More on the SCOTUS deadly, but still shrinking, docket

This week brought some new coverage of one of my favorite issues: the excessively large number of capital cases on the Supreme Court’s ever shrinking docket.  The ACS Blog’s Martin Magnusson has this great post entitled, “The Dominance of the Death Penalty on the Decreasing Supreme Court Docket.”   The post echoes my concerns about a SCOTUS docket “filled with criminal cases that have no impact on the vast majority of American inmates.”

Relatedly, this Washington Post article discusses comments by Chief Justice John Roberts about the court’s docket.  I found this quote especially notable:

“I regarded this as a matter of great concern when I was a practicing lawyer, somewhat less significant when I became a Court of Appeals judge,” Roberts said. And now that he has seen it from the high court’s viewpoint, he says that at times, there just are not that many cases that merit the court’s review.

I guess this means that CJ Roberts and the other Justices will understand why, because I am a practicing lawyer particularly in the arena of non-capital sentencing jurisprudence, I am always eagerly rooting for SCOTUS to take more non-capital sentencing cases.

Some (of many) recent related posts:

• My effort to help with the SCOTUS docket problem (with cert. petition link)
• CJ Roberts and sentencing law: the virtues (and vices?) of consensus
• What SCOTUS should be doing
• Solving the SCOTUS docket mystery
• Additional SCOTUS docket dissection
• Time to take some more Blakely and Booker cases….
• New Justices content with their dip in the pool
• Roberts, the cert pool, and sentencing jurisprudence