SUPREME COURT NOTEBOOK

Court won't take North Carolina county prayer case

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court is leaving in place a decision that barred a North Carolina county from opening its meetings with Christian prayers.

The Supreme Court declined last Thursday to take a case involving the Rowan County Board of Commissioners.

The board was sued in 2013 over its practice of opening meetings with a prayer led by a commissioner.

The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond ruled against the county in 2017. It said the commissioners' practice of leading the prayers themselves and inviting the audience to join, always in the Christian faith, violated the First Amendment by establishing Christianity as a preferred religion. The Supreme Court's decision not to take the case leaves that decision in place.

Justice Clarence Thomas said he'd have taken the case.

 

Two Mississippi death row appeals rejected

By Emily Wagster Pettus
Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court last Thursday rejected appeals from two Mississippi death row inmates.

However, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general's office, Margaret Ann Morgan, said Richard Gerald Jordan and Timothy Nelson Evans have additional appeals remaining. Neither has an execution date, and "neither is cleared for execution," by the Supreme Court decision, Morgan said.

Jordan, now 72, has been on death row longer than any Mississippi inmate. He was sentenced to death in 1976 for the kidnapping and killing of Edwina Marter earlier that year in Harrison County.

Mississippi Supreme Court records show Jordan traveled from Louisiana to Gulfport, Mississippi, where he called Gulf National Bank and asked to speak to a loan officer. After he was told Charles Marter could speak with him, Jordan ended the call, looked up Marter's home address in a telephone book, went to the house and got in by pretending to work for the electric company.

Records show Jordan kidnapped Edwina Marter, took her to a forest and shot her, then later called her husband and demanded $25,000, saying she was safe.

Jordan is among the inmates challenging Mississippi's lethal injection procedure, with a federal trial set for Aug. 27.

Evans, now 61, was convicted in 2013 for the 2010 killing of Wenda Holling in Hancock County. Court records show Evans had previously been romantically involved with Holling but was living in her home as a tenant when he strangled her. Investigators found Evans used Holling's credit card after her death.

Mississippi's last execution was in June 2012.

In a dissent last Thursday, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the cases of Jordan and Evans illustrate what he had previously written in other death penalty cases - that the death penalty, as applied in the U.S. today, involves "unconscionably long delays, arbitrary application and serious unreliability."

Breyer wrote that the Supreme Court should consider an argument made by Jordan, that execution after decades on death row violates the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Breyer also wrote that Jordan and Nelson were both sentenced to death from the 2nd Circuit Court District, and that Evans' attorneys said the district on the Gulf Coast accounts for "the largest number of death sentences" among Mississippi's 22 circuit court districts since 1976. Breyer said that shows the arbitrary application of the death penalty.

Jordan's attorney, Jim Craig, said it's notable that Breyer analyzed the Mississippi cases and found "evidence for the abolition of the death penalty."

 

Justices decline city's bid on abortion-notice law

BALTIMORE (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear from a Maryland city that wants pregnancy centers opposed to abortion to notify patients they don't provide such services.

The Daily Record of Baltimore reports the high court declined last Thursday to hear Baltimore's appeal of a lower-court ruling that struck down a city ordinance requiring notification.

Baltimore's 2009 ordinance required "limited-service pregnancy centers" to have signs posted in English and Spanish that said they didn't provide abortion or birth-control services. The signs also had to say if the facility didn't provide referrals for those services. The Archdiocese of Baltimore challenged the ordinance in 2010.

The newspaper reports the Supreme Court ruled last Tuesday that a similar law in California was unconstitutional. It ruled that compelling notification violates a center's right to free speech.

 

Remap ruling keeps North Carolina's current lines intact

By Gary D. Robertson
Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court agreed last Thursday that lingering racial bias infected some General Assembly district boundaries approved last year, but its ruling leaves intact the district lines already used earlier this year for this fall's elections.

The justices ruled 8-1 it was proper for a lower-court panel of federal judges to determine that four North Carolina House and Senate districts drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature last August remained illegal racial gerrymanders. Their order, however, also declared the panel went too far ruling other 2017 map changes in Mecklenburg and Wake counties violated the state constitution's prohibition of mid-decade redistricting.

With the help of an outside expert, the three-judge panel in January had redrawn the boundaries in and around those four racially-tainted districts and returned the Wake and Mecklenburg lines to configurations originally approved by the General Assembly in 2011.

The Supreme Court stepped into the case the week before General Assembly primary candidate filing began in February. It ruled the districts the lower court changed due to racial bias would be enforced while it considered the case, but temporarily blocked other district lines that were altered based on the state constitution.

Last Thursday's unsigned order essentially makes permanent that result. It means the districts used to elect nominees in the May primary should be the ones used in the November general election, and no special candidacy filing periods and elections are required.

Further alterations could have brought more uncertainty to the fall legislative elections in which Democrats seek to end the GOP's veto-proof majorities and give Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and allies more leverage.

Last year's remapping occurred after the same three-judge panel ruled for election advocacy groups and Democratic voters who claimed almost 30 districts drawn in 2011 relied too heavily on race.

"The people of North Carolina finally have assurance that the districts used in the 2018 primary will be used in the 2018 general election," said GOP state Rep. David Lewis of Harnett County, a co-author of the 2017 maps and lawsuit defendant. "We hope this stops the plaintiff's continued gamesmanship and overtly political litigation."

Allison Riggs, a lawyer representing the groups that sued over the maps, declared victory.

"We have finally achieved our clients' goals for this litigation: to eradicate the blatantly unconstitutional sorting of voters by race in North Carolina's state legislative districts," Riggs wrote.

The justices upheld the lower court's ruling that the General Assembly had failed to eliminate the vestiges of racial discrimination from the 2011 maps in two House districts and two Senate districts redrawn last year. Republican legislative leaders had argued that they used no racially-based voting data in the 2017 round of redistricting, so there could be no racial gerrymandering.

But the three-judge panel "turned up sufficient circumstantial evidence that race was the predominant factor governing the shape of those four districts," the justices' unsigned order reads. The defendants' insistence they didn't look at racial data "does little to undermine the District Court's conclusion."

The justices, however, wrote the three-judge panel - U.S. Circuit Judge Jim Wynn and District Judges Catherine Eagles and Thomas Schroeder - erred by going further by deciding Wake and Mecklenburg changes violated the state constitution.

Once the lower court "ensured that the racial gerrymanders at issue in this case were remedied, its proper role in North Carolina's legislative districting process was at an end," the order read.

In the lone dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote he would have ordered oral arguments in the case.

A separate challenge on the mid-decade redistricting argument is now in state court, which Riggs said she hopes will require changes before the 2020 elections.

While Lewis praised the finality of last Thursday's ruling, lawyers representing Republican lawmakers actually asked the Supreme Court this week to order all 2017 districts be used in this year's elections in light of a new Texas redistricting ruling. That would have required new candidate filing and elections in several House and Senate districts this year.

Published: Mon, Jul 02, 2018