Earlier this week, I mentioned the cert. grant in the habeas case of Gonzalez v. Thaler. Next term is shaping up to be pretty interesting, and potentially scary for habeas petitioners.
I neglected to mention that the Court also granted cert. in a front end case, Smith v. Louisiana. According to SCOTUSblog, here are the issues:
1) Whether there is a reasonable probability that the outcome of Smith’s trial would have been different but for Brady and Giglio/Napue errors; 2) whether the state courts violated the Due Process Clause by rejecting Smith’s Brady and Giglio/Napue claims.
As that blog notes, there is a long and ugly of history of Brady violations coming out of Orleans Parish in Louisiana. The Court recently looked at those violations, in the context of a 1983 claim, in Connick v. Thompson, which was the really horrible decision in which the Court found prosecutors immune from liability despite serious bad faith. Although the Court refused to hold the prosecutors responsible in Thompson, there is room for the Court to act in Smith. Maybe the Court decided to take Smith to say, while a civil suit is not the way to stop the Brady violations, upsetting the criminal conviction may be. We shall see.
In any event, I really need to update the Supreme Court Cases page.
SCOTUSblog also had a relist post the other day. Nothing of note in habeas cases (except for Cavazos v. Smith, which clearly is going to be either a summary reversal or a dissent from a denial of cert). However, the Court relisted two front-end capital cases. Here's what SCOTUSblog said about these two cases:
And the Court relisted for the first time in two capital cases: Russell v. California, 10-10201, on direct review from the Supreme Court of California, raises constitutional challenges to the exclusion of mitigating evidence from the penalty phase of a capital trial under a state’s hearsay rule. The Court also relisted in Spencer v. Alabama, 10-9085, a capital case from the Alabama state courts, which involves a claim that the trial court erred by not instructing the jury that it could find the defendant guilty of a crime other than capital murder, and an Apprendi challenge to the state’s sentencing system.
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