by Jordan Rubin | Apr 2, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil became the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus protest and immigration. At the same time, Emil Bove became the face of the Trump Justice Department’s enforcement before the president appointed him to a federal judgeship.
The opposing figures, who signify the early days of Trump’s second term, collided this week in a motion from Khalil that seeks Bove’s recusal from considering the activist’s appeal.
Khalil is challenging a divided three-judge panel ruling from January in a case that his lawyers say raises crucial legal issues nationally as well as for Khalil personally.
“The Court’s divided opinion decided novel and significant questions of federal immigration and habeas law and, if left intact, would ultimately permit the re-detention of Mr. Khalil, a lawful permanent resident who already spent 104 days in immigration detention and missed the birth of his child based purely on his speech,” Khalil’s lawyers wrote to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. They made that observation in a February filing that requested an extension to file a petition for the full appeals court to consider his case, as well as permission to file a longer-than-usual petition due to the weighty issues involved. The request was granted and his lawyers filed the petition this week.
They argue in the petition that if the panel ruling is left standing, then that would let the government “detain any noncitizen on retaliatory or punitive grounds, without lawful justification, while insulating this abuse of detention power from any federal court review, for what will likely be years, as it accomplished its unconstitutional end.” Calling the case one of “extraordinary importance,” the petition says that at stake is whether
by Jordan Rubin | Apr 2, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
A Colorado state appeals court on Thursday ordered a new sentencing for Tina Peters in the former county clerk’s 2020 election interference case, reasoning that her almost nine-year term “was based in part on improper consideration of her exercise of her right to free speech.”
It’s a qualified win for Peters, because the appeals court still upheld her trial convictions for attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failure to comply with requirements of the secretary of state.
The appeals court also said that President Donald Trump’s attempt to pardon her state crimes has no effect in her favor — the presidential pardon power is for federal crimes — and that she wasn’t immune from prosecution.
But the appeals court agreed with Peters that the trial judge violated her constitutional rights by punishing her for protected speech regarding alleged election fraud. The appeals court said the trial judge’s comments about her belief in the existence of such fraud in the 2020 election “went beyond relevant considerations for her sentencing.”
The appeals court said that Peters’ offense wasn’t “her belief, however misguided the trial court deemed it to be, in the existence of such election fraud; it was her deceitful actions in her attempt to gather evidence of such fraud.” The appeals court explained that “just as her purported beliefs underlying her motive for her actions were not relevant to her defense, the trial court should not have considered those beliefs relevant when imposing sentence.”
The appeals court conceded that many of the trial judge’s statements were completely appropriate, including when it came to the judge’s view that Peters
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 31, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Supreme Court sided with a Christian counselor over Colorado in her challenge to the state’s ban on so-called conversion therapy for minors.
In an 8-1 ruling by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court said that the state’s law, as applied to talk therapy, conflicts with core First Amendment principles because it regulates speech based on viewpoint. Gorsuch wrote that the amendment “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. “The Constitution does not pose a barrier to reasonable regulation of harmful medical treatments just because substandard care comes via speech instead of scalpel,” she wrote.
About half the states in the country have banned or restricted the practice that aims to change a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Represented by conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, counselor Kaley Chiles argued that Colorado’s ban violates First Amendment free speech protections.
Medical associations told the justices that efforts to change sexual orientation and gender identity are illegitimate, ineffective and can be especially harmful to minors.
Still, backed by the Trump administration, Chiles’s lawyer argued to the high court that the First Amendment “doesn’t permit Colorado’s censorship,” and that the state can’t prove the therapy practice is harmful or “deny that many people have experienced life-changing benefits from the kind of counseling that Ms. Chiles wants to provide.”
Colorado countered that the court has long recognized the states’ power to regulate health care safety, and that its law “lies at the bull’s-eye center of this protection because it prohibits licensed professionals from performing one specific treatment because that treatment does not work and carries great risk of harm.”
Religious ministers are exempt from complying with the state law.
Upholding the district
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 31, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
In 2019, Justice Brett Kavanaugh led the Supreme Court in siding with Curtis Flowers, who was on Mississippi’s death row. Flowers was tried six times in the same quadruple murder case by the same prosecutor, Doug Evans, who worked to keep Black people from serving on Flowers’ juries.
