U. S. Supreme Court Wraps Up "Blockbuster" Term. Watch Video.

Breaking U. S, Supreme Court News: As I Expected, Court Invalidates Section 4 Of Voting Rights Act, Formula No Longer Valid For Pre-Clearance,

Read the 5 to 4 decision here.

U. S. Supreme Court: Accused Pre Miranda Silence Does Not Protect Him Unless He Claims The Priviledge. WOW.

The case is Salinas v. Texas. You must go and read the opinion here.

The court essentially said, if you do not invoke your Fifth Amendment right, your silence during interrogation can be used against you!.

U. S. Supreme Court Rules Any Fact Which Increases Mandatory Minimum Sentence Must Be An "Element" Submitted To A Jury, Not "Harris" Found By A Judge.

The case is Alleyne V. United States, and you can read it here.

U. S. Supreme Court Holds That States Are Powerless To Impose Proof Of Citizenship Requirements On Voting Form Before A Person Can Vote.

Supreme Court says states may not add citizenship proof for voting

States may not require additional proof of citizenship on federal forms designed to streamline voter-registration procedures, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The court rejected a requirement passed by Arizona voters in 2004 that potential voters supply proof of eligibility beyond an applicant’s oath on the federal form that he or she is a citizen.

The court ruled 7 to 2 that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 trumps Arizona’s Proposition 200.
The federal law “precludes Arizona from requiring a federal form applicant to submit information beyond that required by the form itself,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority.
Three other states have similar proof-of-citizenship laws, and others have considered the additional requirement.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote separate dissents, although both made the point that the majority ignored the Constitution’s demand that states set the requirements for voter registration.
“I would construe the law as only requiring Arizona to accept and use the form as part of its voter registration process, leaving the state free to request whatever additional information it determines is necessary to ensure that voters meet the qualifications it has the constitutional authority to establish,” Thomas wrote.

The Arizona proposition was immediately challenged after passage. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit — which included retired justice Sandra Day O’Connor, sitting by designation — also held that federal law precluded Arizona’s action.
O’Connor was sitting in the courtroom Monday as her former colleagues upheld the decision.

Scalia noted that the Constitution’s elections clause, which empowers Congress to preempt state regulations governing the “times, places and manner” of holding congressional elections, gives weight to the federal regulation that states “accept and use” the federal form to enroll voters.
The state-by-state battle over who is eligible to vote, what kind of identification or proof may be required and even the hours of voting prompted a host of legal battles leading up to the 2012 elections. In general, Republicans proposed new restrictions as necessary to combat voter fraud, while Democrats said such moves would harm minorities and the poor, who often do not have easy access to the required credentials.

The court’s oral arguments and its decision avoided those partisan battles and concentrated on questions of federalism.
But interest groups that challenged the law claimed a great victory.
“Today’s decision sends a strong message that states cannot block their citizens from registering to vote by superimposing burdensome paperwork requirements on top of federal law,” said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
“The Supreme Court has affirmed that all U.S. citizens have the right to register to vote using the national postcard, regardless of the state in which they live.”

Groups that supported Arizona called the decision dire.
“The integrity of our nation’s elections suffered a blow today from the Supreme Court,” said Tom Fitton, president of the conservative legal group Judicial Watch. “This issue takes on increasing urgency with the prospect of 11 million illegal immigrants being given amnesty. It is essential that our elections be secured by ensuring that only citizens register to vote.”

Scalia, writing for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said Arizona is not powerless to protect against noncitizens voting.
He said the state need not register voters when it has other proof that they are not citizens. He also said the state could petition the federal Election Assistance Commission to alter the form to require evidence of citizenship, and go to court if the commission fails to do so.

Alito in dissent pointed out “that prospect does little to assuage constitutional concerns.”
“The EAC currently has no members, and there is no reason to believe that it will be restored to life in the near future. If that situation persists, Arizona’s ability to obtain a judicial resolution of its constitutional claim is problematic.”

Editor's note: The case is Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona and you can read the opinion by clicking here.

U. S. Supreme Court: Imposition Of Harsher Sentences Due To Sentencing Guidelines Changes That Post Date Offense Violates "Ex Post Facto" Constitutional Prohibition.

Harsher Sentencing Guidelines Can’t Be Used for Old Offenses, Justices Say

WASHINGTON — In a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, the Supreme Court on Monday ruled that courts violate the Constitution when they rely on current federal sentencing guidelines if those guidelines call for harsher punishment than the ones in place at the time of the offense.

Related in Opinion

• Editorial: The Sentencing Guidelines and the Constitution (June 11, 2013)

If such sentencing guidelines were mandatory, as they once were, the case would have been easy. But in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that the guidelines must be treated as advisory to avoid running afoul of a line of Sixth Amendment cases requiring that juries rather than judges make the factual findings supporting criminal sentences.

The question that divided the justices on Monday was whether the current discretionary guidelines retained enough force to subject defendants to a substantial risk of additional punishment and thus violate the Constitution’s ex post facto clause, which prohibits enhanced retroactive punishment.

