Week In a Nutshell, 10/14/22

October 14, 2022 | Updated Feb 23 2023

Week In a Nutshell, 10/14/22

Demonstrators gather outside the US Supreme Court. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)

Here are some of the legal news stories making headlines this week:

The Supreme Court rejected former President Donald Trump’s request that the justices intervene in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

Last week, Trump elevated the case to the Supreme Court following a decision from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals that shielded from special master review over 100 classified documents that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago. Trump requested that the Court return the documents to the special master for review.
Without an explanation for the decision, the Court declined to step into the dispute. In addition, no justice publicly signaled that they would have granted Trump’s request.
Before the Court released the order, DOJ filed a response urging the Court to leave in place the Eleventh Circuit’s order. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that Trump had not proven that the appeals court’s ruling was wrong. Trump, Prelogar wrote, “has no plausible claim of privilege in or ownership of government records bearing classification markings.”
Prelogar further contended that Trump had not even attempted to show that he would be permanently injured by shielding the classified documents from the special master — one criterion that must be proven for the Court to grant the relief sought by Trump. “Most notably, applicant has not even attempted to explain how he is irreparably injured by the court of appeals’ partial stay…Applicant’s inability to demonstrate irreparable injury is itself sufficient reason to deny the extraordinary relief he seeks in this Court,” Prelogar wrote.

The Supreme Court considered other major issues this week.

The justices declined to hear a dispute from Rhode Island over whether fetuses have constitutional rights. A Catholic group and two pregnant women brought the case on behalf of the women’s fetuses, but the Rhode Island Supreme Court dismissed the case on the ground that the challengers lacked the legal standing to sue — citing Roe v. Wade. The petitioners elevated their challenge to the Supreme Court after the justices overturned Roe earlier this year.
The Court also turned down a request to consider the case of Andre Thomas. Thomas is facing the death penalty after being convicted of murdering his estranged wife and two children in 2004. The all-white jury that convicted him included three people who said that they opposed interracial marriage. Thomas’s wife was white, but his attorney did not seek to remove these jurors from the jury pool. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that she would have overturned Thomas’s conviction and death sentence because they “clearly violate[d] the constitutional right to the effective assistance of counsel.” “No jury deciding whether to recommend a death sentence should be tainted by potential racial biases that could infect its deliberations or decision, particularly where the case involved an interracial crime,” Sotomayor continued.
Meanwhile, the Court heard oral arguments in the case of Rodney Reed. Reed is also facing the death penalty after he was convicted, by an all-white jury, of murdering and raping a woman in 1996. Reed maintains his innocence and is seeking new DNA evidence to prove his case, but at issue in this appeal is a technical dispute over whether Reed is raising these new arguments too late. Legal experts, including SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe, speculated that a number of justices might reject the strict deadlines imposed by the lower court, but that “there was no clear consensus around an alternative rule – and Reed’s lawsuit would still be too late under one of the options that the justices debated.” A decision in this case is likely to come sometime in 2023.