PHOENIX — An Arizona prisoner scheduled to be executed Wednesday in the 1980 killings of two people asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his claim that authorities had until recently withheld that a survivor had failed to identify him in a photo lineup.
Lawyers for Murray Hooper, who was convicted of killing William “Pat” Redmond and his mother-in-law, Helen Phelps, say the existence of the photo lineup wasn’t disclosed until this month.
A prosecutor told the state’s clemency board that Redmond’s wife, Marilyn, who survived being shot in the head, had been unable to identify Hooper as the attacker when she was shown a photo lineup. However, authorities now insist no such lineup was shown to Marilyn Redmond and that the claim is based on a mistake a prosecutor made in a letter to the board.
Marilyn Redmond eventually identified Hooper in an in-person lineup.
Hooper’s arguments have already been rejected twice this week by state courts, with the Arizona Supreme Court concluding Monday that the claim focusing on a photo lineup “has no evidentiary support and no basis in fact.”
Hooper’s attorneys keep pressing the matter. “The prosecutor’s belated admission flatly contradicts the state’s pretrial and trial assertions that no such (photo) lineup had ever been admninistered,” Hooper’s lawyers told the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hooper also is asking the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to postpone his execution as he appeals a ruling that rejected his bid to allow fingerprint and DNA testing on evidence from the killings.
His lawyers said Hooper is innocent, that no physical evidence ties him to the killings and that testing could lead to identifying those responsible. They say Hooper was convicted before computerized fingerprint systems and DNA testing were available in criminal cases.
Authorities say Hooper and two other men forced their way into the Redmond home on Dec. 31, 1980. The three victims were bound, gagged, robbed and shot in the head. Marilyn Redmond testified against Hooper at his trial.
Two other men, William Bracy and Edward McCall, were convicted in the killings but died before their death sentences could be carried out.
Authorities say Robert Cruz, who was alleged to have had ties to organized crime, hired Hooper, Bracy and McCall to kill Pat Redmond, who co-owned a printing business. They said Cruz wanted to take over the business and was unhappy that Redmond had rejected his offers to enter several printing contracts with Las Vegas hotels, according to court records. In 1995, Cruz was acquitted of murder charges in both deaths.
Hooper’s lawyers say Marilyn Redmond’s description of the assailants changed several times before she identified their client, who said he was not in Arizona at the time. They also raised questions about the benefits received by witnesses who testified against Hooper, including favorable treatment in other criminal cases.
Hooper would be the state’s third prisoner put to death this year after Arizona resumed carrying out executions in May, following a nearly eight-year hiatus attributed to both the difficulty of obtaining lethal injection drugs and criticism that a 2014 execution was botched.
Arizona has 111 people on death row, 22 of whom have exhausted their appeals, according to the state attorney general’s office.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has claimed that the leak of the draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade earlier this year endangered the lives of justices by putting a target on their backs. What do you think?
“It’s true. Four have been murdered, and there’s only two left.”
Alejandro Kowalchuk, Unemployed
“No justice should know the fear of an abortion provider.”
Walker Bensen, Personal Fundraiser
“I could have sworn it had something to do with the actual decision.”
A former high school football coach in Washington state who lost his job after praying on the 50-year line following games — and whose case went all the way to the Supreme Court — could soon be reinstated, court documents obtained by CBS News show.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of Joe Kennedy, an assistant coach at Bremerton High School. On Tuesday, attorneys for the Bremerton School District and Kennedy both submitted a joint stipulation in U.S. district court stating that he be reinstated to his former position on the football team on or before March 15, 2023.
The documents also state the district cannot “retaliate against or take any future adverse employment action against Kennedy for conduct that complies with the terms of the court’s order.” Additionally, Kennedy will be entitled to “reasonable” attorneys’ fees and costs, the stipulation states.
Former Bremerton High School assistant football coach Joe Kennedy takes a knee in front of the U.S. Supreme Court after his legal case, Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, was argued before the court on April 25, 2022, in Washington, D.C.
