Supreme Court Daily News

The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether Arizona can enforce its controversial immigration law, over the strong objections of the Obama administration.

The justices made the announcement in a brief order Monday.

Federal courts had blocked key parts of the state’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, known as SB 1070. Arizona had argued illegal immigration was creating financial hardships and safety concerns for its residents and that the federal government has long failed to control the problem.

The administration has countered immigration issues are under its exclusive authority and that state “interference” would only make matters worse.

When he was arrested in Turkey in 1970, Billy Hayes was given a choice of whom to call. For a scared young man facing serious charges, it was an easy decision: The U.S. consulate in Istanbul.

“It was an immense emotional relief, knowing I had someone to advise and help me at that early uncertain stage,” he told CNN. “I wanted an American to talk with, not some foreign lawyer.”

Hayes’ story became the basis for his book and subsequent movie “Midnight Express,” about surviving harsh conditions in a Turkish prison after being given a life sentence for drug smuggling charges.

He eventually escaped custody and now is speaking out in an international legal fight over a Mexican man on death row in Texas, scheduled to die Thursday. It is a high-stakes dispute over federal authority, local sovereignty and foreign treaties — reaching far beyond the gruesome facts of a single murder.

The Supreme Court has struck down a California law that would have banned selling “violent” video games to children, a case balancing free speech rights with consumer protection.

The 7-2 ruling Monday is a victory for video game makers and sellers, who said the ban — which had yet to go into effect — would extend too far. They say the existing nationwide, industry-imposed, voluntary rating system is an adequate screen for parents to judge the appropriateness of computer game content.

The state says it has a legal obligation to protect children from graphic interactive images when the industry has failed to do so.

The estate of the late actress Anna Nicole Smith has lost a Supreme Court appeal in a longstanding fight to secure a share of her deceased husband’s fortune.

The 5-4 ruling Thursday was the latest chapter in a tedious legal soap opera, over the kind of evidence a separate bankruptcy court may hear when deciding various claims and counterclaims. State courts generally hear probate cases, while bankruptcy proceedings are confined to federal courts. The high court’s 38-page decision will now likely put an end to this particular legal dispute.

Two women who say they suffered severe medical complications from a generic drug lost their Supreme Court appeal Thursday, essentially ending their separate lawsuits against pharmaceutical manufacturers.

The justices in a 5-4 ruling said generic drug companies do not share the same level of responsibility as makers of brand-name equivalents, to update their warning labels when significant new risks emerge.

The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a massive sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart on behalf of women who work there.

The court ruled unanimously that the lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. cannot proceed as a class action, reversing a decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The lawsuit could have involved up to 1.6 million women, with Wal-Mart facing potentially billions of dollars in damages.

Now, the handful of women who brought the lawsuit may pursue their claims on their own, with much less money at stake and less pressure on Wal-Mart to settle.

The justices divided 5-4 on another aspect of the ruling that could make it much harder to mount similar class-action discrimination lawsuits against large employers.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the court’s conservative majority said there needs to be common elements tying together “literally millions of employment decisions at once.”

But Scalia said that in the lawsuit against the nation’s largest private employer, “That is entirely absent here.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court’s four liberal justices, said there was more than enough uniting the claims. “Wal-Mart’s delegation of discretion over pay and promotions is a policy uniform throughout all stores,” Ginsburg said.

Business interests lined up with Wal-Mart while civil rights, women’s and consumer groups have sided with the women plaintiffs.

Both sides have painted the case as extremely consequential. The business community has said that a ruling for the women would lead to a flood of class-action lawsuits based on vague evidence. Supporters of the women feared that a decision in favor of Wal-Mart could remove a valuable weapon for fighting all sorts of discrimination.

By Mark Herman, Associated Press, June 20, 2011.

The Supreme Court blocked a federal lawsuit Monday by states and conservation groups trying to force cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The court said that the authority to seek reductions in emissions rests with the Environmental Protection Agency, not the courts. The ruling was 8-0.

EPA says it will decide by next year whether to order utilities to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The lawsuit targeted the five largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the United States, four private companies and the federal Tennessee Valley Authority.

The Obama administration sided with the power companies in this case.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, said the Clean Air Act gives the EPA authority to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants.

The landmark environmental law leaves no room for what Ginsburg described as a parallel track, “control of greenhouse gas emissions by federal judges.”

On the other hand, Ginsburg said, that the states and conservation groups can go to federal court under the Clean Air Act if they object to EPA’s eventual decision.

The decision reversed a ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not take part because she sat on the appeals court panel that heard the case.

The states’ lawsuit is the second climate change dispute at the court in four years. In 2007, the court declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. By a 5-4 vote, the justices said the EPA has the authority to regulate those emissions from new cars and trucks under that landmark law. The same reasoning applies to power plants.

EPA’s consideration of regulating those emissions stems from the earlier court ruling.

The private defendants in the suit are American Electric Power Co. of Ohio, Cinergy Co., now part of Duke Energy Corp. of North Carolina; Southern Co. Inc. of Georgia, and Xcel Energy Inc. of Minnesota.

Eight states initially banded together to sue. They were California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. New Jersey and Wisconsin withdrew this year after Republicans replaced Democrats in their governor’s offices.

The high court did not rule on some potential state-law claims. Ginsburg said those are best addressed by lower courts.

The case is American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, 10-174.

By Mark Sherman, Associated Press, June 20, 2011. Associated Press writer Dina Cappiello contributed to this report.

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

RAY SUAREZ: Justices ruled 5-4 that juveniles suspected of a crime are entitled to Miranda protections when questioned at school by the police.

Marcia Coyle of “The National Law Journal” is here to explain the significance of the decision.

Marcia, remind us of what was involved in this case and how it got to the high court.

