Supreme Court Takes Eight Cases, but Doesn’t Act on Some Big Ones (DACA)
Supreme Court Takes Eight Cases, but Doesn’t Act on Some Big Ones
If the Supreme Court is to hear an unusually large number of pending petitions on significant issues, it will have to act soon.
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If the Supreme Court is to hear an unusually large number of pending petitions on significant issues, it will have to act soon.CreditCreditSarah Silbiger/The New York Times
By Adam Liptak
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court added eight cases to its docket on Friday, including ones on how gun laws apply to undocumented immigrants and whether the police may have blood drawn from unconscious motorists suspected of drunken driving.
The court took no action on an unusually large number of pending petitions on significant issues, including President Trump’s efforts to shut down a program that shields some 700,000 young undocumented immigrants from deportation
and to bar most transgender people from military service.
Other petitions under consideration concern an Indiana abortion law, a New York City gun control ordinance, a New Jersey ruling barring government grants to repair churches and whether a federal civil rights law prohibits job discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender workers.
If the court is to hear any of those cases this term, it will have to act soon. If it does not grant review by next week, the court’s past practices indicate that any cases it does eventually agree to hear will not be argued until its next term starts in October.
The case concerning immigrants and guns involves Hamid M. Rehaif, who came to the United States from the United Arab Emirates to study at the Florida Institute of Technology on a student visa. He was dismissed for academic reasons after three semesters but stayed in the United States.
About a year after he left school, Mr. Rehaif went to a shooting range, rented a gun and bought ammunition. Six days later, a worker at a hotel where was staying told the authorities that he had been acting suspiciously.
When he was questioned by an F.B.I. agent, Mr. Rehaif admitted to visiting the firing range. He allowed a search of his room, which turned up the remaining ammunition.
Mr. Rehaif was charged with violating a federal law that makes it a crime for people “illegally or unlawfully in the United States” to possess “any firearm or ammunition.” Another provision of the law says that violations of it must be made knowingly. Mr. Rehaif was convicted and sentenced to a 18 months in prison.
The question in the case, Rehaif v. United States, No. 17-9560, was whether prosecutors had to prove not only that Mr. Rehaif knew he possessed a gun or ammunition, but also that he knew he was in the United States unlawfully.
The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed his conviction, ruling that a trial judge had properly instructed the jury that “the government is not required to prove that the defendant knew that he was illegally or unlawfully in the United States.”
In urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, Mr. Rehaif relied on a 2012 concurrence from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who at the time was a federal appeals court judge in Denver. Judge Gorsuch wrote that logic and the rules of grammar required proof that every element of the crime in question had been committed knowingly.
“It makes no sense,” he wrote, “to read the word ‘knowingly’ as so modest that it might blush in the face of the very first element only to regain its composure and reappear at the second.”
The case on drawing blood from motorists, Mitchell v. Wisconsin, No. 18-6210, concerns Gerald P. Mitchell, a Wisconsin man arrested on suspicion of drunken driving. A police officer took him to a hospital, where he was slumped over and unresponsive. The officer instructed medical personnel to draw blood from Mr. Mitchell, and they found that his blood alcohol concentration was 0.22, which is above the legal limit for driving.
It was Mr. Mitchell’s seventh offense for driving under the influence. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, and he challenged his conviction on Fourth Amendment grounds.
A splintered Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected that argument, relying on a state law that presumes drivers have consented to blood tests and punishes them if they decline to cooperate by revoking their driver’s licenses.
The law says unconscious motorists are “presumed not to have withdrawn consent” to having their blood drawn.
Twenty-eight states have similar laws, according to Mr. Mitchell’s petition seeking Supreme Court review, but some of them have been struck down after two recent Supreme Court decisions.
In 2013, the court ruled that a warrant is ordinarily needed before drawing blood in drunken-driving investigations. In 2016, the court added that “motorists cannot be deemed to have consented to submit to a blood test on pain of committing a criminal offense.” In Mr. Mitchell’s case, the penalty of losing a driver’s license is a civil one.
In urging the Supreme Court to deny review, lawyers for the state said Mr. Mitchell should not benefit because he “got so drunk that, after driving while under the influence, he passed out and became unconscious.”
Mr. Mitchell should not, the state’s brief said, receive “the windfall of avoiding the lawful civil choice, which other drunk drivers must face, of having their blood drawn or losing their license.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/u...new-cases.html
