Legal Docket - Explaining the remaining cases

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday morning and a brand new work week for The World and Everything in It. Today is the 11th of July, 2022.

Good morning to you, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

Today, we wrap up the remaining opinions from argued cases in the term just ended for the US Supreme Court. And we will breeze through them as fast as we can, so here we go! Fourteen of them.

REICHARD: First: victory for the veteran who sued for job discrimination.

LeRoy Torres served in the US Army Reserve, He also worked as a state trooper. The army deployed Torres to Iraq in 2007. There, he and other soldiers constantly inhaled noxious fumes from burning trash. After honorable discharge from service, Torres developed lung problems.

He asked for a different job with the state agency he’d worked for in order to accommodate his new health problems. But the state refused, offering him the same job and telling him he’d be fired if he didn’t do it.

Torres sued under a federal law that requires employers to restore the same or similar job to a returning service member. The state agency claimed immunity from suit.

The dispute had far-reaching implications, as Justice Stephen Breyer put it during oral argument in March:

BREYER: This has the potential of being a pretty important case for the structure of the United States of America. The war power is not copyright, and it is not the Indian Commerce Clause. It is, and, you know, as Lincoln said, will this nation long endure? We hope it is never necessary, but maybe that question will come up, okay? Now you see why I think it’s very important.

Writing for the majority, Justice Breyer said that ratifying the Constitution was a package deal—and the States agreed their sovereignty would yield to the national power to raise and support the Armed Forces. The bottom line of the 5-4 ruling? Texas does not have immunity from this type of lawsuit.

EICHER: Moving on: another 5-4 decision that benefits people convicted during a time when racially disparate penalties on crack-cocaine charges were in place.

Carlos Concepcion received 19 years in prison for crack possession. A year later, the law changed in such a way that would have made his sentence shorter. Naturally, Concepcion sought to take advantage. Even the Justice Department agreed he was eligible for sentence reduction, but the question was what factors judges had to consider.

Bottom line here is that lower courts may consider changes to the law involving crack-cocaine when resentencing criminal defendants.

REICHARD: Third, a unanimous win for two physicians convicted by a jury of prescribing controlled substances outside the usual course of professional practice.

The doctors challenged the jury instruction; they wanted the jury instructed on subjective intent; that is, so long as the doctors believed they were prescribing for a legitimate medical purpose, they’d acted lawfully.

The federal government argued for an objective standard that doesn’t consider physician intent.

But all nine justices agreed with the doctors and sent the case back for further review. Justice Breyer wrote the opinion: Once the doctors proved they were authorized to dispense controlled substances, Breyer wrote, the burden is on the government to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the doctors knew they were acting in an unauthorized way.

EICHER: A major decision now that limits the power of the federal government. The case involves regulation of carbon emissions from power plants. It goes back to the administration of President Barack Obama, and specifically that Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency exceeded its authority. According to the court, the EPA overstepped when it issued carbon emissions caps to restructure the American energy market.

You could hear the eventual majority ruling in this comment from Justice Brett Kavanaugh during oral argument in February:

KAVANAUGH: One thing we said is that Congress must speak clearly if it wishes to assign an agency decisions of vast economic and political significance. And the second thing we said is that the Court greets with a measure of skepticism when agencies claim to have found in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate a significant portion of the American economy.

This ruling signals an end to courts deferring to broad agency actions.

The three liberal justices in dissent thought that members of Congress often don’t know enough to regulate sensibly on such issues and that expert agencies are appropriate to address problems.

But Justice Neil Gorsuch in a concurring opinion wrote that “lawmaking under our Constitution can be difficult, but that’s a virtue, not a bug, of our system. It is a purposeful design to protect individual liberties from authoritarian power.”

REICHARD: Okay, the fifth decision ends former President Donald Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy. The 5-4 court said allowing migrants to stay in the United States while their immigration hearings play out doesn’t violate a Clinton-era 1996 migrant detention law.

Justice Kavanaugh joined the liberal justices to form the majority.

The dissenting justices pointed out that the Department of Homeland Security lacks capacity to detain the avalanche of aliens at the border, so it just releases untold numbers of them into the country. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the minority, says that’s a violation of “clear terms of the law, but the Court looks the other way.”

EICHER: Now for the sixth opinion: another 5-4 in a surprising lineup of conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett joining liberal justices Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor to form the majority.

