SCOTUS Watch: Order List

Petitioner Andre Thomas was sentenced to death for the murder of his estranged wife, their son, and her daughter from a previous relationship. Thomas is Black, his wife was white, and their son was biracial. Thomas was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury, three of whom expressed firm opposition to interracial marriage and procreation in their written juror questionnaires.

Justice Sotomayor found another case with troubling facts to flag in an Order List, this time bringing with her Kagan and Jackson. The basic facts is likely to lead people to say "what is wrong with the conservatives," though the case turns on the high standard necessary to summarily reverse a lower court. Here for ineffective counsel. Does seem a blatant case.

The role of the Supreme Court as a whole is not meant to be error correction. The lower courts have lots of cases, some of them decided wrongly.  The Supreme Court generally should take cases involving major national questions (such as if a congressional law is declared unconstitutional) or when there is a disagreement on a question among the lower courts.  They do sometimes flag blatant errors like this allegedly is. 

Let's not even go into the "not the immediate issue" point here involving the guy removing his own eyeballs.  This sounds like he would be blind though that is not really crystal clear.  After all, maybe there was a way to put them back in.  There is also a bit involving the state seeming to warn the jurors about how the scary black guy might get one of their family members. The case has racist aspects, in a death penalty case.

The guy seems unhinged, even if (as the state claims) he made himself unhinged by drinking too much cough medicine (seriously). He shouldn't get the death penalty on that ground alone. But, the other matter would have been problematic even in a non-capital case.  It being capital, makes SCOTUS not acting here more so.

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The other stuff is apparently not too notable, looking at summary reporting from court watchers.  One case earlier flagged by a liberal Supreme Court reporter as a trivial case (on the facts) with problematic implications, if the wider conservative arguments were met, was disposed of as moot.  

The procedural approach disposed of the lower court opinion, which protected voters from their ballots being disposed of because of certain trivial errors.  Sotomayor and Jackson would have avoided doing that.  This is not clear from the bare bones order sometimes hides some stuff out of view.  

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There were two oral arguments, the first another case where the new questioning (open questioning and then each justice gets a chance specifically) really encouraged a long argument. The first half took over an hour though the second was not that long.  

(I don't agree with the link that California is blocked via Lawrence v. Texas from resting their law on morality, here animal welfare. That case said bare morality could not deny someone a protected liberty.  Scalia's argument aside, it is far from clear ALL morals legislation went by the wayside.) 

The second oral argument involved the right to get DNA testing in a capital case, but it involved a rather technical question.