Court limits use of repeat offender law
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court is making it tougher for federal prosecutors to seek longer prison terms for people convicted of repeated violent crimes.
The justices ruled 5-3 that lower courts are limited in how they can consider prior state crimes for purposes of increasing sentences under the federal Armed Career Criminal Act.
The court sided with Richard Mathis, who pleaded guilty to a federal weapons charge. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison - five more than he otherwise would have gotten - because of prior state convictions for burglary.
The Armed Career Criminal Act makes defendants eligible for longer prison terms if they have three prior convictions for crimes that are either violent felonies or serious drug offenses. The list of prior violent offenses includes burglary convictions that are punishable by more than a year in prison.
Mathis argued that Iowa burglary laws are much broader than the federal version of burglary, so the state convictions should not be used to increase his sentence. But a federal appeals court said it could look beyond the elements of the law to see whether Mathis' conduct would have been guilty of violating federal burglary law.
The Supreme Court disagreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan said courts must follow the elements-based approach and warned of the "inconsistency and arbitrariness" that would result if courts went beyond that.
In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer said the ruling would "unnecessarily complicate federal sentencing law" and prevent courts from applying the law Congress enacted. He was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Justice Samuel Alito filed his own dissent, saying the majority's decision is "for aficionados of pointless formalism." He warned that under the court's rationale "burglary convictions in a great many states may be disqualified from counting as predicate offenses" under the repeat offender law.
Tie favors tribal court authority
WASHINGTON (AP) - A Supreme Court tie has left in place the authority of Native American courts to judge complaints against people who are not tribal members.
The justices said last Thursday they deadlocked 4-4 in a closely watched dispute between the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and Dollar General Corp.
The Tennessee-based company was sued in tribal court in 2005 over allegations that a store manager made sexual advances toward a 13-year-old boy placed in his store by a tribal youth employment program. Dollar General asked federal courts to block the lawsuit. The boy's family is seeking $2.5 million.
The case threatened to limit the ability of tribal courts to resolve cases in which a member makes claims about a company doing business on tribal land.
The Supreme Court ruled more than 40 years ago that nonmembers can be sued only in tribal court when they have agreed to dealings with the tribe, including through a contract, lease or other business arrangement.
Lower courts ruled that such a connection exists between Dollar General and the Mississippi Choctaws. The Obama administration and Mississippi, among six states, supported the tribe.
Mississippi Choctaw Tribal Chief Phyliss Anderson called the result a positive outcome "not only for our tribe, but for all of Indian country."
The case is now expected to return to the tribal court for a ruling on the merits.
'No' to Obama's immigration plans, Supreme Court says
By Mark Sherman
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - A short-handed and deeply divided Supreme Court deadlocked last Thursday on President Barack Obama's immigration plan to help millions living in the U.S. illegally, effectively killing the plan for the rest of his presidency and raising the stakes even further for the November elections.
The hotly debated direction of America's national immigration policy as well as the balance of power on the high court now will be determined in large part by the presidential and congressional elections. Immigration and the court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia's death in February already were featuring prominently in the campaign.
Scalia's vote likely would have meant an outright ruling against Obama's immigration expansion rather than the 4-4 tie, a much more significant defeat for the president and immigrant advocates.
Democrat Hillary Clinton declared that as president she would work to restore the programs and go further. Republican Donald Trump said he would make sure Obama's "unconstitutional actions" never came back.
On immigration, the tie is not likely to lead to an increase in deportations since the president retains ample discretion to decide whom to deport. But the ruling stymies his effort to bring people "out from the shadows" by giving them the right to work legally in the U.S.
One of the Obama programs would have protected the parents of children who are in the country legally. The other was an expansion of a program that benefits people who were brought to the U.S. as children. Obama decided to move forward on his own after Republicans won control of the Senate in 2014 and the chances for an immigration overhaul, already remote, were further damaged.
Obama said last Thursday's impasse "takes us further from the country we aspire to be."
And the people directly affected?
Mexican immigrant Cristina Molina of New York City, said she was frustrated and upset. "I feel like I'm in limbo," Molina, 48, said through an interpreter. She has lived in the United States for 23 years and said she would have been eligible for one of the programs Obama announced in 2014.
