Constitutional Law

Justices Consider Questions On Police Searches, Discrimination Claims and Legal Immunity for Administration

The U.S. Supreme Court reviewed cases this week involving police searches, lawsuits entangling top administration officials, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and habeas corpus review of a Tennessee murder conviction.

In Cone v. Bell, the justices revealed “flashes of incredulity and anger,” The New York Times reported. The case involves a convicted killer’s ongoing attempt to prove his conviction was the result of serious misconduct by Tennessee prosecutors. Gary Cone, a Vietnam veteran, admitted to the murders of a Memphis couple in 1980, but argues that prosecutors in the case withheld evidence from his defense attorneys regarding his use of drugs during the killings. Tom Goldstein, representing Cone, told the justices that, “Our defense was amphetamine psychosis brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder from honorable service in Vietnam.” Jennifer L. Smith, a lawyer with the Tennessee attorney general’s office defend the prosecutors, who, according to court transcripts, painted Cone as a deliberate, cold-blooded murderer, with no drug problems. Smith, reported The Times, argued that the prosecutors “had no legal or ethical obligation to provide” information to Cone’s attorneys about his drug-use and that doing so would not have made any difference. Justice David Souter expressed bewilderment at the defense of the Tennessee prosecutors’ handling of the evidence. “I will be candid with you,” Souter informed Smith. “I simply cannot follow your argument because I believe you have just made a statement to me that is utterly irrational.”

The justices also heard oral argument in AT&T v. Hulteen, a case involving pregnancy discrimination claims. In a guest post for ACSBlog, Harper Jean Tobin, of the National Senior Citizen Law Center, wrote that AT&T, with the support of the Bush administration, is trying to forgo paying former employees who received reduced benefits because of pregnancy leave they took in the 1960s and early 1970s before the enactment of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. “The company is now set to argue before the Supreme Court on Wednesday that these women can’t sue because any discrimination occurred decades when they took pregnancy leave, not when they were awarded lesser retirement benefits,” Tobin wrote.

In Arizona v. Johnson, the high court considered the extent of police pat-down searches of passengers of cars stopped on traffic violations. The Scotusblog’s Lyle Denniston in analyzing the oral argument wrote that the justices focused largely on definition of roadside stops. “When does such a stop begin and end, in relation to police discretion on what they do after the initial stop? In Fourth Amendment terms, that question is: when does a police seizure of an individual begin and end, especially during a traffic stop?”

The Bush administration also argued before the high court that former Attorney General John Ashcroft and the current FBI director, Robert Mueller, should not be required to provide evidence “in a group of lawsuits in federal courts claiming that they were at least partly to blame for serious physical and mental abuse of Arab Muslims picked up and detained in harsh conditions in a Brooklyn, N.Y., jail in the weeks and months after” the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Denniston wrote for Scotusblog. Denniston concluded that a “majority of Justices seemed concerned about requiring officials of Cabinet or near-Cabinet level to answer in court for the way they react in the immediate, perhaps-frenzied after math of a severe threat to national security.” See Denniston’s analysis of the oral argument in Ashcroft v. Iqbal.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on December 10, 2008 (boomark / email).