Getty Images
According to the court records, both parties still disagree on some of the wording in the document, including a clause which states the school district cannot “interfere with or prohibit Kennedy from offering a prayer consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion.”
Both parties will file a joint submission on Nov. 8, with each side’s proposed wording on the remaining disputed issues.
Jeremy Dys, an attorney representing Kennedy, told CBS News that his client is “excited” to get back to the job.
“For him to be able to get back on that field with his players and help them to be good men at the same time is something that is very near and dear to his heart,” Dys said.
CBS News reached out to an attorney representing the Bremerton School District, but did not immediately hear back.
Kennedy began praying on the field after football games in 2008, and continued the practice until 2015, when he and the Bremerton School District debated over whether the practice was protected under religious expression. He was eventually placed on administrative leave for violating district directives to stop praying with the students.
Kennedy chose to not reapply for his coaching position, and sued the school in 2016 for violating his First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of his faith. After the 9th U.S. District Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the school district, Kennedy and his legal team petitioned the Supreme Court. His case was turned down once, but the justices agreed to hear the case earlier this year.
The court’s majority said that the free exercise and free speech clauses of the First Amendment protected Kennedy’s prayer time, as he was an individual engaging in religious expression. Following the ruling, Kennedy told CBS News that the decision was a “great ruling for America.”
“People of faith or no faith, everybody has the same rights and that is what the Constitution is all about,” he said in June. “It’s rights for all Americans.”
FILE – This undated photo provided by the Oklahoma State Department of Corrections shows Benjamin Robert Cole Sr. The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a last-minute appeal filed by Oklahoma death row inmate Benjamin Cole. The high court’s decision on Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022 paves the way for the 57-year-old to be executed Thursday at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. (Oklahoma State Department of Corrections via AP, File)
The Onion has some serious things to say in defense of parody.
The satirical site that manages to persuade people to believe the absurd has filed a 23-page Supreme Court brief in support of a man who was arrested and prosecuted for making fun of police on social media.
“As the globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists,” lawyers for the Onion wrote in a brief filed Monday. “This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.”
The court filing doesn’t entirely keep a straight face, calling the federal judiciary “total Latin dorks.”
The Onion said it employs 350,000 people, is read by 4.3 trillion people and “has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.”
The posts were published over 12 hours and included an announcement of new police hiring “strongly encouraging minorities to not apply.” Another post promoted a fake event in which child sex offenders could be “removed from the sex offender registry and accepted as an honorary police officer.”
After being acquitted of criminal charges, the man sued the police for violating his constitutional rights. But a federal appeals court ruled the officers have “qualified immunity” and threw out the lawsuit.
One issue is whether people might reasonably have believed that what they saw on Novak’s site was real.
But the Onion said Novak had no obligation to post a disclaimer. “Put simply, for parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original,” the Onion said, noting its own tendency to mimic “the dry tone of an Associated Press news story.”
More than once, people have republished the Onion’s claims as true, including when it reported in 2012 that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was the sexiest man alive.
The brief concludes with a familiar call for the court to hear the case and a twist.
“The petition for certiorari should be granted, the rights of the people vindicated, and various historical wrongs remedied. The Onion would welcome any one of the three, particularly the first,” lawyers for the Onion wrote.
The Supreme Court said Monday it will hear two cases seeking to hold social media companies financially responsible for terrorist attacks. Relatives of people killed in terror attacks in France and Turkey had sued Google, Twitter and Facebook, accusing the companies of helping terrorists spread their message and radicalize new recruits.
The court will hear the cases this term, which began Monday, with a decision expected before the court recesses for the summer, usually in late June. The court did not say when it would hear arguments, but the court has already filled its argument calendar for October and November.
One of the cases the justices will hear involves Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen studying in Paris. The Cal State Long Beach student was one of 130 people killed in ISIS attacks in November 2015. The attackers struck cafes, outside the French national stadium and inside the Bataclan theater. Gonzalez died in an attack at La Belle Equipe bistro.
Her friend, Cal State student Niran Jayasiri, may have been the last to see Gonzalez alive, standing next to her at the café as a terrorist opened fire.
