June 29, 2008
Important Supreme Court Decisions, 2007-2008
Following are summaries of the 2007-2008 term’s most important decisions:
Access to Court
The 5-to-4 ruling that the detainees at Guantánamo Bay have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention was the court’s third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration in a Guantánamo-related case. Justice Kennedy, who had voted with the majority in the two earlier rounds, wrote the opinion in the case, Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195. The guarantee of habeas corpus applies at the Navy base in Cuba, the court said, and the truncated alternative procedure that Congress set up was not an adequate substitute.
Justice Kennedy’s opinion was joined by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter, who said in a concurring opinion that the decision was “no bolt out of the blue” but rather represented “an act of perseverance” by justices weary of having to reiterate that the rule of law applied on Guantánamo. “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Kennedy said in the majority opinion, which overturned a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions from Guantánamo prisoners.
Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia dissented, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito. The chief justice accused the majority of judicial “overreaching.” Justice Scalia warned that giving the detainees access to judicial review “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”
By contrast to the sharp division in the Guantánamo case, the court was unanimous in another case on the availability of habeas corpus. It rejected the Bush administration’s argument that two United States citizens facing criminal charges in Iraq, and held in that country by the American military, could not seek federal court review of their detention. The two were entitled to file habeas corpus petitions, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the court in Munaf v. Geren, No. 06-1666. Proceeding to the merits of the petitions, the court ordered them dismissed on the ground that holding the men while awaiting further action by the Iraqi authorities did not violate their rights.
The question of access to court also played out in the realm of securities-fraud litigation. In a decision highly favorable to investment banks and accountants named as defendants in class-action shareholder lawsuits, the court ruled that, for such a lawsuit to proceed, the plaintiffs have to be able to show not only that the actions of these market players were deceptive, but also that the actions were communicated to the marketplace and relied on by the plaintiffs in deciding to sell or hold stock.
The 5-to-3 decision, Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta Inc., No. 06-43, rejected the concept of “scheme liability,” in which bankers, auditors and other deep-pocketed corporate advisers are sued by investors in companies that suffer a major loss. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion. Justice Stevens dissented, along with Justices Souter and Ginsburg. Justice Breyer did not participate.
An important ruling on federal pre-emption of state liability law closed the courthouse doors to liability suits against the manufacturers of medical devices that have received approval, before they came on the market, from the Food and Drug Administration. The outcome, a victory for the Bush administration, reversed previous federal policy as part of its embrace of a broad theory of federal pre-emption.
The 8-to-1 decision, Riegel v. Medtronic Inc., No. 06-179, concerned a catheter, a federally approved medical device, that burst while being used to dilate a coronary artery. The 1976 law governing medical devices provides that states cannot impose any additional “requirement” on manufacturers of devices that have won pre-market approval. The court interpreted “requirement” to include making the manufacturer liable for damages under state tort law. Justice Scalia wrote for the majority and Justice Ginsburg was the lone dissenter.
The court ruled 9 to 0 that participants in 401(k) retirement plans can sue to recover losses due to the mishandling of their individual accounts. The decision, LaRue v. DeWolff, Boberg & Associates Inc., No. 06-856, resolved uncertainty over whether administrators of these common retirement plans can be held accountable, not only for the overall health of the plan, but for how they handle individual accounts. Justice Stevens wrote the principal opinion.
Second Amendment
Overturning the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, the court ruled that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to own a gun for private use — not only in connection with service in a militia. The 5-to-4 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290, left unanswered questions, but also much room for continued gun regulation, short of an absolute ban. Justice Scalia wrote for the court. Justices Stevens, Breyer, Souter, and Ginsburg dissented.
Elections
By a vote of 6 to 3, the court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law, which requires would-be voters to present current state or federal photo identification to cast a ballot. The strictest of a half-dozen such laws, the Indiana statute was challenged as an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. But no such burden had been demonstrated, Justice Stevens wrote in the lead opinion, leaving open the theoretical possibility that a case with a more persuasive record might succeed.
The court was splintered in this case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, No. 07-12, with only Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito signing the Stevens opinion. Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito agreed with the result but would have rejected the challenge more categorically. Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissented.
On First Amendment grounds, the court struck down the so-called Millionaire’s Amendment to the six-year-old McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The provision applied to Congressional campaigns in which wealthy candidates finance themselves and, under the court’s precedents, can spend personal funds without limit. To “level the playing field,” the McCain-Feingold law allowed opponents to raise money from contributors in excess of the usual limits. This system placed an unconstitutional burden on the wealthy candidate’s exercise of First Amendment rights, the court said in a 5-to-4 opinion by Justice Alito. Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissented in the case, Davis v. Federal Election Commission, No. 07-320.
