SCOTUS Term Kickoff: Week in a Nutshell, 10/4/24

October 4, 2024

SCOTUS Term Kickoff: Week in a Nutshell, 10/4/24

An exterior view of the Supreme Court on June 20, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The Supreme Court will start its new term on Monday, and there are a number of high-profile cases on the docket. Here are some of the cases in which the justices will hear oral arguments this month:

Garland v. VanDerStok

At issue in this case is whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has statutory authority to regulate “ghost guns,” homemade firearms that can be made with a 3D printer or assembled from a kit. The justices will hear oral arguments on Tuesday, October 8.
In 2022, ATF ordered manufacturers and sellers of ghost gun kits and parts to obtain licenses, conduct background searches of buyers, and label the parts with serial numbers.
Last November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the guidelines “flout[] clear statutory text and exceed[] the legislatively-imposed limits on agency authority in the name of public policy.”
In the Biden administration’s petition to the Supreme Court, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar urged the justices to leave the regulations in place. Without the guidelines, Prelogar wrote, there “would be a flood of untraceable ghost guns into our Nation’s communities, endangering the public and thwarting law-enforcement efforts to solve violent crimes.”

Glossip v. Oklahoma.

In this case, the Court will consider whether to overturn the guilty verdict of Richard Glossip, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for the 1997 killing of his employer. The justices will hear oral arguments on Wednesday, October 9.
In his appeal, Glossip argues that the prosecution suppressed evidence about a key witness’s mental health in violation of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1963 ruling Brady v. Maryland, which held that prosecutors must provide the defendant with all exculpatory evidence.
The state of Oklahoma no longer supports Glossip’s conviction and death sentence. Therefore, the Supreme Court has appointed an independent attorney to argue in favor of preserving them.
The death penalty continues to be a contentious issue at the Court and throughout the country. Last week, the state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams after the Supreme Court declined to postpone his execution. Williams, a Black man, was convicted and sentenced to death in 2001 for the stabbing murder of a white woman in 1998. In the years since his conviction, lawyers on both sides of the trial questioned Williams’s guilt due to the lack of DNA evidence linking him to the crime scene and prosecutorial misconduct during the trial.