Nohemi Gonzalez
“First I thought it was firecrackers because it sounded like firecrackers,” Jayasiri told CBS News in 2015. “When I looked into the direction where the noise was coming, I saw a gunman just walking on the sidewalk, just shooting everybody.”
Gonzalez’s relatives sued Google, which owns YouTube, saying the platform had helped the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, by allowing it to post hundreds of videos that helped incite violence and recruit potential supporters. Gonzalez’s relatives said that the company’s computer algorithms recommended those videos to viewers most likely to be interested in them.
But a judge dismissed the case and a federal appeals court upheld the ruling. Under U.S. law — specifically Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — internet companies are generally exempt from liability for the material users post on their networks.
The other case the court agreed to hear involves Jordanian citizen Nawras Alassaf. He died in the 2017 attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul where a gunman affiliated with ISIS killed 39 people.
Alassaf’s relatives sued Twitter, Google and Facebook for aiding terrorism, arguing that the platforms helped ISIS grow and did not go far enough in trying to curb terrorist activity on their platforms. A lower court let the case proceed.
Washington — The Supreme Court is set to gather Monday to kick off its new nine-month term, one that is expected to bring another round of divisive decisions on hot-button issues like affirmative action, voting rights, elections and LGBTQ discrimination, cases that could showcase the power of the court’s six-justice conservative majority.
But as the justices prepare to take the bench — before members of the public for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — the court is also confronting historically low levels of public confidence, which plummeted before and after the June decision unwinding the constitutional right to an abortion.
Already on the docket is a challenge to race-conscious admissions policies at selective universities, a dispute pitting the free speech rights of a website designer against anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people and an elections dispute that could limit state courts’ authority to review elections rules approved by state legislatures under state constitutions.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a sleepy sort of Supreme Court term,” Allison Orr Larsen, a professor at William & Mary Law School, told CBS News. “The cases they’ve taken are ideologically charged, and there’s probably going to be even more divisive questions they have to answer about the Second Amendment and abortion fights all in the wake of their big decisions last term. There’s no evidence yet that this court is going to pump the brakes on deciding high-profile, divisive issues anytime soon.”
The justices have also been asked to weigh in on disputes over the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ ban on bump stocks for firearms, a Florida law regulating how social media companies moderate their content and whether the unborn are entitled to constitutional protections. The cases the court decides not to hear could be illuminating as to whether the conservative justices want to maintain their fast pace of reshaping the law.
“One question will be whether there is any feeling on the court that after Dobbs, they need to cool the temperature down somewhat, and that may either be in the decisions they make or the cases they may take,” said Sean Marotta, an appellate attorney at Hogan Lovells. “Restraint may be not in the cases they decide, but in the cases they decide not to decide.”
Affirmative action
Among the most closely watched legal battles the justices will hear is a pair of cases challenging the race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard College, a private school, and the University of North Carolina, a public institution, which are set to be argued Oct. 31.
The Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that brought the suit, argues the schools violate the 14th Amendment and federal law through their admissions programs, which have been used to foster diversity among university student bodies.
Students for Fair Admissions is asking the justices to scrap its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld the use of race as a factor in student admissions by the University of Michigan Law School.
Court watchers expect the Supreme Court to overturn its nearly 20-year ruling, particularly given that the membership of the court has changed since its 2016 decision in the case Fisher v. University of Texas, when the court last said race-conscious admissions programs are legal.
“Chief Justice Roberts, his vote is not really in question on race-based affirmative action. The majority of times, he’s been a skeptic of race-based affirmative action and there’s no surprises there,” Larsen said. “I can’t count to five in any way that would preserve Grutter or Fisher. I think the safe bet is that those cases will be overturned.”
The court in January consolidated the two cases for oral argument, but unlinked them in July after Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed, as she recused herself from the dispute involving Harvard due to her role on the school’s Board of Overseers. Jackson can participate in the consideration of the University of North Carolina case.
Devon Westhill, president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, said he believes it’s important for Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the court, to express her views on race-consciousness in American life.
