SCOTUS Drops House Arguments On Mueller Documents | Federal Executions Continue As Biden Prepares To Take Over
November 20, 2020
SO OVER IT
|The Supreme Court today dropped its plan to hear arguments in the case involving the House’s efforts to secure documents from ROBERT MUELLER’S investigation into PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP. Pete Williams with NBC News reports that although the case is technically still alive, it’s likely to be dropped early next year.
FEDERAL EXECUTIONS CONTINUE
|SCOTUS ruled late last night to clear the way for the execution of a man convicted of kidnapping and raping a young girl and burying her alive. The Supreme Court overturned a court decision that came down earlier in the day Thursday and had very temporarily halted the execution of Orlando Hall. Hall was executed just before midnight after the Supreme Court weighed in. Ann E. Marimow with The Washington Post notes Hall became the eighth person executed by the U.S. government since the Trump administration resumed federal executions for the first time in 17 years. “The Justice Department has carried out more lethal injections in the past four months than the total number the federal government executed over the previous three decades.”
A UNIQUELY AMERICAN DILEMMA
|Lawrence Hurley, Andrew Chung and Andrea Januta with Reuters tell a story about what happens when cops and “America’s cherished gun rights” come into conflict with one another. Andrew Scott, a young pizzeria worker, was killed by a cop when he answered his door at 1:30 A.M. to four sheriff’s deputies. He answered with his legally owned gun in hand, and courts said that gave police license to kill him on the spot. From Reuters report: “In an investigation published in May, Reuters revealed that federal appeals courts have in recent years been granting qualified immunity at an increasing rate to cops sued for excessive force — even when courts determine that police actually did use excessive force. The increase largely reflects the impact of a series of Supreme Court interventions that have made it harder for plaintiffs to breach the immunity defense, prompting widespread calls for the doctrine to be reined in or eliminated altogether on the grounds that it denies justice to victims of police brutality.”