U.S. Supreme Court – Page 48 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Defendant Can Raise Tenth-Amendment Challenge to Her Conviction, SCOTUS Rules

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:June 16, 2011
Post category:Constitutional Interpretation Criminal Law & Process Federal Criminal Law & Process Federalism U.S. Supreme Court

Earlier today, in Bond v. United States (No. 09-1227), the Supreme Court ruled that the defendant should have been permitted to raise a Tenth-Amendment challenge to the chemical-weapons statute that she was convicted of violating. In response to her indictment for violating 18 U.S.C. § 229, Bond had argued

that the conduct with which she is charged is “local in nature” and “should be left to local authorities to prosecute” and that congressional regulation of that conduct “signals a massive and unjustifiable expansion of federal law enforcement into state-regulated domain.” Record in No. 2:07-cr-00528-JG-1 (ED Pa.), Doc. 27, pp. 6, 19. The public policy of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, enacted in its capacity as sovereign, has been displaced by that of the National Government. The law to which petitioner is subject, the prosecution she seeks to counter, and the punishment she must face might not have come about if the matter were left for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to decide. Indeed, petitioner argues that under Pennsylvania law the expected maximum term of imprisonment she could have received for the same conduct was barely more than a third of her federal sentence.

The Third Circuit, however, ruled that Bond lacked standing to raise her constitutional objections.

In reversing this decision, the Court did not address the merits of the objections. As a result, it’s hard to say whether there is any sympathy on the Court for the basic claim that the Tenth Amendment may be violated when a federal law criminalizes conduct that is “local in nature.” Still, it is interesting to put Bond alongside last month’s decision in Fowler, in which the Court cited similar federalism concerns in rejecting an expansive interpretation of a different federal criminal statute. Perhaps the Court is entering a new phase of heightened concern over the federalization of criminal law.

Cross posted at Life Sentences Blog.

Sentencing Judge May Not Lengthen Prison Term in Order to Promote Rehabilitation

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:June 16, 2011
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Federal Criminal Law & Process Federal Sentencing U.S. Supreme Court

Earlier today, the United State Supreme Court ruled that federal judges may not impose or lengthen a defendant’s sentence in order to promote rehabilitation. In Tapia v. United States (No. 10-5400), the district judge apparently selected a sentence at the very top of the recommended guidelines range in order to give Tapia time to complete the Bureau of Prison’s Residential Drug Abuse Program (a/k/a the 500 Hour Drug Program). The Supreme Court rejected this reasoning as a straightforward matter of statutory interpretation: 18 U.S.C. § 3582(a) instructs sentencing judges to “recogniz[e] that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation.”

“I Don’t Have to Take Any Time for This”

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:June 16, 2011
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Judges & Judicial Process U.S. Supreme Court

The Supreme Court will once again address alleged Brady violations by the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office. Earlier this week, the Court granted certiorari in Smith v. Cain (No. 10-8145), in which Smith alleges that the prosecutor suppressed a veritable boatload of exculpatory evidence in his murder trial. I’ve only read the cert. petition, which obviously has a partisan slant, but on the face of things it appears there was some pretty egregious police and prosecutor misconduct. And, of course, there is a well-documented history of Brady violations in the DA’s office in New Orleans, including in the Supreme Court’s earlier case of Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419 (1995). Earlier this very term, the Court again dealt with discovery issues in the Big Easy in Connick v. Thompson, declining to find civil liability for what even the state conceded were violations of Brady. Indeed, according to the cert. petition, the very assistant district attorney who prosecuted Smith later had his law license suspended for a Brady violation in another case.

I’m a little surprised the Court took Smith, both because it has not been through federal habeas (it’s coming directly up from the state court system) and because it’s basically an “error-correction” case — at least as framed by the cert. petition, the case does not really present any questions of law, but will instead require the justices to roll up their sleeves and sort through a rather complex evidentiary record to produce a case-specific, fact-intensive ruling. On the other hand, for reasons that are not clear to me, this seems to be precisely the way that the Court has engaged with Brady ever since United States v. Bagley in 1985. See, e.g., Kyles; Cone v. Bell, 129 S. Ct. 1769 (2009).

In some ways, I’m more interested to hear what the Court has to say about a collateral procedural issue in Smith that received relatively brief treatment in the petition, but that is also expressly encompassed by the cert. grant. Smith claims that the Louisiana courts violated his due process rights by rejecting all of his Brady-type claims without finding any facts or providing any explanation.