Recently in Supreme Court Category

In a 5-4 per curiam opinion (see below), a majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices held that a San Francisco federal court's failure to give the public notice and a chance to comment about broadcasting live, streaming video of California's Proposition 8 ('Prop 8') trial violated a local legal rule, justifying the decision to halt the trial's broadcast.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a blistering dissent, concluding that the case did not satisfy any of the majority's 6-point legal standards for halting the broadcast. He was joined by Justice Stevens, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor.

This morning the U.S. Supreme Court halted both realtime and delayed broadcasts of oral arguments in the California Prop 8 Same same-sex marriage litigation.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer filed a dissenting from the court's short one-paragraph order, contending that the legal arguments filed in support of halting the broadcast did not meet the requisite legal standard of showing that 'irreparable harm' was likely if broadcast wasn't stopped. Breyer argued that any decision should have been made without granting a temporary restraining order to stop transmission of the legal proceedings in court.

In a new per curiam opinion issued by the U.S. Supreme Court today, the Justices held that a convicted Ohio killer's "attorneys met the constitutional minimum of competence," reversing a 2008 federal appeals court ruling that his attorneys failed to find certain mitigating factors in his defense in violation of the Sixth Amendment.

How convinced was the Supreme Court of its decision? The justices concluded that:

[t]his is not a case in which the defendant's attorneys failed to act while potentially powerful mitigating evidence stared them in the face,