FIX THE COURT RELEASES OT18 RECUSAL REPORT | RBG Is Out On Supreme Court Fixes | The Dying Death Penalty
July 25, 2019
COME CLEAN
|Fix the Court announced a new report today which reveals that of the 201 times justices disqualified themselves from cases and petitions this last term, two of them did so for the same reason. CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS and JUSTICE ELENA KAGAN were recused from petitions they received as circuit justices for the D.C. and Ninth Circuits, respectively. Unfortunately, neither recusal was noted in a weekly orders list, just in the online docket. Fix the Court says these “semi-hidden disqualifications” underscore the need for transparency from justices on why any recusal is made. GABE ROTH notes, “Absent a lot of digging, there’s no way for the public to know if the justices are making the right call ethically when they decide to hear a case. This lack of explanation coupled with the growing list of missed recusals undermine the public’s faith in court’s integrity.”
GOOD AS IS
|NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports on an interview Tuesday with JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG who says she doesn’t agree with the growing number of proposals to change the number of Supreme Court justices. “Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” RBG said, adding, “I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.” Ginsburg also didn’t seem to be too troubled by the growing interest to impose term limits on justices. She sees that as being too unrealistic given the Constiution’s directive on the matter. “Our Constitution is powerfully hard to amend.”
VERY MUCH ALIVE
|In her conversation with Nina Totenberg, GINSBURG also discussed her health. Totenberg explains, “Ginsburg is not oblivious to health concerns, but she waves away worries about her future.” RBG: “There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months. That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I am very much alive.”
TRAVEL BUDDIES
|At the funeral of JUSTICE JOHN PAUL STEVENS, RUTH BADER GINSBURG revealed that she traveled with Stevens in the last week of his life to Lisbon, Portugal. They went together for a conference, but they also visited museums, vineyards and castles. CNN’s Ariane de Vogue reports on RBG’s remarks in which she said, “He wanted to experience fully the joys of being alive, and he did just that almost to the end.”
SUGAR, WE'RE GOIN' DOWN
|“Death row’s population declined for the 17th straight year in 2017, while the duration from sentence to execution increased to 20 years, three months, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported Tuesday, continuing an overall drop in capital punishment across the U.S. The number of inmates under sentence of death fell by 94 to 2,703, a figure that would shrink further if it excluded more than 900 condemned prisoners in Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and, as of March, California, which have declared moratoriums on executions.” That’s Jess Bravin with The Wall Street Journal reporting that America’s death row population has been going down, down, down for years and years now.
THE READOUT
|Tony Mauro and Marcia Coyle with The National Law Journal review the papers of the late JUSTICE STEVENS “and what they may tell researchers about the inner workings of the court during his 35-year tenure.”
OTHER NEWS
A Blind Man Couldn’t Order Pizza From Domino’s. The Company Wants The Supreme Court To Say Websites Don’t Have To Be Accessible
CNBC“Guillermo Robles, who is blind, has tried to order a custom pizza from Domino’s at least twice in recent years, using the company’s website and mobile app. He says despite using screen reading software, he wasn’t able to order the food, because the website is not accessible to blind people. So three years ago, Robles filed a lawsuit against the company. He alleged that the Americans with Disabilities Act, the 1990 law that requires businesses to make accommodations for those with disabilities, applied to the websites and apps of businesses with physical locations. A federal appeals court agreed. Now, the Supreme Court may weigh in.”
This Supreme Court Case Made School District Lines A Tool For Segregation
NPR“Their schools are still segregated and underfunded more than 60 years after the Supreme Court issued one of its most famous rulings, in Brown v. Board of Education, unanimously declaring that separate but equal schools are neither equal nor constitutional. So why are so many U.S. schools still so separate and unequal? ‘That’s all thanks to Milliken,’ Sibilia says.”
Why This Law Could Be A Bigger Threat To Roe v. Wade Than Near-Total Abortion Bans
Vox“Near-total bans on abortion in Alabama and elsewhere around the country have gotten a lot of coverage in recent months. But an Arkansas law requiring physician certification could have nearly the same effect without banning the procedure outright — and it might have a better shot at surviving a court challenge.”