“I do think as we continue to think about concerns about the legitimacy of the court, that it would be really a black mark on the court if the first Black female just didn’t have an opportunity to weigh in on a major race issue like affirmative action,” he said during a preview of the court’s term hosted by the Federalist Society.
A clash of free speech and LGBTQ rights
The justices will also consider whether anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people can require a business owner to express a message they don’t wish to convey under the First Amendment.
The case, which involves a website designer in Colorado, comes four years after the justices heard a similar dispute involving a Colorado baker who declined to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. But in its 2018 decision, the justices left unaddressed the central free speech issues.
“Those big First Amendment questions are now back up before the court, but before a new court,” said Amanda Shanor, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who focuses on constitutional law, during the Federalist Society preview.
The case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, “bears both on the scope of speech protections and economic life, particularly for business owners, but also the degree to which businesses can refuse to serve customers,” she said.
The website designer involved in the dispute, Lorie Smith, does not want to design websites for same-sex weddings, and she asked a federal court in Colorado not to enforce the the state’s anti-discrimination law against her. The lower courts, however, sided with the state.
While Shanor said there’s “good money” on the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Smith, the details of the decision will be key.
“How it does so, or if it does so, may have enormous implications for expressive and associational rights in other economic settings and for other anti-discrimination laws more broadly,” she said. “And part of the question is how on earth are you going to cabin such an exception?”
Elections and voting rights
In their first week of oral arguments, the court will hear a Voting Rights Act dispute involving Alabama’s Republican-drawn congressional map, which a lower court said violated the 1965 law by having a single district where Black voters make up a majority of the district.
Then, in the coming weeks, it will consider an election law dispute from North Carolina that involves the congressional map created by a state court for the 2022 midterm elections. That legal fight invokes the so-called independent state legislature theory, which says that under the U.S. Constitution, only the state legislature has the authority to set federal election rules, ousting oversight from state courts to ensure they comply with state constitutions.
A version of the theory was proposed by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist in his concurring opinion in the 2000 case Bush v. Gore, and four of the current justices — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — wrote or joined opinions in March that said the Supreme Court will soon have to address the extent of state courts’ authority to review elections rules adopted by state legislatures.
The case has attracted the attention of a wide range of voting groups, among them the Conference of Chief Justices, an organization composed of the country’s highest judicial officers.
In a friend-of-the-court brief filed in support of neither party, the group told the Supreme Court that the U.S. Constitution “does not derogate from state courts’ authority to decide what state election law is, including whether it comports with state and U.S. Constitutions.”
A new term begins with a new justice
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
In addition to launching its new term, the justices are also welcoming a new member with the addition of Jackson, who replaced now-retired Justice Stephen Breyer.
Jackson’s appointment is historic, as she is the first Black woman to serve on the high court, and she also brings the Supreme Court closer to gender parity.
While she doesn’t alter the court’s ideological composition — Republican-appointed justices still hold six of the nine seats — she does offer a new vantage point given her eight years as a federal judge on the trial court in Washington.
“That perspective can be really valuable — the types of tests that the court is going to announce or amount of deference it gives on questions of facts, or the willingness to leave questions open, those are more subtle issues, but I suspect she will care a lot about them,” Larsen said. “In the conference room, it can make a difference to have a colleague say, ‘I have real-world experience on the trial court and here’s the practical implications of what you’re about to decide.’”
Marotta, meanwhile, noted that as the court’s makeup has changed and its ideological leanings shifted rightward, fueled by former President Donald Trump’s appointment of three members, discussions about its center have shifted from the swing justice to the median justice.
“The incrementalists don’t have the majority they once did. A lot of it is eyes on Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett, because they get to decide how much they lay on the gas,” he said. “In some cases, they’re willing to be more incrementalist and more cautious, and in others, they’re more in favor of change.”
Conservative activist Ginni Thomas arrives at Capitol, where she is to be interviewed by House select Jan. 6 committee, Sept. 29, 2022.