A Supreme Court tie sets no national precedent but leaves in place a ruling by a lower court. The justices issued a one-sentence opinion, with no further comment.
A full nine-justice court agreed to hear the case in January, but by the time of the arguments in late April, Scalia had died. That left eight justices to decide the case, and the court presumably split along liberal-conservative lines, although no breakdown was announced.
The federal appeals court in New Orleans had said the Obama administration lacked the authority to shield up to 4 million immigrants from deportation and make them eligible for work permits without approval from Congress. That ruling now remains in place.
Texas had led 26 Republican-dominated states in challenging the Obama initiatives in court. The lawsuit was heard by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Brownsville, Texas. Hanen previously had criticized the administration for lax immigration enforcement.
Hanen sided with the states, blocking the programs from taking effect. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and the Justice Department rushed an appeal to the high court.
Had Scalia been alive, he almost certainly would have voted with his fellow conservatives to form a majority in favor of the states.
In practical terms, an election victory by Trump could mean an end to the programs anyway, since he has vowed to deport the roughly 11 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally.
If Clinton wins, the Senate will at some point fill the vacancy created by Scalia's death - either with Obama's nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, or a Clinton choice. In either case, legal challenges would come to a court with a majority of Democratic-appointed justices.
The Republican-led Senate has refused to hold a hearing or a vote on Garland's nomination. He would not have been able to participate in the cases argued this term, but the court might have avoided 4-4 ties and ordered cases to be argued anew in the next term if he had been confirmed.
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Associated Press writers Lisa Lerer in Washington and Deepti Hajela, in New York City, contributed to this report.
Texas Uunivesity admissions can consider race
By Mark Sherman
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - In a narrow victory for affirmative action, the Supreme Court last Thursday upheld a University of Texas program that takes account of race in deciding whom to admit, an important national decision that was cemented by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
The justices' 4-3 decision in favor of the Texas program ends an 8-year-old lawsuit that included a previous trip to the Supreme Court, filed by a white Texan who was denied admission to the university.
Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion that the Texas plan complied with earlier court rulings that allow colleges to consider race in pursuit of diversity on campus. "The university has thus met its burden of showing that the admissions policy it used ... was narrowly tailored," Kennedy wrote.
The court's three more-conservative justices dissented, and Justice Samuel Alito read portions of his 51-page dissent, more than twice as long as Kennedy's opinion, from the bench.
"This is affirmative action gone wild," Alito said. The university "relies on a series of unsupported and noxious racial assumptions."
In a separate dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas repeated his view that the Constitution outlaws any use of race in higher education admissions.
With the death of Scalia in February and with Justice Elena Kagan sitting out the case because she worked on it while serving in the Justice Department, just seven justices participated in the decision.
Scalia, long opposed to affirmative action, almost certainly would have voted with his fellow conservatives. He was criticized for suggesting at arguments in December that some black students would benefit from being at a "slower-track school," instead of Texas' flagship campus in Austin.
At the very least, Scalia's vote could have made the result a tie and limited the high court to issuing a one-sentence opinion upholding the lower court ruling in favor of Texas. In that instance, the result would have been the same but without the Supreme Court endorsement offered by Kennedy last Thursday.
The university considers race among many factors in admitting the last quarter of incoming freshmen classes. The state fills most of its freshman class by guaranteeing admission to students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their Texas high school class.
The high court ruled in the case of Abigail Fisher, a white Texan who was denied admission to the university in 2008. She contended she was rejected while African-American applicants with lower grades and test scores were admitted.
The school said Fisher, who did not graduate in the top 10 percent of her class, would not have been admitted with or without race as a factor. But officials did conditionally offer to allow her to transfer in as a sophomore if she maintained a 3.2 grade-point average at another public college in Texas.
Instead, she went to Louisiana State University, from which she graduated in 2012, and pursued her lawsuit. Fisher was recruited for the suit by Edward Blum, an opponent of racial preferences who has been remarkably successful in persuading the Supreme Court to hear cases challenging the use of race in education and politics.
