Capital ruling and Booker GVRs from SCOTUS

Though other rulings on the 10 Commandments and file sharing are capturing most of the headlines and the blogsphere commentary, the Supreme Court today did decide a capital case with an interesting procedural angle in Bell v. Thompson, 04-514 (S. Ct. June 27, 2005) (available here).  Anisha Dasgupta at SCOTUSblog explains in this post that, in a 5-4 decision, the “majority found that, even assuming that Rule 41 authorizes stay of a mandate following denial of certiorari, and further assuming that a court can stay the mandate without entering an order, the Sixth Circuit’s decision to do so in this case constituted an abuse of discretion.”  The AP’s summary of the decision is available here.

Also not to be overlooked, we had a few more Booker-inspired GVRs today.  My rough estimate suggests the running count of these GVRs has to be approaching 800 with the additional five to be found today on this order list.