by Jordan Rubin | Jun 22, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented Monday from the court’s refusal to consider a case involving race and law enforcement.
The court’s senior GOP appointees wanted their colleagues to review the petition brought by the federal government, which raised questions about the relevance of race in analyzing whether Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures are violated.
It takes four justices to grant review. The denial appeared on the court’s order list, in which the justices announce the latest action in pending appeals. As usual, the court did not explain why it denied review.
The government’s petition came in the case of Donte Carter. He was charged with gun and theft offenses in Washington, D.C., and he moved to suppress the stolen firearm that law enforcement recovered from him after an officer asked him to hike his pants. He argued that he was technically “seized” under the Fourth Amendment at that point and that the officer lacked reasonable suspicion or probable cause.
The trial court denied his motion to suppress, but the appeals court reversed. The appeals court considered what it called “the coercive nature of the officers’ conduct and factoring in the elevated effect that this would have had on an objective and reasonable Black man in Mr. Carter’s shoes.” From that premise, the appeals concluded that Carter was seized under the Fourth Amendment when the officer asked him to raise his pants.
Dissenting from the Supreme Court’s denial of the government’s petition to review the appeals court’s ruling, Alito said the lawfulness of the appeals court’s inquiry “is an important question.” Joined by Thomas, he wondered: If officers
by Jordan Rubin | Jun 22, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Supreme Court on Monday backed Manhattan prosecutors’ bid to revive Pedro Hernandez’s conviction for the 1979 murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz, who was never found, in the infamous disappearance that the court recalled “once captured the Nation’s attention.”
A federal appeals court panel sided with Hernandez last year in ruling that a jury instruction at his trial violated Supreme Court precedent. The panel said the state had to release him or retry him, setting the stage for what could have been a third trial after the first one ended in a hung jury.
But the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority on Monday reversed the appeals court’s ruling. The majority said the appellate panel ran afoul of the federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, or AEDPA, which imposes strict limits on federal courts’ power to grant relief for state prisoners. The high court majority has consistently applied that law to rule against defendants over the years, with this latest instance happening to come in a high-profile case stemming from the disappearance that, as one news account put it, “led to a generation of anxious parents and changes in how law enforcement responds to missing children.”
The Supreme Court’s reversal came in an unsigned “per curiam” opinion, meaning no single justice claimed authorship. Such unsigned rulings are typical for these sorts of summary reversals.
“The panel’s opinion appears to reflect serious doubt about the reliability of Hernandez’s confessions, but AEDPA does not allow a federal habeas court to disturb a state-court conviction based on such an evaluation of the evidence,” the high court majority said.
Though the ruling is unsigned, we know there was a split
by Jordan Rubin | Jun 19, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. I’m writing to you a day early this week, ahead of the Juneteenth holiday on Friday.
Fresh off the Trump administration’s Iranian agreement, let’s go back to early March, right after the U.S. and Israel struck the Middle Eastern nation. That’s when the Supreme Court heard argument in United States v. Hemani. Technically, Iran had nothing to do with the legal issue in the case, which was whether the Second Amendment barred the prosecution of Ali Danial Hemani under a federal law disarming anyone who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.”
But the administration highlighted an Iranian connection in pressing the justices to take up Hemani’s case. In its petition, the Justice Department said that the dual U.S.-Pakistani citizen had “drawn the attention” of the FBI, and that he was “poised to commit fraud at the direction of suspected affiliates of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps” and had “traveled to Iran to participate in a celebration of the life of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian general and terrorist who had been killed by an American drone strike.”
What did any of that have to do with the Second Amendment? Gun rights advocates had the same question. They warned the justices not to fall for what they saw as an underhanded litigation tactic of the government: “handpicking unsympathetic criminal defendants to justify its preferred gun control.” Groups led by Gun Owners of America said the court should “decide the easy question presented and ignore the Government’s irrelevant character assassination.”
