U.S. Supreme Court Notebook

Justices: Proof needed that ­person knew he couldn’t have gun


WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court says prosecutors must prove that people charged with violating federal gun laws knew they were not allowed to have a weapon. The government says the decision could affect thousands of prosecutions of convicted criminals who are barred from having a gun.

The court ruled 7-2 Friday in the case of a foreign student from the United Arab Emirates who took target practice at a Florida shooting range even though he had stopped attending classes and was in the United States illegally. He was prosecuted under a law that bars people who are in the country illegally from having guns.

Prosecutors never proved he knew he couldn’t have a gun.

The same law is also an important tool to keep guns away from convicted criminals.

 

Supreme Court tosses murder conviction of black inmate
 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is throwing out the murder conviction and death sentence for a black man in Mississippi because of a prosecutor’s efforts to keep African Americans off the jury. The defendant already has been tried six times and now could face a seventh trial.

The court’s 7-2 decision Friday says the removal of black prospective jurors violated the rights of inmate Curtis Flowers.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the court’s majority opinion. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

In Flowers’ sixth trial, the jury was made up of 11 whites and one African American, and District Attorney Doug Evans struck five black prospective jurors.

In the earlier trials, three convictions were tossed out, including one when the prosecutor improperly excluded African Americans from the jury. In the second trial, the judge chided Evans for striking a juror based on race. Two other trials ended when jurors couldn’t reach unanimous verdicts.

“The numbers speak loudly,” Kavanaugh said in a summary of his opinion that he read in the courtroom, noting that Evans had removed 41 of the 42 prospective black jurors over the six trials. “We cannot ignore that history.”

In dissent, Thomas called Kavanaugh’s opinion “manifestly incorrect” and wrote that Flowers presented no evidence whatsoever of purposeful race discrimination.”

In the course of selecting a jury, lawyers can excuse a juror merely because of a suspicion that a particular person would vote against their client. Those are called peremptory strikes, and they have been the focus of the complaints about discrimination.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Batson v. Kentucky in 1986 set up a system by which trial judges could evaluate claims of discrimination and the race-neutral explanations by prosecutors.

Flowers has been in jail more than 22 years, since his arrest after four people were found shot to death in a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi, in July 1996.

 

Pennsylvania woman wins ­property rights case in Supreme Court

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Friday to give citizens another way to sue when they believe states and local governments have harmed their property rights, handing a victory to a Pennsylvania woman fighting her town over a cemetery ordinance.

The high court ruled 5-4 along ideological lines in favor of Rose Mary Knick. She tried to bring a lawsuit in federal court after her town passed an ordinance that requires anyone with a cemetery on their land to open it to the public during the day.

A town official found several grave markers on Knick’s farmland in eastern Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County, but she disputes whether there’s actually a small, family cemetery on her 90-acre property.

Regardless, Knick argued that in passing the ordinance in 2012 and applying it to her, local officials were in essence taking her property and opening it to the public without paying her for it.

A federal court threw out Knick’s case, ruling she had to go to state court first. But after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Knick will be able to pursue her case in federal court.

Property owners like Knick would often prefer to pursue property rights disputes in federal court, Knick’s lawyers have said, because they may view them as more neutral or objective than state courts, which are sometimes seen as being influenced by local politics.

Local governments previously had the power to take a case like Knick’s that was filed in state court and move it to federal court, but citizens didn’t have the option to begin their cases in federal court.

A 1985 Supreme Court decision had effectively barred people with property rights claims like Knick’s from going to federal court. The Supreme Court on Friday overruled that part of the decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for himself and his four conservative colleagues that the earlier decision was “not just wrong” but its reasoning was “exceptionally ill founded.”

The court’s ruling means citizens will now have a choice about whether to go to state or federal courts.

Knick’s attorney, J. David Breemer, said before the decision that a ruling in her favor would also lead to faster resolutions in similar cases.

“This decision is a very long time coming for Rose and other property owners who have had federal courtroom doors slammed shut in their faces whenever they seek compensation for a governmental taking of their private property,” Breemer said in a statement.

The case is Knick v. Township of Scott, 17-647.