The case, Peugh v. United States, No. 12-62, arose from bank fraud committed in 1999 and 2000 by Marvin Peugh, an owner of two farming businesses. When it came time for sentencing in 2010, the trial judge took note of the guidelines then in place, which suggested a sentence between 70 and 87 months. The judge settled on the lower number.

Had the judge instead referred to the guidelines in place at the time of the fraud, the suggested range would have been 30 to 37 months. “The low end of the 2009 guidelines range,” still in effect in 2010, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority on Monday, “was 33 months higher than the high end of the 1998 guidelines range,” which were in effect in 1999 and 2000.

Justice Sotomayor said guidelines imposed significant constraints on sentencing judges even after being made advisory. The guidelines remained, she said, quoting an earlier Supreme Court decision, “the starting point and the initial benchmark.” Trial judges are required to explain the basis for the sentences they impose, she added, with a major departure from the guidelines requiring “a more significant justification than a minor one.”

Appellate review of sentences is relaxed, though it does take account of variance from the guidelines along with other factors. “Common sense indicates that, in general, this system will steer district courts to more within-guidelines sentences,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.

That was enough, she said, to establish a violation of the ex post facto clause in Mr. Peugh’s case under the standard set out in a 1995 decision, California Department of Corrections v. Morales. That decision said the clause bars new laws that create a “sufficient risk of increasing the measure of punishment attached to the covered crimes.”

“A retrospective increase in the guidelines range applicable to a defendant,” Justice Sotomayor concluded, “creates a sufficient risk of a higher sentence to constitute an ex post facto violation.”

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined all of the majority opinion, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy most of it.

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the guidelines, since they are only advisory, “do not constrain the discretion of district courts and, thus, have no legal effect on a defendant’s sentence.” That means, he said, that there was no violation of the ex post facto clause under the standard announced in the Morales case.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined that part of Justice Thomas’s dissent.

Writing only for himself, Justice Thomas added that the analysis both sides had used, derived from the Morales decision, was at odds with the original meaning of the ex post facto clause, which referred, he said, only to “the punishment affixed by law.”

This was, he said, self-criticism. “As the author of Morales,” Justice Thomas wrote, “failure to apply the original meaning was an error to which I succumbed.”

In another development on Monday, the court let stand a court order barring abortion protesters from displaying images of aborted fetuses in places where they may disturb children. As is their custom, the justices gave no reasons for declining to hear the case.

U. S. Supreme Court Allows DNA Swabs Of Arrestees.

Supreme Court upholds DNA swabbing of people under arrest

Watch below:



The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the police practice of taking DNA samples from people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime, ruling that it amounts to the 21st century version of fingerprinting.

The ruling was 5-4. Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative, joined three of the court’s more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — in dissenting.
The five justices in the majority ruled that DNA sampling, after an arrest “for a serious offense” and when officers “bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody,” does not violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches.
Under those specifications, the court said, “taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

Scalia’s siding with the liberals reflects his growing concern over the past five years about privacy, said Tom Goldstein, the publisher of SCOTUSblog, who teaches at Harvard Law School and is a Supreme Court analyst for NBC News.
“We’ve seen several decisions where he has joined more liberal justices to find greater privacy rights,” he said in an interview. “It’s not a big surprise in recent years, but it is a surprise in the sense of his general conservatism.”

While a cheek swab does constitute a search under the law, the court noted that it requires “but a light touch” and no surgical intrusion — a critical point, the court said, in determining whether it was reasonable.

At an oral argument in February, Justice Samuel Alito called the question perhaps the most important criminal procedure case the court had taken up in decades. Twenty-eight states and the federal government take DNA swabs from people under arrest before they can be tried.
The case arose from the arrest of a 26-year-old Maryland man, Alonzo King, in 2009 on a charge of second-degree assault. The police took a swab of DNA from his cheek, ran it through a database and matched it to an unsolved rape from six years earlier.
King was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for the 2009 assault. The Maryland Court of Appeals later reversed the rape conviction on the grounds that the DNA sample was an unreasonable search.

“Today’s judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes,” Scalia wrote in his dissent. “Then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane.”
In an allusion to the technique of taking a swab from the cheek, Scalia wrote: “I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”

The Maryland law restricts DNA swabbing to people arrested for certain violent crimes, but justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, worried during the oral argument that other laws might not be so restrictive. Roberts wondered why they couldn’t be applied to simple traffic stops.
Roberts voted with the majority Monday, as did Alito, who tipped his hand at the oral argument by saying that DNA sampling “involves a very minimal intrusion on personal privacy.”
Justice Anthony Kennedy, considered the court’s swing vote, delivered the opinion of the court. Justices Clarence Thomas, who usually votes with the court’s conservatives, and Stephen Breyer, who generally votes with the liberals, also voted with the majority.

The court’s majority ruling also said that the government has an interesting in identifying a person under arrest so that a judge can make an informed decision about granting bail. Today, it takes as long as two and a half weeks for DNA tests to come back, but lawyers noted before the court that instant DNA testing is not far off.