October 01, 2007

Happy SCOTUS Day: Gitmo, Death Penalty, Drug Sentencing & More

It's the first Monday in October, and that means the Nine return to work today to face a full docket that showcases some of the nation's most divisive and meaty subjects.

The justices are convening under more scrutiny than usual, due in part to the big guns they pulled out during the last session on abortion, school desegregation and campaign finance. And as the New York Times points out, the close decisions in those cases bring the "deep ideological divisions" among the justices, as well as the court's lean to the right led by new Chief Justice John Roberts, into sharp relief.

Get a rundown of some upcoming cases after the jump.

· Guantanamo Bay. The court will hear a case challenging detainees' limited access to legal services and court hearings. (The Gate covered the nuances of the case when the court announced its decision to hear it in April.)

· Lethal injections. Prompted by the appeal of two men on death row in Kentucky, SCOTUS will hear arguments about the constitutionality of the mix of chemicals used to execute inmates by injection.

· Voter ID. Justices will rule on whether voters should be required to show government-issued photo identification before being allowed to cast a ballot. The decision will come before the 2008 elections and will certainly impact races on both the state and federal levels.

· Primary law. Sam Reed, Washington state's Republican secretary of state, spurred a case on whether Washington's primary system (subscription) is constitutional -- a ruling that could cause First Amendment ripples for major political parties in other states.

· Drug sentencing. Currently, punishments for a crack cocaine conviction are vastly harsher -- at a ratio of 100 to 1 -- than they are for powder cocaine; justices will review the guidelines.

· D.C. gun laws. An appeals court overturned the citywide gun ban in the District of Columbia in March. The justices haven't officially agreed to take up this case, but if they do -- as expected -- it could have a big impact on Second Amendment rights throughout the country.

· Child rape. Another maybe for the court, and another death penalty case. A Louisiana court sentenced a man to death for raping an 8-year-old girl. A 1977 SCOTUS ruling that the death penalty could not be handed out in the case of rape of an adult woman, but it left open the door for child rape and would be asked to decide definitively in the current case.

Medill has a list of all the cases on the docket, as well as descriptions of each one and the schedule of oral arguments.

Posted at 11:30 AM
Posted to: Supreme Court
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