SUPREME COURT NOTEBOOK

Challenge to Wisconsin voter ID law turned away

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court on Monday turned away a challenge to Wisconsin's voter identification law, after having blocked the state from requiring photo IDs in November's general election.

The justices' action means the state is free to impose the voter ID requirement in future elections, and is further evidence that the court put the law on hold last year only because the election was close at hand and absentee ballots already had been mailed with no notification of the need to present photo IDs.

The court did not comment on its order.

Wisconsin was one of four states in which a dispute over voting rules reached the Supreme Court last fall. The other states were North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Of the four states, only Wisconsin's new rules were blocked.

Wisconsin's photo ID law has been a political flashpoint since Republican legislators passed it in 2011. The GOP argues the mandate is a common sense step toward reducing election fraud. Democrats maintain no widespread fraud exists and that the law is really an attempt to keep Democratic constituents who may lack ID, such as the poor, minorities and the elderly, from voting.

The law was in effect for the February 2012 primary but subsequent legal challenges put it on hold and it hasn't been in place for any election since.

The ACLU and allied groups persuaded a federal judge in Milwaukee to declare the law unconstitutional last year. But the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago later ruled that the law did not violate the Constitution.

The Supreme Court refused to disturb that ruling on Monday.


Court won't hear case of wrongly convicted men

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court won't hear an appeal from two former Louisiana inmates who were wrongly convicted of murder and wanted to sue prosecutors for damages after spending 28 years in prison.

The justices Monday let stand a federal appeals court ruling that said Earl Truvia and Gregory Bright couldn't hold the New Orleans district attorney's office liable for the conduct of prosecutors who violated their constitutional rights.

Truvia and Bright were convicted of murder in 1976, but exonerated in 2002 after a judge ruled prosecutors withheld key evidence.

A federal district court threw out their damage claims, saying they failed to show the district attorney's office had a policy or custom of withholding evidence. An appeals court affirmed.

The men claimed there was enough evidence of a pattern of violations.


Texas man on death row since 1984 loses appeal

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court turned away an appeal Monday from a convicted killer who has spent more than 30 years on death row in Texas.

The justices rejected the appeal from Lester Bower of Arlington, Texas.

Bower's scheduled execution last month for the fatal shootings of four people at an airplane hangar on a North Texas ranch in 1983 had been stopped by Justice Antonin Scalia pending the outcome of the appeal.

Bower's appeal raised several issues, including his claim that other people were responsible for the deaths. He also contends that executing him now after he has been held for so long on death row would be unconstitutionally cruel.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have thrown out Bower's death sentence because jurors didn't get to consider evidence that might have persuaded them to impose something other than a death sentence.

"I recognize that we do not often intervene only to correct a case-specific legal error. But the error here is glaring, and its consequence may well be death," Breyer wrote in a dissent that Ginsburg and Sotomayor joined.

Bower long has maintained his innocence in the October 1983 shooting. The bodies were discovered at the hangar on the ranch, where one of the victims stored his ultralight plane. Parts of the missing aircraft were later found in Bower's garage in Arlington.

Bower, then 36, initially lied to authorities about being at the hangar, but he later recanted. But he insisted that when he left, the men at the ranch were alive.

Prosecutors built a circumstantial case against Bower, a college graduate and father of two daughters who worked as a chemical salesman. Investigators alleged that he killed the men while stealing the plane and connected Bower to the case after finding he had made three phone calls to the plane's owner on his company credit card.

Bower is among the longest-serving Texas death row inmates because his case has slowly moved through the state and federal courts. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review his case in April 2008, and Bower was set to die three months later, but a judge in Grayson County withdrew the execution date to allow for DNA testing.

Five years after his trial, a woman implicated four other men in the case, saying the shootings were the result of a drug deal gone bad. Then at the 2012 hearing, Bower's attorneys produced witnesses who said other men were responsible for the four slayings. Prosecutors challenged the information.

Published: Wed, Mar 25, 2015