The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled Microsoft is liable for at least $290 million in damages for willfully using a patent it did not own as part of its Word program.

The appeal brought by the world’s largest software maker was a closely watched intellectual-property case. Microsoft was asking the justices to make it easier for companies to defend themselves against patent-infringement allegations.

The court refused, and declined to toss the verdict (.pdf).

Microsoft’s legal trouble began in 2007, when it was sued by Canadian outfit i4i. It claimed in a federal lawsuit that Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, had hijacked technology that made it easier for Word 2003 and Word 2007 to work with XML code. Microsoft Word’s current version does not employ i4i’s patents.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing California to continue granting reduced, in-state tuition to college students who are illegal immigrants is likely to bolster similar proposals across the nation, as well as a California measure to provide financial aid for the undocumented.

The high court’s action Monday upholds a California Supreme Court ruling last year that said the state’s policy is legal because it grants in-state tuition on the basis of students’ graduation from California high schools, not on their citizenship. A conservative immigration-law group appealed the decision, arguing that the discount — worth as much as $23,000 annually at University of California schools — was preferential treatment that violated federal law.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Halliburton Co. shareholders can pursue a class-action lawsuit claiming the oil services company inflated its stock price.

The high court overturned a lower court ruling against the shareholders, who want to represent all investors who bought Halliburton stock between June 1999 and December 2001.

The Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals court on Monday to take a new look at a Pennsylvania city’s crackdown on illegal immigrants in light of the high court’s recent decision upholding an Arizona employer-sanctions law.

The high court threw out a ruling by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that prevented the city of Hazleton from enforcing regulations that would deny permits to business that hire illegal immigrants and fine landlords who rent to them.

The Supreme Court has sustained Arizona’s law that penalizes businesses for hiring workers who are in the United States illegally, rejecting arguments that states have no role in immigration matters.

By a 5-3 vote, the court said Wednesday that federal immigration law gives states the authority to impose sanctions on employers who hire unauthorized workers.

The decision upholding the validity of the 2007 law comes as the state is appealing a ruling that blocked key components of a second, more controversial Arizona immigration enforcement law. Thursday’s decision applies only to business licenses and does not signal how the high court might rule if the other law comes before it.

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Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a majority made up of Republican-appointed justices, said the Arizona’s employer sanctions law “falls well within the confines of the authority Congress chose to leave to the states.”

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, all Democratic appointees, dissented.

The Supreme Court on Monday endorsed a court order requiring California to cut its prison population by thousands of inmates to improve health care for those who remain behind bars.

The court said in a 5-4 decision that the reduction is “required by the Constitution” to correct longstanding violations of inmates’ rights.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, a California native, wrote the majority opinion, in which he included photos of severe overcrowding. The court’s four Democratic appointees joined with Kennedy.

“The violations have persisted for years. They remain uncorrected,” Kennedy said.

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that consumers can be bound by an arbitration clause in a cellphone deal or other contract even when state law permits a class-action lawsuit for claims arising from the deal.

In a 5-4 vote, the justices divided along familiar ideological lines, with conservatives in control. Dissenting liberal justices said the ruling would make it harder for consumers with small-dollar grievances to band together and sue corporations.

A sharply divided Supreme Court ruled against a former death row inmate who sought damages from the state after prosecutors hid crucial blood tests that would have earlier proven his innocence. The 5-4 decision Tuesday involved John Thompson, who came within weeks of execution and had spent 18 years behind bars before being set free after the new forensic evidence came to light.

At issue was whether a district attorney’s office should be held liable, under a “failure to train” standard, when one of its prosecutors unconstitutionally withholds exculpatory evidence from a criminal defendant.

Then-New Orleans area District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. claimed his office should not be held fully responsible after one of his staff attorneys violated long-standing, accepted procedures on handling evidence in criminal trials.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday for a Texas inmate sentenced to die for killing his girlfriend and her two adult sons nearly two decades ago, saying the man who came within about an hour of being executed last year can ask to test crime-scene evidence he says may show he’s innocent.

By its 6-3 ruling, the court ensured that Hank Skinner won’t be put to death any time soon while his legal case continues. But the decision doesn’t necessarily result in Skinner winning the right to perform genetic testing on evidence found at the scene of the triple slayings in a home in Pampa in the Texas Panhandle on New Year’s Eve 1993. Such a request would still have to go through the courts.

Edward Dawson, an attorney for Gray County District Attorney Lynn Switzer, whose office prosecuted Skinner’s capital murder case, said he was disappointed with the ruling but described it as “a pretty narrow decision on the procedural point.”

The Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday in Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T shows there’s a limit to the morphing of corporations into persons.

In an 8-0 decision, the court declared that AT & T could not use a claim of “personal privacy” to prevent disclosure of corporate documents under the Freedom of Information Act. This is an interesting decision; not least, because it’s rendered by the same conservative-dominated court that declared corporations share the same free-speech rights as persons.

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the First Amendment protects fundamentalist church members who mount anti-gay protests outside military funerals, despite the pain they cause grieving families.

The court voted 8-1 in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. The decision upheld an appeals court ruling that threw out a $5 million judgment to the father of a dead Marine who sued church members after they picketed his son’s funeral.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the court. Justice Samuel Alito dissented.

Roberts said the First Amendment shields the funeral protesters, noting that they obeyed police directions and were 1,000 feet from the church.

The 6-2 Supreme Court ruling breaks somewhat from recent rulings forbidding the use of ‘hearsay’ statements to police, creating a new rule for when officers are dealing with ‘an ongoing emergency.’ The decision, says Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent, leaves the Constitution ‘in shambles.’

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a shooting victim’s statement to the police at a crime scene can be used in court, even if the victim later dies and cannot testify at a trial.