Legal Docket: Keeping criminals on the hook

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Monday morning, June 26th and you’re listening to The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. Good morning! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

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It’s time for Legal Docket.

It’s the final week of this term of the U.S. Supreme Court. That means a fistful of opinions to cover, maybe two, maybe more. They include much-anticipated decisions about our first freedoms—religion and speech among them.

We’ll bring you more in-depth coverage of those this week and next.

But let’s get caught up on opinions the court released last week: we have eight opinions, and we’ll run through them quickly today with links in the transcript should you want to read the opinions for yourself.

EICHER: All right, here we go! First up, the case involving the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to confront witnesses in a criminal trial.

Adam Samia is a hit man serving a life sentence. That won’t create much sympathy for him, but the legal issue is what that right to confront witnesses means.

In Samia’s trial, a co-defendant wrote a confession that ID’d him as an accomplice to murder. But that co-defendant never took the witness stand, so Samia’s lawyer had no chance to cross-examine.

REICHARD: Back in March, Samia’s lawyer during argument delivered this memorable close. This is Kannon Shanmugam.

KANNON SHANMUGAM: If you throw a skunk in the jury box, you can't instruct the jurors not to smell it. And I would submit that this is a case in which the government not only threw a skunk into the jury box but pointed to it repeatedly, and the jury could hardly be expected to ignore it.

Six justices weren’t persuaded. The written confession with Samia’s name blotted out along with limiting jury instructions satisfies the Constitutional protection.

Dissenting Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Kentanji Brown Jackson thought the court was elevating form over substance, thereby undermining a vital constitutional protection.

EICHER: A second ruling came in a case we covered last week involving two Russian citizens. The court held that U.S. racketeering law may be used to enforce foreign arbitration awards.

In this case, Vitaly Smagan spent years trying to collect a multimillion dollar arbitration award. He sought it against a man named Ashot Yegiazaryan. Smagan lives in Russia and Yegiazaryan lives in the United States. Smagan sued in American courts under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO. But Yegiazaryan argued that statute requires a “domestic injury” and with Smagan still in Russia, the injury doesn’t qualify as domestic.

You can hear Chief Justice John Roberts’ doubt about that in this from oral argument in April:

JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, here the plaintiff obtained a California judgment to collect California property against someone living in California based on conduct in California. Right?

LEVY: There's a California judgment recognizing an award rendered abroad.

JUSTICE ROBERTS: Why can't we consider, with all those connections, that that's a domestic injury?

REICHARD: There it is. A 6-to-3 majority found no reason not to. So Smagin prevails under the RICO statute to enforce his award.

Okay, on to the third opinion: a loss for a man sentenced to additional time for unlawful possession of a gun as a felon.

Years after Marcus Jones’ conviction, the Supreme Court changed what the government has to prove in cases like his. First, that he possessed a gun and second, that he knew his legal status as a “felon.”

Jones wanted a chance to be found innocent under that new standard of proof that hadn’t been required at the time of his trial.

EICHER: But another majority of six said he could not: that Jones had already used up his appeals, and he cannot have another day in court based on a more favorable interpretation of law adopted after his conviction became final. Dissenters were again Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson.

Opinion four: a 5-4 loss for the Navajo Nation.

The Navajo reservation is 17 million acres, and it suffers under lack of infrastructure. It sought a court order to require the U.S. to assess the tribe’s water needs and then secure that water from the Colorado River.

But the majority held that an 18-68 treaty doesn’t require the U.S. to take “affirmative steps” to do that. That treaty says the federal government guarantees the Tribe’s agricultural needs, but that doesn’t necessarily include water rights.

REICHARD: Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a vociferous dissent joined by the three liberal justices. It’s an in-depth read of Native American history. One quote that caught my eye from the dissent is when Gorsuch writes that the Navajo have tried everything to get clarity on the responsibility of the federal government. He writes, quoting now: “..when all of those efforts were rebuffed, they brought a claim seeking to compel the United States to make good on its treaty obligations by providing an accounting of what water rights it holds on their behalf. At each turn, they have received the same answer: “Try again.” When this routine first began in earnest, Elvis was still making his rounds on The Ed Sullivan Show.”

EICHER: On to the fifth opinion: Pugin v Garland, a 6-3 loss for two immigrants in the U.S. who hold green cards. They were subject to deportation because they were convicted of crimes “related to obstruction of justice.” The legal question had to do with the meaning of the phrase “related to obstruction of justice.”

Does it require an active investigation or pending court case?

The majority says no. Crimes involving obstruction of justice are deportable under applicable law, period.

REICHARD: Okay, moving right along!

Our sixth opinion is in the case captioned US v Hansen. Here, Helaman Hansen duped hundreds of noncitizens with a promise to get them adopted as adults in order to secure U.S. citizenship. The scam netted him nearly $2 million.

He was convicted under a law that he argued was overbroad: words like “induce” and “encourage” to break the law could sweep up all kinds of ordinary speech and make criminals of all of us.

But a majority 7 justices did not buy the argument. They held that Congress intended the words to mean criminal solicitation, and that’s what the scammer did.

Case reversed and remanded for further proceedings.

EICHER: Two more opinions to go! This one, US v Texas is a dispute over immigration policy by the Biden administration.

The 8-1 ruling says the states of Texas and Louisiana lack standing to challenge the Biden administration for ending the policy known as Remain in Mexico.

The states argued that the Immigration and Nationality Act requires illegal aliens to be detained or sent to a bordering nation pending resolution regardless of risk level to public safety.

But the federal government had the winning argument. Here’s Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar during argument in March:

PRELOGAR: And it makes sense because, in a world where we don't have sufficient beds, as everyone acknowledges, there is a imperative public interest in ensuring that we are detaining the people who might be criminals or who might abscond or who threaten our national security and not simply filling those beds on a first come basis with no accounting for the limited detention capacity.

REICHARD: Okay, we’ve made it to the final opinion for today: Coinbase v Bielski. It’s a 5-4 decision in a technical arbitration dispute.

In this case, a man alleges that an online currency platform did not return money that had been fraudulently removed from his account. But he’d signed an agreement to resolve disputes using arbitration. So when Abraham Bielski sued, the company cited that agreement to force him into arbitration.

The question was whether Bielski’s court case must be put on hold while the arbitration question is pending. The answer is clear: yes, it must. Case reversed and remanded for further proceedings.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

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