Reviewing cert denial statements in criminal justice cases from the latest SCOTUS order list

As noted in a prior post, the Supreme Court this morning via this order list had a lot of GVRs, a few vert grants, and finally a bunch of comments on cert denials.  Four of the six cases with those comments involved criminal justice issues, which I will quickly recap:

Denial of cert in Price v. Montgomery County prompts Justice Sotomayor to issue a statement questioning whether “absolute immunity [should be] available under §1983 when, as here, a prosecutor knowingly destroys exculpatory evidence and  defies a court order.”  She explains ways to address prosecutorial misconduct and suggests that if “this is what absolute prosecutorial immunity protects, the Court may need to step in to ensure that the doctrine does not exceed its ‘quite sparing; bounds.” 

Denial of cert in McCrory v. Alabama prompts Justice Sotomayor to issue a statement questioning remedies for when there are “convictions resting on forensic evidence later repudiated by the scientific community.”  She does so in a case in which “Charles M. McCrory was convicted of murder in 1985 based on forensic bitemark testimony that has now been roundly condemned by the scientific community and retracted by the expert who introduced it at his trial.”  She  concludes her 13-page statement this way:

I vote to deny this petition because the constitutional question McCrory raises has not yet percolated sufficiently in the lower courts to merit this Court’s review. There is no reason, however, for state legislatures or Congress to wait for this Court before addressing wrongful convictions that rest on repudiated forensic testimony.

Denial of cert in King v. Emmons prompts Justice Jackson to dissent, joined by Justice Sotomayor, in a capital case in which “a Georgia prosecutor struck every Black woman and all but two Black men from a jury pool.”  The end of the 10-page dissent concludes with Justice Jackson stating she “would summarily reverse the Court of Appeals’ erroneous application of deference in upholding the state court’s decision and remand for reconsideration of King’s Batson claim without the deference AEDPA otherwise requires.”

Denial of cert in Bassett v. Arizona prompts Justice Sotomayor to dissent, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, in a case involving sentencing of a juvenile to a mandatory LWOP term.  The dissent contends that “Arizona advances three arguments for why Bassett did, in fact, receive all the discretionary process required by Miller….  Each runs contrary to Miller’s clear command.” Consequently, after running through the Arizona argument, this dissent concludes by stating that “[b]ecause the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision departed from this Court’s established precedents, [she] would grant the petition for certiorari and summarily reverse the judgment below.”