The court rejected a constitutional challenge to New York State’s method for choosing candidates to run in judicial elections. The 9-to-0 decision, with a principal opinion by Justice Scalia, overturned an appeals court ruling that had ordered the state to substitute a direct primary election for a convoluted nominating convention system, unique to New York, that preserves the power of the political parties’ leaders.
The case, New York State Board of Elections v. López-Torres, No. 06-766, was brought by an unsuccessful insurgent candidate who argued that the system deprived voters of their First Amendment right to political association. Several justices indicated in separate opinions that they thought the system, while not unconstitutional, was unfortunate or even “stupid.”
Criminal Law
The court rejected a challenge to Kentucky’s method of execution by lethal injection, ruling that there was insufficient evidence that the state administered a common sequence of three drugs in a manner that posed an unconstitutional risk of pain and suffering. The vote in the case, Baze v. Rees, No. 07-5439, was 7 to 2, although the principal opinion by Chief Justice Roberts did not speak for a majority. Six of the seven justices in the majority — all but Justice Kennedy — filed separate concurring opinions, and only Justices Kennedy and Alito signed the chief justice’s opinion. The others were Justices Stevens, Breyer, Scalia and Thomas. Justices Souter and Ginsburg dissented.
The decision raised the question of whether a challenge based on more compelling evidence — the plaintiff’s lawyers could not demonstrate that a Kentucky execution had encountered a problem — might succeed where this case had failed. The answer is unclear. The court promptly allowed several lethal-injection executions to take place, ending an informal six-month moratorium on executions.
Justice Stevens, while voting with the majority, used this case to call for abolition of the death penalty.
In a second death penalty decision, the court ruled that the Constitution prohibits the death penalty for the rape of a child. The 5-to-4 decision, Kennedy v. Louisiana, No. 07-343, overturned laws in Louisiana and five other states that had recently extended their death penalty laws to cover child rape. Two men were on death row, both in Louisiana, for raping young girls.
Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority that death was a disproportionate penalty for even so “devastating” a crime when the death of the victim did not result. Justice Alito dissented, along with Justices Scalia, Thomas and Chief Justice Roberts.
A pair of decisions restored to federal judges a measure of the independence in criminal sentencing that they lost under the 1984 law that set up the federal sentencing guideline system. The new rulings elaborated on a 2005 decision that, in rendering the guidelines advisory rather than mandatory, had left judges in the dark as to how much discretion they had actually regained.
The court has now made it clear that conformity with the guidelines is only one factor in assessing the “reasonableness” of a sentence. One decision, Gall v. United States, No. 06-7949, upheld a trial judge’s refusal to impose prison time on a young drug offender, despite the sentence of 30 to 36 months called for by the guidelines. Justice Stevens wrote that opinion.
In the second case, Kimbrough v. United States, No. 06-6330, the court upheld a lower sentence for a man convicted of a crack cocaine offense than the guidelines called for under a formula that treated crimes involving crack cocaine much more harshly than those involving cocaine in its powdered form. Justice Ginsburg wrote the opinion. Both cases were decided by the same 7-to-2 alignment, with Justices Thomas and Scalia dissenting.
The court found “clear error” in a Louisiana prosecutor’s removal of a black potential juror from a black defendant’s capital murder trial. The court’s detailed dissection of the jury-selection process, and its overturning of the conviction of a man who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury, was evidence that the court remains concerned about racial prejudice in the courtroom, 22 years after the landmark decision in Batson v. Kentucky permitted individual defendants to challenge the racial composition of juries.
The vote in the latest case, Snyder v. Louisiana, No. 06-10119, was 7 to 2. Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion, and Justices Thomas and Scalia dissented.
In a case with implications for international law, the court held that the Texas courts were not required to give a new hearing to a Mexican on the state’s death row, despite a directive by President Bush and a finding by the World Court that the man’s murder trial violated United States treaty obligations.
The vote was 6 to 3 in this case, Medellín v. Texas, No. 06-984, with a majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts. The majority said that neither the international judgment, nor the president’s intervention, nor the treaty that was violated, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, was sufficient to overcome a Texas procedural rule that barred a new appeal.
The convention gives foreign nationals facing criminal charges the right to notification that their government’s diplomats can be made available to assist them. José Medellín, the defendant in this case, received no notification after his arrest. Justices Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg dissented.
In a case on the rights of mentally ill defendants, the court gave trial judges considerable discretion to deny a request by such a defendant to dispense with a lawyer and represent himself in a criminal trial. Although self-representation is an important constitutional right, Justice Breyer said, for the 7-to-2 majority, the right to a fair trial was also important and could be compromised if a defendant could not competently present his case. Justices Scalia and Thomas dissented from the decision, Indiana v. Edwards, No. 07-208.
