SCOTUS continues to show very little interest in very many criminal justice issues

It is surely a sign of my own self-involvement that I now consistently find myself, upon opening a new Supreme Court order list, grousing about the fact that the Justices continue to show very little interest in addressing a wide array of important criminal justice issues (and especially sentencing issues) that have percolated for a long time in lower courts and could benefit from SCOTUS input.  Of course, this Term and other recent ones still have had a handful of notable criminal cases, though mostly about interpretation of the Armed Career Criminal Act or high-profile (and likely low-impact) death penalty administration matters.  But this latest new 29-page SCOTUS order list, which is like so many others recent ones with a long list of cert denials in criminal cases and a few certain grants on civil cases, prompts for me another round of grousing.

Of course, Justice Sotomayor remains the Justice seemingly most eager to ensure that lots of criminal justice issues do not get entirely forgotten even as cert repeatedly gets denied, and today’s order list includes a seven-page statement from her in a case from New York that starts and end this way:

In New York, criminal defendants who earn sufficient good time credits before the end of their prison sentences are entitled to conditional release.  Defendants classified by the State as “level three sex offenders,” however, must first assure the State that they will not reside within 1,000 feet of any school.  In New York City, this is no easy task, and the difficulties of finding a compliant residence can result in defendants serving additional time in prison past the expiration of their sentences.  Because petitioner Angel Ortiz was unable to identify any release address that satisfied the State’s requirement, he spent over two additional years incarcerated when he should have been at liberty.  Although Ortiz’s petition does not satisfy this Court’s criteria for granting certiorari, I write to emphasize that New York’s residential prohibition, as applied to New York City, raises serious constitutional concerns….

New York should not wait for this Court to resolve the question whether a State can jail someone beyond their parole eligibility date, or even beyond their mandatory release date, solely because they cannot comply with a restrictive residency requirement. I hope that New York will choose to reevaluate its policy in a manner that gives due regard to the constitutional liberty interests of people like Ortiz.

As always, I remain ever grateful that Justice Sotomayor remains ever committed to shining a SCOTUS light on some of the darkest parts of our criminal justice systems.  As always, I will keep hoping more Justices will show interest in many other long-concerning aspects of our CJ systems.  And in a coming post, I may do some more “formal speculating” about why the SCOTUS criminal docket has seemed especially fallow in the last few Terms and whether a coming change in SCOTUS personnel might shake matters up in coming Terms.

But maybe I am wrong to sense that the criminal side of the SCOTUS docket is wasting away in recent years.  I welcome comments about SCOTUS work in this respect from all quarters.