U.S. Supreme Court Opinions [6/25/09]

DEMachina.

Posted to Politics on Fri Jun 26, 2009 at 10:27:31 AM EST (promoted from Diaries by port1080). RSS.

The newest SCOTUS opinions were released today, and there're some interesting ones.

It's important to keep up with changing caselaw, I think, so here's what the U.S. Supreme Court had to say about the Constitution today.  Some of these may be overly-technical and not have much interest for non-lawyers, but here we go.  I'm loathe to leave cases out, because I don't presume to know what people might find interesting.

The two biggies (and most interesting IMO) deal with the Fourth and Sixth Amendments, so I'll do those first.

Safford Unified School Dist. #1 v. Redding

A 13-year-old student was accused of distributing pills to her classmates.  She was called to the principals office.  She was shown a day planner that contained knives and other contraband; she admitted that it was hers but said she had loaned it to a friend and that none of the contraband was hers.  She was then shown the pills, and denied ownership.  A female administrative assistant then took the girl to the nurse's office (the nurse is also female), where the two adults strip-searched her.  No drugs were found.  The girl (via her mom) sued, arguing a Fourth Amendment violation.

There're two questions: one, whether the school district and employees are protected by sovereign immunity (or, more specifically, qualified immunity in this case), and two, whether the search violated the girl's Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable search.

For the search, there's a lower standard for kids in public schools (reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause).  That said, the search has to be proportional to the danger of what administrators are looking for, and has to be based on a reasonable belief that evidence will be found.  Here, there was no evidence that kids were smuggling pills in their underwear, and the evidence sought (over-the-counter pills) was not dangerous enough to justify such an invasive search.

Next is qualified immunity, which protects a school official from suit based on a search where "clearly established law does not violate[] the Fourth Amendment."  The Court said that while the specific circumstances haven't been ruled upon (and don't need to have been), there's been enough confusion among lower courts that it was not clearly established that a strip search was improper under the circumstances in this case.  So the lawsuit is out as to the individual employees, but might still stand against the school district, which is what everyone will now fight about.

This case was 8-1, with only Justice Thomas dissenting.  Justices Stevens and Ginsburg dissented as to the qualified immunity part, saying that this search was so much more outrageous than that of previous cases that had already found searches by administrators unconstitutional, so that the administrators here should have known what they were doing was against the law.

Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts

The petitioner here (Melendez-Diaz) was convicted of drug possession.  At his trial, the prosecutor entered certificates from a drug lab identifying a substance found on him as cocaine.  He objected, arguing that he had a right to confront and cross-examine the tech who identified the cocaine.

Pretty standard Confrontation Clause stuff here.  "A witness's testimony against a defendant is thus inadmissible unless the witness appears at trial or, if the witness is unavailable, the defendant had a prior opportunity for cross examination."  When it's in the context of statements made outside of court, it only applies insofar as the statements are within "formalized testimonial materials" like an affidavit.

The majority is written by Scalia, with its usual venom against the dissent.  He then goes through each argument raised by Massachusetts one-by-one, and I won't recount those here.

The vote is 5-4 (Scalia, Thomas, Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg in the majority).

Horne v. Flores

This case is very technical, so I'll be brief.  It deals with a limited standing question (whether a superintended who has an injunction against him has standing to challenge same; he does), Rule 60(b)(5) (which is a way to challenge a court order when the materials facts underlying it have changed) and ruling that the federal district court shouldn't extend an order saying one school district was violating state law to the entire state without proof that the entire state was violating the law.

There's an interesting discussion in there about court orders for the purpose of government oversight, and how it can often be in politicians' interest to lose such a suit, since it then binds their successors' hands.

Atlantic Sounding Co. v. Townsend

This is a maritime case.  It's an area I don't know very well, and is often a whole separate body of law from everything else.  This one's about an employee who was injured while operating a tugboat.  The owner of the boat refused to pay for his maintenance and care, and he sued and also sought punitive damages.  "A claim for maintenance and cure concerns the vessel owner's obligation to provide food, lodging, and medical services to a seaman injured while serving the ship."

The Court says punitives are okay under maritime law, and that the Jones Act doesn't preclude such claims.