Screen grab from pool video
Washington — The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol met in-person Thursday with conservative activist Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Thomas was spotted by reporters arriving at a House office where the panel’s investigators have been gathering throughout their probe and told those assembled, “Thank you for being here.”
NEW: Ginni Thomas walked into her interview with the January 6 Cmte she did not respond to questions when asked why she felt like she attended the hearing and whether she had spoken to her husband about clearing her name. pic.twitter.com/OjPwtMl8tc
Asked whether she had spoken with her husband about her belief that the 2020 election was stolen, Thomas replied, “Thank you for your question. I look forward to answering members’ questions.”
She appeared for more than four hours, interspersed with brief breaks, and Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chair of the House select committee, told reporters Thomas answered “some questions.”
“It’s a work in progress,” he said as the meeting came to a conclusion. “At this point, we’re glad she came.”
Thompson said if Thomas provided committee investigators with “something of merit,” it will be included in the panel’s next public hearing. She also reiterated during the interview that she still believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen, Thompson said.
Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin did not go into specifics about the meeting but told reporters afterward that “Donald Trump and his closest followers continue to propound the absolute lie that he won the election, and they’re still promoting the big lie.” He would not say if Thomas fit into that group.
Mark Paoletta, Thomas’s lawyer, said in a statement that she was “happy to cooperate with the committee to clear up the misconceptions about her activities surrounding the 2020 elections” and answered “all” of the committee’s questions.
“As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas had significant concerns about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election. And, as she told the Committee, her minimal and mainstream activity focused on ensuring that reports of fraud and irregularities were investigated,” he said. “Beyond that, she played no role in any events after the 2020 election results. As she wrote in a text to Mark Meadows at the time, she also condemned the violence on January 6, as she abhors violence on any side of the aisle.”
The committee asked Thomas to appear voluntarily before the panel after it learned that she had corresponded with John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who helped come up with the legal strategy to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally toss out state electoral votes.
Thomas also sent emails to at least two Wisconsin Republican legislators days after the presidential election, pushing them to name an alternate slate of presidential electors to back former President Donald Trump. And Thomas corresponded via text message with Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the days following the 2020 election, urging him to overturn the election results.
Paoletta confirmed about a week ago that she would participate in a “voluntary meeting” with the committee, saying in a statement that Thomas was “eager to answer the Committee’s questions to clear up any misconceptions about her work relating to the 2020 election.”
The select committee was scheduled to hold a hearing a day ago, on Wednesday, but postponed, due to Hurricane Ian. A new date has not yet been set, according to Thompson, and the House is expected to go into recess at the end of the week.
Thompson said earlier this month that the committee plans to put together an interim report in mid-October, and will finalize the report before the end of the year, after the November midterm elections. The committee’s two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, are both leaving Congress in January. Cheney lost her primary in Wyoming to a Trump-backed challenger, and Kinzinger opted not to run for reelection. Another member, Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, is facing a tough reelection battle against Republican state Sen. Jen Kiggans.
Zak Hudak and Ellis Kim contributed to this report.
Washington — President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, joined by their spouses, will attend the investiture ceremony Friday for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, the White House announced.
The ceremony, which will be held in the courtroom before an invitation-only audience, will take place before the Supreme Court convenes for the start of its new term Monday. Jackson was nominated to the high court by Mr. Biden to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer and confirmed by the Senate in April.
She was sworn in as the 116th justice at the end of June.
During the ceremonial investiture, Jackson will be escorted to the well of the courtroom and sit in the same chair used by Chief Justice John Marshall, which has been used for the investiture of every justice since 1972, according to the court.
In addition to Mr. Biden, Harris, first lady Dr. Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, along with their deputies, will also attend the ceremony and will be seated at the counsel’s table in front of the bench.
During the ceremony, Chief Justice John Roberts will administer the judicial oath to Jackson. Breyer also administered the judicial oath to Jackson in late June.
They will also welcome members of the public to oral arguments for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic and provide live audio of scheduled arguments for the new term. The high court began providing audio of its arguments after the pandemic closed the courtroom and continued to do so through its most recent term.