The court upheld Congress’s latest effort to curb the spread of child pornography on the Internet, voting 7 to 2 that a 2003 law known as the Protect Act did not violate the First Amendment. The law makes it a crime to offer child pornography, regardless of whether the depictions are of real children or computer-generated images. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in this case, United States v. Williams, No. 07-694, interpreted the law to make clear that it did not apply to mainstream movies or to innocent snapshots of babies in the bath. The dissenters, Justices Souter and Ginsburg, said the court’s interpretation did not sufficiently protect against over-zealous prosecution for material that did not involve real children.
In two cases, the court narrowed the application of the federal money-laundering statute. Both decisions held that prosecutors had employed a definition of money-laundering that was broader than Congress intended.
In one case, United States v. Santos, No. 06-1005, the court held that the statute’s reference to “proceeds” usually referred to the profits of an illegal operation rather than to its gross receipts. The payments made by illegal gambling operations to customers and runners would not be prosecuted as money-laundering because they were, in effect, just business expenses, the court held by a vote of 5 to 4. Justice Scalia wrote the principal opinion. Justice Alito dissented, along with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy and Breyer.
The second money-laundering decision, Cuellar v. United States, No. 06-1456, was unanimous, with an opinion by Justice Thomas. The court held that it was not a money-laundering offense simply to conceal cash while crossing the border. Rather, the secrecy must be part of a larger “design” to disguise the source or nature of the money.
Employee Rights
In a series of cases, the court interpreted federal statutes against workplace discrimination and by comfortable margins issued decisions favorable to employees.
Two decisions permitted employees to pursue claims that their complaints about discrimination had led their employers to retaliate against them. Two statutes that did not explicitly authorize suits for retaliation should nonetheless be interpreted to allow them, the court said.
In one of these cases, the court by a vote of 7 to 2 interpreted a Reconstruction-era statute known as Section 1981, which bars racial discrimination in employment, to include protection against retaliation. The case was CBOCS West Inc. v. Humphries, No. 06-1431. Justice Breyer wrote the opinion, with Justices Thomas and Scalia dissenting.
In the second case, the court held by a vote of 6 to 3 that the section of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act that applies to federal government employees gives them protection against retaliation for complaining about age discrimination. Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion in that case, Gómez-Pérez v. Potter, No. 06-1321. Chief Justices Roberts wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Scalia and Thomas.
The court also ruled that if an employer claims that a “reasonable factor other than age” accounts for the disproportionately negative impact that a layoff or other action has on older workers, it is up to the employer to prove it, rather than up to the employees to disprove the validity of the defense. The vote in this case, Meacham v. Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, No. 06-1505, was 7 to 1. Justice Souter wrote the majority opinion. Justice Thomas dissented, and Justice Breyer did not participate.
In still another age discrimination case, the court voted 7 to 2 that failure to file the proper form to make a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission does not deprive an employee of the ability to go into court later and file a lawsuit. (Under the age discrimination law, an administrative complaint must precede a lawsuit, to give the commission time to investigate and perhaps resolve the problem.) Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in this case, Federal Express Corp. v. Holowecki, No. 06-1322. Justices Thomas and Scalia dissented.
The last of these cases, another age discrimination case, had an outcome that appeared, on the surface, to be ambiguous. The question was whether a plaintiff’s allegations that co-workers had suffered discriminatory treatment by different managers could be admitted as evidence in a discrimination case. In a unanimous opinion by Justice Thomas, the court said such evidence, sometimes known as “me-too” evidence, was sometimes admissible and sometimes not, depending on the circumstances. For employees, the significance of the decision, Sprint/United Management Company v. Mendelsohn, No. 06-1221, lay in the court’s rejection of the employer’s argument that such evidence was never relevant and should always be excluded.
Business
The court cut a $2.5 billion punitive damages award against Exxon Mobil to roughly $500 million in order to equal the compensatory damages a jury awarded to a group of commercial fishermen, Native Alaskans and landowners along Prince William Sound, where the Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground and created a huge oil spill in 1989.
Justice Souter wrote for the court that, at least under maritime law, in which the Supreme Court has great leeway to set the rules, the ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages should be no greater than 1:1. The decision, Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, No. 07-219, does not govern the punitive damages question in other kinds of cases, but is likely to be influential as a window into the justices’ thinking. The vote was 5 to 3, with Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and Breyer dissenting.
By a vote of 7 to 2, the court upheld the preferential tax break that nearly all states give their residents who invest in the state’s own municipal bonds. The justices rejected the argument that the tax exemption commonly given to the interest on in-state bonds, but not on other states’ bonds, amounts to unconstitutional discrimination against interstate commerce. Justice Souter wrote the majority opinion in Department of Revenue of Kentucky v. Davis, No. 06-666. Justices Kennedy and Alito dissented.