They sided with the Department of Health and Human Services—specifically how HHS interprets a statute that calculates how hospitals serving poor patients are reimbursed by Medicare. The legal question? Whether an administrative agency may issue a rule based on a legal interpretation that a federal court said was not open to interpretation. The opinion says HHS is in the right and reverses the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

REICHARD: Next, states now have more prosecution power for crimes on Native American lands.

Just two years ago, a split bench upended years of practice to say only the federal government or tribal courts can handle those cases. Oklahoma challenged that, saying the federal government wasn’t doing its job and letting a lot of perpetrators go.

This split ruling narrows that one. States again now have concurrent authority to prosecute, along with tribal and federal governments, in these cases: specifically involving non-Native people who commit violent crimes on Native lands against Native Americans.

Justice Gorsuch is known as a champion of Native rights and wrote a fiery dissent: “Where this Court once stood firm, today it wilts.” The court’s three liberal justices joined him.

EICHER: Eighth opinion says Republican lawmakers in North Carolina can intervene to defend the state’s voter ID law, even though the state’s Democratic attorney general says he already is.

Here’s a quote from the opinion: “The facts [here show] how divided state government can lead to disagreements over the defense of state law in federal court.” “We need only acknowledge that a presumption of adequate representation is inappropriate when a duly authorized state agent seeks to intervene to defend a state law.”

That’s a victory for the Republicans, eight justices to one. Only Justice Sotomayor dissented. Liberal justices Breyer and Kagan were with the majority.

REICHARD: Moving right along with opinion number nine. The majority says a prisoner can file a federal civil-rights claim to contest the manner in which he will be executed.

Here, the question was what procedure must an inmate use to challenge the method of execution?

Capital offender Michael Nance wants to be executed by firing squad but Georgia doesn’t offer that. It authorizes only lethal injection. Nance did not bring this challenge as a habeas-corpus application. Instead, he brought it as a civil-rights claim, and a 5-4 majority says he can do that.

EICHER: Next, a decision that says a police officer cannot be sued for failing to read Miranda rights to an accused person prior to questioning him. You know the Miranda rights from cop-shows: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.

Terence Tekoh was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault, but the arresting officer didn’t read him his rights.

A jury later acquitted Tekoh. Then he sued the officer for violating his civil rights.

Here’s lawyer for the federal government, Vivek Suri, during oral argument:

SURI: Miranda recognized a constitutional right, but it's a trial right concerning the exclusion of evidence at a criminal trial. It isn't a substantive right to receive the Miranda warnings themselves. A police officer who fails to provide the Miranda warnings accordingly doesn't himself violate the constitutional right, and he also isn't legally responsible for any violation that might occur later at the trial.

A 6-3 court agreed, reversed the Ninth Circuit appeals court, and remanded the case for further proceedings.

REICHARD: Okay, we’re on a roll! This next opinion is a victory for a hospital accused of bias against patients with kidney failure.

An employee health plan at Marietta Memorial Hospital pays less money for dialysis than it does for other treatments. Dialysis provider DaVita sued, saying that violates Medicare law. A 7-2 court says it does not and remanded this case as well.

EICHER: Next, the court ruled in favor of a criminal defendant as to what counts as a “crime of violence” in federal gun cases that carry mandatory minimum sentences.

Quick background: Justin Taylor and an accomplice planned to steal money. The accomplice pulled a gun on the target and killed him, then ran away without the cash. Taylor received a conviction for “using a firearm to carry out a crime of violence.” He argued a mere attempt to rob can’t be a crime of violence.

And a majority of seven justices agreed with him.

REICHARD: This next opinion is unanimous that a state’s workers’ compensation law discriminates against contractors with the federal government.

This case arises from cleanup of a nuclear waste site that the Department of Energy oversees in the state of Washington.

Some of those doing the work are federal contractors. State law presumes cancer and lung disease will result from this work, and that’ll trigger workers’ compensation benefits. But the federal government contests that part. Washington State later changed that law, so it said the matter was moot.

But the majority justices decided the case is not moot, that the state law is not constitutional because it discriminates against the federal government without authorization of Congress. And the new state law isn’t without questions needing answers. So, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is again overruled.

EICHER: Okay, final opinion. The court ruled against a death row inmate who was seeking a neurological evaluation to get him off death row.

When Raymond Twyford was a teenager, he attempted suicide and that left bullet fragments in his brain. He points to that now as possible evidence of brain damage that might mitigate his sentence.

The court ruled the prison is not obliged to transport Twyford to a medical facility in search of new evidence because the inmate did not show that a brain scan would be admissible. Three liberal justices dissented.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.