SCOTUS action in assortment of interesting criminal justice cases

As effectively detailed over at SCOTUSblog, the Supreme Court returned from its month-long break with a bunch of cert grants.  And, as this post details, four of the six grants involve interesting criminal justice issues:

• Alvarez v. Smith (08-351) — The legal standard for a court hearing to test the forfeiture of property used in a drug crime… 
• Padilla v. Kentucky (08-651) — The duty of an attorney to advise a client facing mandatory deporation from the U.S. after pleading guilty to trafficking in marijuana….
• Smith v. Spisak (08-724) — Judges’ duty to advise jurors on whether unanimity is required in finding factors that bear upon imposing a death sentence. 
• Johnson v. US (08-6925) — The status of a state conviction for felony battery as a violent crime under the federal Armed Career Criminal Act.

In addition, Justice Scalia  has a lot to say about federal criminal justice issues in this potent dissent from the denial of certiorari in a case concerning federal “honest services” fraud. Here is how the raving criminal justice liberal, Justice Brennan Scalia, concludes his latest dissent:

It may be true that petitioners here, like the defendants in other “honest services” cases, have acted improperly.  But “[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried andsentenced in accordance with law.”  Green v. United States, 365 U.S. 301, 309 (1961) (Black, J., dissenting). In light of the conflicts among the Circuits; the longstanding confusion over the scope of the statute; and the serious due process and federalism interests affected by the expansion of criminal liability that this case exemplifies, I would grant the petition for certiorari and squarely confront both the meaning and the constitutionality of §1346.  Indeed, it seems to me quite irresponsible to let the current chaos prevail.