Legal Docket: Justices rule narrowly on broad questions

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 3rd day of July, 2025. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Today we wrap up our coverage of the final opinions from the US Supreme Court’s term. Three decisions, split 6-3 or 5-4, revealed some unexpected alliances among the justices.

REICHARD: We begin with a 6-3 ruling in a high-stakes death penalty case out of Texas, a win for Ruben Gutierrez. He was convicted of the murder of an elderly woman in her mobile home back in 1998. Prosecutors said Gutierrez and two others thought the woman stashed away $600,000 in life’s savings inside her home.

BROWN: Gutierrez confessed to helping plan the robbery. But he says he didn’t enter the house, nor did he wield the weapon.

REICHARD: I called practicing criminal law attorney Matthew Martens to talk about this:

MARTENS: The question was, who had committed the murder, and had Mr. Gutierrez known in advance or participated with the real likelihood that there was going to be a murder, or did he just intend to commit a robbery, because that distinction matters under Texas law.

Gutierrez argued for years that DNA testing of the crime scene evidence could prove he wasn’t inside the home on that night of the murder. But his efforts to obtain DNA testing were denied by the Texa state courts.

BROWN: So, he sued the prosecutor under federal civil rights law, arguing it violates his due process rights for a state to restrict DNA testing after a conviction.

MARTENS: The lower court had said that he didn’t have standing. Meaning he didn’t have a right to be in federal court. And the Supreme Court said he has standing and can continue to sue.

REICHARD: Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the majority opinion. She pointed to an earlier decision with similar facts that said inmates do have the right to challenge DNA testing procedures in federal court.

Here’s lawyer Martens again:

MARTENS: What stands out to me about it is the weird alignment of justices… You have Justice Sotomayor writing for the majority, but not just joined by the liberals—she’s joined by Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Chief Justice Roberts.

BROWN: The Court didn’t say Gutierrez is entitled to the DNA testing, though, just that he can keep trying. So it’s a narrow ruling, focused on standing, whether someone has the right to bring a case in the first place.

Martens noted the broader stakes:

MARTENS: It feels like that’s some of the background here that’s driving the holding… just like, give the guy the DNA evidence, let him test it. He’s probably guilty anyway. But that way we won't have to hear objections later on about someone potentially innocent being executed.

REICHARD: The three dissenters, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch thought even with DNA testing, the death sentence will stand. So in their view, the case shouldn’t proceed. But for Ruben Gutierrez, the execution is on hold for now as the case returns to lower court to sort out.

BROWN: Next, FCC v Consumer’s Research, a case that touches the bank accounts of nearly everyone with a phone or internet bill. It challenged a program that helps ensure poor and rural Americans have access to them. The court says that program stays.

The money for it comes from fees charged to telecom companies, who in turn pass that on to consumers as a line item on their bills. But a conservative free-market group calling itself Consumers’ Research said that’s just an unconstitutional tax, and one that Congress never approved.

WALKER: This is a really big deal…

REICHARD: Christopher Walker is professor of law at the University of Michigan. He teaches administrative law.

WALKER: This case is about the nondelegation doctrine which is a doctrine that’s only been used twice to invalidate a statute. But the basic idea is that the Court has said that when Congress passes a statute, it can’t give away its power to someone else.

And what Justice Gorsuch in dissent is upset about is that Congress well generally can’t give away their legislative power, especially when it’s a tax, or when it’s revenue generating that that’s a core power that Congress can’t give away. In other words, that Congress should have been setting that tax rate, they shouldn’t have been able to allow for the FCC or this private entity to be setting what the rate should be.

But the majority disagreed. Majority opinion writer Justice Elena Kagan said Congress gave enough guidance to the FCC, specifying that a “sufficient” amount could be collected, and that it has to service certain public needs like rural schools and hospitals.

Walker said this dispute was a chance for the Court to say to Congress decide what a tax rate is, or whether a private entity can do something, and not pass the buck to a federal agency, an unelected group. But it didn’t do that

WALKER: They refused to kind of recognize that, and instead say, hey, you know what? We're going to allow Congress to have a lot of flexibility and how it gives its power to other, you know, to agencies or maybe even to private entities. And I think that's the real big takeaway, is that there weren't enough votes on the court to kind of come and say, Congress has got to do its job. It's got to make the major value judgments.

Bottom line? You’ll still see that fee on your bill.

BROWN: Next, a 5 to 4 decision in Hewitt v US, a case about criminal sentencing and a law that brought rare bipartisan agreement. That law is the First Step Act that passed in 2018 under President Trump. It changed how some federal firearm offenses are punished. Specifically, it got rid of what’s called “stacking,” a practice that forced judges to impose multiple mandatory 25-year sentences, even for first time offenders during a single incident.

REICHARD: Matthew Cavedon is incoming director of the Project on Criminal Justice at Cato Institute, which filed a friend of the court brief in support of the inmates.

CAVEDON: There were cases where somebody who would have gotten four years in prison instead got 161 because of stacking these provisions. Another person got life without the possibility of parole instead of just 10 years.

BROWN: The First Step Act put an end to that and made the new rules partly retroactive. But that created a gray area. What if a person was originally sentenced before the law passed, but his sentence was later vacated? If he’s resentenced after the First Step Act went into effect, does he benefit from the new rules?

REICHARD: That’s what happened to Tony Hewitt. He received convictions for multiple firearm counts and was sentenced under the old rules. A federal appeals court threw that out, and he came up for resentencing after the First Step Act took effect.

CAVEDON: It might sound super technical. A lot of the disagreement in this case turned on a grammatical disagreement. Remember Lance Armstrong, champion of the bicycling world, champion of the Tour de France, had a very, very prominent career, but then ended up getting stripped of some of his gold medals because he failed steroid testing. What the majority said is, when we ask today, has Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France, the answer is no, because as of today, he doesn't have a valid gold medal. He had been a winner of the Tour de France, but as of today, he has not been.

BROWN: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by both liberal and conservative justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Gorsuch. Justice Alito dissented, along with three other conservatives. The dissent thought Congress meant for the original sentence to matter, even if later overturned.

CAVEDON: So one of those issues where, even though people out there in the world like to talk about Trump judges and Biden judges and Obama judges and Bush judges, sometimes the disagreement is less about big, sweeping concepts and more about just those very, very picky details. I know a lot of world listeners are church goers. You might be familiar with this. Sometimes the most heated arguments can be about a specific phrase in the Bible rather than about the big picture things. And I think that's a lot of what was going on in the Hewitt case.

So what happens next? For a narrow group of inmates, judges now have discretion, and that could mean a five-year minimum sentence instead of 25 years.

REICHARD: That’s it for this week’s series of Legal Dockets. Next week we begin our summertime Legal Docket, focusing on what’s going on in the lower courts.

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