Supreme Court hears murky case on executing the mentally disabled

Mental capacity. Lawyers for a man sentenced to death for killing a police officer in Baton Rouge, La., argued last week before the U.S. Supreme Court that he should not be executed because the court has not appropriately determined his intellectual capacity. Kevan Brumfield’s attorney, Michael DeSanctis, said his client did not get a separate hearing to determine his mental status, so the high court’s precedent for exempting the mentally disabled from execution should mean erring in Brumfield’s favor.

In fact, a state judge found Brumfield’s intellectual capacity did not make him disabled. But a federal judge said he was. The problem is the paperwork, which was in dispute. And that frustrated the justices. They couldn’t possibly sort out thousands of documents.

“The only court to provide Mr. Brumfield with a hearing found that he is intellectually disabled, and unless this court reverses the 5th Circuit’s erroneous ruling, an intellectually disabled person will be executed,” DeSanctis argued.

In the end, the frustrated court can dismiss the case as “improvidently granted,” meaning it declines further review of the issue until a more clear-cut case arises. But the stakes are high if it does. Louisiana may execute Brumfield based on what might be an insufficient determination of his mental capacity.

Too much monitoring? A unanimous ruling last week held that a two-time convicted sex offender required to wear a GPS device for the rest of his life raised a legitimate Fourth Amendment question as to whether the monitoring was reasonable. The case involved a man named Dale Grady, who found it cumbersome that he had to plug in his tracking device to a wall outlet for hours each day. The Supreme Court did not say round-the-clock monitoring was unconstitutional, only that the lower courts need to do more analysis of the nature and purpose of such monitoring. Many states have laws requiring 24-hour digital monitoring of such offenders. So the matter returns to lower court for fact-finding.

Sufficient defense. Another unanimous decision held a defense attorney’s absence for 10 minutes during trial testimony in a murder case is not tantamount to ineffective assistance of counsel. The client, Cory Donald, was convicted of shooting a drug dealer to death. He argued his attorney’s missing 10 minutes unconstitutionally prejudiced his case. Not a single justice agreed.

Coming up short. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court said Medicaid providers cannot sue a state for paying too little. The federal government is supposed to enforce the Medicaid Act, not a group of doctors in Idaho who, in this case, argued federal law requires higher reimbursement than the state of Idaho was willing to pay. Prior court decisions make it difficult to sue unless Congress expressly provided for the right, which in the case of the Medicaid Act, Congress did not. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Anthony Kennedy thought the doctors should be able to pursue such a claim. But the five-justice majority said they couldn’t.

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