The court did just that on Thursday, when all nine justices sided with Hemani. “The charge
by Jordan Rubin | Jun 18, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Supreme Court sided with a marijuana user over the Trump administration in the court’s latest Second Amendment ruling, with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing for the court that the prosecution of Ali Danial Hemani ran afoul of the amendment.
The case involved a federal law that bans gun possession by someone who’s an “unlawful user” of, or addicted to, any controlled substance.
The Trump administration, which has cast itself as a great defender of the right to keep and bear arms, wanted to disarm Hemani due to what it called his “habitual use of marijuana.” In light of recent high court precedent that requires historical analogies to justify modern gun laws, the government pointed to laws from the time of the country’s founding that restricted the rights of “drunkards.”
Hemani countered that the federal law in question is too vague and that the country has no historical tradition of “stripping anyone who consumes an intoxicant a few times a week of the right to keep a firearm in the home for self-defense.” He said the government’s logic would mean that anyone who regularly “takes a sleep gummy or drinks cannabis tea a few nights a week, but also anyone who regularly has a beer with dinner,” could lose their right to keep firearms for self-defense.
While calling the case a “narrow” one, Gorsuch wrote that the government’s argument “fails under every measure it asks us to consider: The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways.” He added: “And faced with all these shortcomings in the government’s submission, we cannot say it has carried its conceded burden of showing its
by Jordan Rubin | Jun 18, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
“What do you think Donald Trump might do if the Supreme Court doesn’t side with him on birthright citizenship?” — Eduardo
Hi Eduardo,
If the president’s reaction to his tariffs loss earlier this year is any indication, then he will complain about how bad he thinks it is for the country while calling the justices who rule against him cowards, disgraces, traitors and embarrassments to their families.
We will likely find out soon. The court usually issues the term’s final rulings by July. The next batch is set for Thursday morning, but the court doesn’t announce ahead of time which cases or how many are coming.
The justices’ questions and comments at the April hearing in the birthright citizenship case strongly suggested Trump will lose like he did in the tariffs case — and quite possibly by a wider margin than the 6-3 tariffs ruling. In a sign of the citizenship case’s importance to him, Trump attended the hearing, in an apparent first for a sitting president. That means he saw for himself the court’s tepid response to his bid to single-handedly redefine U.S. citizenship in the face of the Constitution, federal law and more than 100 years of precedent.
In a Truth Social post after the hearing, the president continued to complain about his tariffs loss while looking ahead to his likely citizenship loss. He called the tariffs defeat “an unnecessary and expensive slap in the face to the U.S.A., and a giant victory for its opponents.” He continued, “If they rule against our Country on Birthright Citizenship, which they probably will, it will be even worse, if that’s possible.” Striking down his executive
by Jordan Rubin | Jun 16, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
In the latest legal fallout from the failed bid backed by Donald Trump to overturn his 2020 election loss, Kenneth Chesebro, Michael Roman and James Troupis were in Wisconsin state court, where they have been charged with fraud crimes, on Tuesday.
They pleaded not guilty, The Associated Press reported, adding that the defendants “argue that they committed no crime and were just trying to keep their options alive in case a court ruled that Trump had actually won the state.”
According to the state’s complaint against them, Chesebro and Troupis represented the Trump campaign in Wisconsin and Roman worked for the campaign. The state charged them with conspiracy and fraudulent writings, alleging, among other things, that they conspired to put forth a false certification of 2020 electors from that state.
“The criminal complaint in this case alleges that the defendants were part of a conspiracy to present a certificate of purported electoral votes from individuals who were not Wisconsin’s duly appointed electors,” Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said when he announced the case in 2024. He alleged a conspiracy to have unappointed electors meet and cast votes in Wisconsin and to transmit a “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Wisconsin” that reflected the votes of these unappointed electors.
Trump himself has largely avoided criminal consequences, thanks in part to his 2024 election victory. His Justice Department won’t be charging him or his allies.
But criminal consequences stemming from the nationwide 2020 election plot are still possible in state cases, though they have faced their own hurdles, perhaps most notably the Georgia case that was dismissed after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’