Blum was behind a major challenge to the landmark Voting Rights Act that resulted in the court eviscerating a key provision of the law, and he also led an unsuccessful challenge to states' widespread practice of counting all their residents, not just those eligible to vote, in drawing legislative districts.
The Supreme Court heard Fisher's case once before and issued an inconclusive ruling in 2013 that sent it back to a lower court and set the stage for last Thursday's decision.
In 2003, the justices reaffirmed the consideration of race in the quest for diversity on campus. Their decision then set a goal of doing away with such programs in 25 years.
"The most important part of this case is that the court reaffirmed what it said in 2003 which is that diversity can be a compelling interest of a university in fulfilling its educational mission," said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
In a statement, Fisher said "I am disappointed that the Supreme Court has ruled that students applying to the University of Texas can be treated differently because of their race or ethnicity. I hope that the nation will one day move beyond affirmative action."
Separate legal challenges have been filed to affirmative action plans at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. Vanderbilt University law professor Suzanna Sherry said the outcome of the Texas case "makes the universities' cases a lot stronger. The challengers have an uphill battle."
Texas is unique in marrying the top-10 plan to a separate admissions review in which race is one of many factors considered. The university's current freshman class is 22 percent Hispanic and 4.5 percent African-American. White students make up less than half the school's freshmen.
Eight states prohibit the use of race in public college admissions: Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington.
Kennedy noted the long duration of Fisher's lawsuit in rejecting calls to send the case back to lower courts again. Alito complained the court should not side with Texas "because it is tired of this case."
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Associated Press writer Jessica Gresko contributed to this report.
Justices limit drunk driving test laws
By Sam Hananel
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court last Thursday placed new limits on state laws that make it a crime for motorists suspected of drunken driving to refuse alcohol tests.
The justices ruled that police must obtain a search warrant before requiring drivers to take blood alcohol tests, but not breath tests, which the court considers less intrusive.
The ruling came in three cases in which drivers challenged so-called implied consent laws in Minnesota and North Dakota as violating the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. State supreme courts had upheld the laws.
While drivers in all 50 states can have their licenses revoked for refusing drunken driving tests, the high court's ruling affects laws in 11 states that go farther in imposing criminal penalties for such refusals.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said breath tests do not implicate "significant privacy concerns." Unlike blood tests, breathing into a breathalyzer doesn't pierce the skin or leave a biological sample in the government's possession, he said.
Alito compared blowing into a breath test machine to using "a straw to drink beverages," which he called "a common practice and one to which few object." He noted that the high court has previously declined to require a warrant for collecting DNA samples by rubbing a swab on the inside of a person's cheek or scraping underneath a person's fingernails to find evidence of a crime.
Six justices agreed with Alito's opinion on breath tests, though Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to say he would have found both tests valid without a warrant under the Constitution. Thomas called any distinction between breath and blood tests "an arbitrary line in the sand."
Other states that have criminalized a driver's refusal to take alcohol blood or breath tests include Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia.
In all three cases before the high court, the challengers argued that warrantless searches should be allowed only in "extraordinary circumstances." They said routine drunk driving stops count as ordinary law enforcement functions where traditional privacy rights should apply.
State officials called the testing a legitimate condition on the privilege of using state roads. Prosecutors argued that it was too burdensome for police to obtain a warrant every time a driver refused a test because some rural areas have only one judge on call late at night or on weekends.
But during oral argument, some of the justices pointed out that even in rural states police can call a magistrate and get a warrant over the phone in just a few minutes.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote a separate opinion saying she would have gone further and required search warrants for both breath and blood alcohol tests. She said no governmental interest makes it impractical for an officer to get a warrant before measuring a driver's alcohol level.
"The Fourth Amendment prohibits such searches without a warrant, unless exigent circumstances exist in a particular case," she said.
The states garnered support from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which argued that public safety is a compelling reason that justified the laws. But civil liberties groups said states can't criminalize the assertion of a constitutional right.
Adam Vanek, national general counsel for MADD, said his group was pleased "that the court recognized public safety concerns far outweigh the minimal privacy concerns when it comes to a breath test." Vanek said the group was hopeful that the court's decision would encourage other states to implement similar laws punishing refusal to take a breath test.
Published: Mon, Jun 27, 2016
