The Petition of the Week
Of Kalvis Golde
On February 8, 2025
At. 07.31
The Peters of the Week highlights some of Cert Petitions recently filed in the Supreme Court. A list of all petitions we are looking at is available here.
People who are held in state prison can turn to the federal court to contest the validity of their beliefs or judgment. But they are facing a high bar by doing so: they have to convince a federal court judge that their state award or judgment was “unreasonable” and if they fail in this endeavor, they need permission to appeal . This week we highlight petitions asking the court to consider, among other things, whether a federal court can refuse permission to appeal a request for emergency after judgment when at least one judge would give it.
Missouri resident Lance Shockley crashed a pick-up truck belonging to his sisters’ fiancé in a ditch. He left the truck to seek help for fiancé, fell into the passenger seat. Shockley stumbled to a nearby home where the owners called 911 and he called his wife.
Highway Patrol officers soon arrived at the scene of the accident where they found the wounded passenger and several bottles of alcohol inside the truck. Shockley’s wife, her sister and homeowners were outside – but there were no signs of shockley. No one identified Shockley as the driver, and he even refused the involvement of the officers. His passenger did not survive the crash.
After months of investigation, patrol officers again asked that one of the homeowners Shockley had asked for help the night to the crash. The officers falsely told her that Shockley had confessed to being the driver; On the other hand, she revealed that Shockley had told her the same that night. The officers then asked Shockley, who again refused involvement and claimed an alibi.
The next day, someone shot and killed the leading investigator of the case in his own driveway. Three days later, police arrested Shockley – not as a suspect in the investigator’s killing, but to escape the car accident. However, they soon accused Shockley of both crimes, and he was only prosecuted for murder. Shockley was sentenced and sentenced to death.
The night after the jury’s verdict, Shockley’s lawyer found that the jury chairman had written a “fictionalized autobiography” in which he, as a protagonist, murdered the drunk driver who had killed his wife to get revenge after the driver received only trial time. During the election of the jury, the chairman had said he was a self -published author, but Shockley’s lawyers did not ask him about it.
The chairman was removed from the jury before discussing Shockley’s judgment. Shockley’s lawyers still demanded a new trial that argued that the President might be partical against him. The judge invited Shockley’s lawyers to question the chairman and other juries about the book and potential bias, but they rejected. The request for a new trial was rejected.
Shockley hired new lawyers to represent him. When they spoke with the jury leaders, the new lawyers taught that the chairman had shared his book with several other jurist and the courts of the courts before and during the trial. Shockley filed for relief after conviction, on the grounds that his law attorney’s lack of questions about questioning the President or any of the other jury leaders after learning about the book fell so shortly after professional norms that it violated his constitutional rights.
Missouri Supreme Court ultimately rejected Shockley’s claim, but a judge disseminated from this decision and wrote that Shockley was entitled to a new trial.
Shockley then went to the federal court and asked a federal district judge in Missouri to impose a new trial. According to the high threshold for relief after conviction of the federal court, the judge rejected Shockley’s request. He also refused Shockley permission to appeal – known as a “certificate of appealsness” – concluded that his claims “lacking debatable profits.”
In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the US appeal for the 8th circuit similarly refused to give Shockley a certificate of appeal, like the full 8th circuit, with two judges who disagreed.
IN Shockley v. VandergriffShockley asks the judges to send his case back to the 8th orbit with instructions to let his appeal move on. The Supreme Court has decided that people seeking exemption from conviction in the federal court are entitled to a certificate of appeals if they show that “reasonable lawyers could discuss” the strength of their claims, Shockley explains. The courts of appeals, he claims, are divided over whether this standard is met when at least one judge would give the certificate. Shockley insists that he is entitled to an appeal because “reasonable lawyers” quite literally “debated” his case: Three federal judges would have let his appeal move on, and a state Supreme Court’s judge agreed that his lawyers were Constitutionally deficient and would have given him a new trial.
The state calls on the judges to stay out of dispute. Federal right allows the right of appeal to set their own appeals procedures, Missouri explains. It argues that this includes whether they should refuse them over the dissent from some judges. Accordingly, the state maintains Shockley’s case does not involve a gap among the circuits on a legal issue, just a difference in internal procedures that are Ancitipped by Congress.
In August last attempt.
The full 8th circuit exceeds a decision from a three-judge panel of the court that had given Johnson a certificate of appealability. Dissenting from the Supreme Court’s rejection of entering wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, along with judges Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that “[b]Exact reasonable lawyers could, did, and still discuss whether “Johnson was entitled to exemption from his death sentence,” the eighth orbit should have approved an appeal. “
A list of this week’s highlighted petitions are below:
Ellingburg against the United States
24-482
Question: Whether criminal refund under the Law on Refunds of Mandatory Sacrifice has been punished for the purpose of Constitution’s Ex Post Facto clause.
Hoskins v. Withers
24-504
Question: (1) on qualified immunity Shield’s government officials against responsibility, even in cases where they reciprocate against a person to exercise a clearly established constitutional right; and (2) Whether a plaintiff, even by assuming that a plaintiff must show that retaliatory behavior is clearly illegal, qualified immunity should have been denied because the retaliatory behavior here was clearly illegal.
Abbey against the United States
24-510
Question: About the negligence of the seconds claims “aris[e] Outside of … erroneous representation, ”and is thus excluded by section 2680 (h) of the Federal Compensation Act, although the petitioners do not personally trust an alleged incorrect representation.
Korban v. Watson Memorial Spiritual Temple of Christ
24-512
Question: Whether a prior federal judgment excludes state law claims in a subsequent state or federal judicial act that arises as a result of a common core of facts and which could have been but were not raised in the prior federal act.
Carter v. Stewart
24-513
Question: (1) Whether a potential jury leader claiming they were affected as a result of a policy, custom or use of racial discrimination has a case of action under 42 USC § 1983; and (2), if so, whether such claims should be judged in the same way as other litigation of 1983, including the submission of genuine questions of material fact to a jury.
Shockley v. Vandergriff
24-517
Question: Whether the US Appeals Court for the 8th Circuit made a mistake in denying the petitioner’s application for dissence to appeal the denial of his sixth change ineffective assistance from legal requirements.
Light Defense Group v. Snaprays
24-524
Question: Whether a defendant exposes himself to personal jurisdiction everywhere a plaintiff is operating simply because the defendant knows its out-of-forum behavior “necessarily would affect marketing, sales and other activities” within the forum, even if the defendant has not someone contacts with that sues or forum at all.
Bethesda University v. Cho
24-530
Question: About the ecclesiastical abstinence The accompanying the doctrine bars the courts from judging the religious qualifications of the leaders of a religious institution.
The Federal Republic of Nigeria against Zhongshan Fucheng Industrial Investment Co.
24-532
Question: (1) Whether in order to interpret the Treaty Party’s intentions of a word as a “person”, extra-textual information, such as historical context and contemporary national law, is a material input parallel to the textual analysis; and (2) About the New York Convention applies for arbitration agreements that regulate a dispute with a sovereign nation that arises as a result of its role as a sovereign.