Kavanaugh wrote that he and his colleagues merely applied high court precedent on jury discrimination “to the extraordinary facts of this case.”
But what does the Trump appointee think about Terry Pitchford, who’s on the same state’s death row after being tried by the same prosecutor who also struck Black people from the jury?
We should get a sense of Kavanaugh’s and the rest of the court’s views when Pitchford’s case is argued Tuesday morning in Washington.
In a nod to Kavanaugh’s potentially pivotal role, Pitchford’s final brief ahead of the hearing began by citing a 1989 Yale Law Journal article on race and jury selection that Kavanaugh wrote as a student. Pitchford’s lawyers quoted the future justice’s argument that relying “solely on the good faith of prosecutors is misguided.”
In the article, Kavanaugh examined the 1986 ruling in Batson v. Kentucky, in which the court reaffirmed that it’s unconstitutional to keep Black people off juries because of their race. Kavanaugh advocated for the defense’s right to be present when a prosecutor gives their race-neutral explanation for wanting to strike a prospective juror, and for the defense’s right to rebut that explanation before a judge decides whether to accept it.
Judges can strike an unlimited number of prospective jurors if there’s cause to believe that they are biased or can’t otherwise serve. The bigger controversy can come into play with the limited number of strikes that the prosecution and
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 27, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. This week, the Supreme Court heard a Republican appeal to block mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. Monday’s argument suggested that the effort has the support of several GOP-appointed justices. We should learn by early July whether a majority of the court will deliver another victory for the GOP ahead of the midterm elections. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett may hold pivotal votes in the case, called Watson v. RNC.
The hearing is a reminder of the simple, yet important, math on a court with six GOP appointees and three Democratic appointees. In politically consequential disputes at the nine-justice court, Republicans can afford to lose a vote and still win 5-4. Put another way, in cases with clear party lines — voting cases are a good example — two GOP appointees must defect for a Democratic win.
That math was also on display on Monday’s order list, a routine document that contains the latest action on pending appeals, mostly consisting of the court declining to review cases without comment. Because the court wields great power over its docket — which cases it chooses to consider, which to reject — the list provides a snapshot of the court’s priorities.
Those priorities were clear as ever on Monday’s list, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor authoring three dissents. One of them came in a qualified immunity case, in which the majority summarily sided with a law enforcement officer over Sotomayor’s dissent for the three Democratic appointees. The minority accused the GOP appointees of giving officers “license to inflict gratuitous pain on a nonviolent protestor even where there is no threat to officer safety or any other reason to do
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 27, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
“From a legal standpoint, why didn’t Merrick Garland rescind the DOJ policy barring prosecution of a sitting president, which seems to be treated as if it were a law enacted by Congress?” — Bobbie
Hi Bobbie,
The short answer is twofold: Rescinding the policy 1) would have been out of character for the Justice Department under Garland, then the attorney general; and 2) it wouldn’t have likely made a practical difference anyway.
You’re correct that the policy has been treated as if it’s a law. Really, it has been treated even more powerfully than that.
The DOJ’s long-standing view is that prosecuting a sitting president is unconstitutional. That is, according to the department, it violates principles inherent in the separation of powers among the branches of government, as laid out in the Constitution.
In a 2000 memorandum during Democrat Bill Clinton’s presidency, the DOJ’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel recalled that during Republican Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1973, the department concluded that prosecuting a sitting president would “unduly interfere with the ability of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned duties, and would thus violate the constitutional separation of powers.” The 2000 memo’s analysis maintained that same conclusion.
I mention that background for two reasons.
First, to show how, in the hypothetical scenario you raise, the Garland-led DOJ would have ditched a long-held, bipartisan policy. Such a stark move would have been out of step with his relatively conservative tenure as attorney general during the Biden administration.
Second, and perhaps more important for practical purposes, the policy’s constitutional underpinnings suggest that ditching it wouldn’t make a difference.
In the immediate sense, it wouldn’t have mattered because the DOJ could have reversed the policy reversal once Donald Trump returned to office.
