Supreme Court refuses to hear Brown's appeal on prison crowding

SACRAMENTO — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to hear Gov. Jerry Brown's appeal of an order to reduce prison crowding, further narrowing the governor's options in his quest to end what he characterizes as an arbitrary cap on the inmate population.

The cap was ordered by three federal judges in California, and Brown had asked the high court to remove it. Having lost that bid, he will continue to pursue a request to the lower court for more time to comply, according to a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman.

The Supreme Court justices said they found no grounds to take up the population limit, dispatching the governor's request in a single sentence: "The appeal is dismissed for want of jurisdiction."

Brown had no immediate response to the decision. A spokeswoman in his corrections department, Deborah Hoffman, issued a statement saying that the administration was "disappointed."

While awaiting the Supreme Court's decision, the governor recently asked the three-judge panel to give him three years to lower inmate numbers for the long term by, for example, expanding rehabilitation programs that could help keep offenders from returning to prison once they leave.

The court gave the state an extra month instead, until Jan. 27, and ordered officials to conduct settlement talks with lawyers for the inmates whose lawsuits led to the population cap. A report on those mediation efforts is due next week.

Brown and lawmakers approved funding in September for the rehabilitation programs, and the governor has touted "historic reforms" that have already been made — such as a new law requiring reconsideration of some sentences — that need time to work.

"California will continue to build on these landmark reforms with our law enforcement and local government partners," Hoffman said Tuesday.

If the settlement talks do not yield a result that is acceptable to the court, Brown could be left with more difficult options: Spend hundreds of millions of dollars to rent privately owned prison beds or concede to major changes in whom California incarcerates.

The governor so far has fought proposals to shorten the sentences of inmates who are considered at low risk to re-offend, saying that would threaten public safety. He has vowed to keep prisoners locked up, sending them to private facilities across the country if necessary.

But the judges have temporarily barred him from moving more prisoners out of state.

"I'm among those who think there are no easy solutions," said Michael Romano, director of the Three Strikes Project at Stanford University.

Romano said thousands of inmates could leave the system relatively quickly if local courts speed up reviews of sentences in about 2,000 pending three-strikes cases. Californians voted last year to ease the state's three-strikes law and apply its new standards retroactively.

The judges ordered that the mediation discussions include three-strikes prisoners, although Brown's administration has said the backlog of unheard cases is not its responsibility.

The state's prisons have long been beset by problems in the delivery of medical care and psychiatric services, inmate suicides and lawsuits over other conditions. The three judges ruled that the problems were due to overcrowding and in 2009 ordered the state to remove about 43,000 inmates.

The state moved some prisoners to private facilities, built a new medical prison and kept more than 20,000 prisoners and parole violators in county jails rather than send them to state prisons. Officials have also signed agreements with private prison operators for almost 3,800 beds at three facilities.

The latest of those is an $86-million, three-year contract announced Tuesday to take over a California City prison that houses federal immigration detainees.

But a corrections department spokeswoman said Tuesday that the state still has 4,400 more prisoners than the cap permits.

As part of its contract, Corrections Corp. of America will make the first $10 million in upgrades that might be needed to house California's higher-security inmates. After that, the bill falls to California taxpayers.

If Brown doesn't want to give up yet on his effort to be free of the inmate cap, one expert said, he might still be able to find ways to contest the cap before a lower court.

There is no "federal order that is not appealable," said Kent Scheidegger, an official of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. "It is a matter of finding" the right procedure, he said.

Scheidegger's Sacramento-based group submitted a brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of four former California governors, siding with Brown by arguing that the cap is unreasonable in light of the improvements California has made.

In the meantime, prisoners' lawyers are pressing for even greater court intervention, seeking new orders on treatment of inmates.

"Prisoners are still suffering from terrible healthcare," said Don Specter of the Prison Law Office, which represents inmates in the federal court cases.

"Reports from the court experts still show that prisoners are at great risk of injury or death from the lack of adequate medical care," he said.

paige.stjohn@latimes.com

Supreme Court Strikes Down Key Part of Voting Rights Act

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, ruling that Congress had not provided adequate justification for subjecting nine states, mostly in the South, to federal oversight.

“In 1965, the states could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.”

The court divided along ideological lines, and the two sides drew sharply different lessons from the history of the civil rights movement and gave very different accounts of whether racial minorities continue to face discrimination in voting.

President Obama, whose election as the nation’s first black president was cited by critics of the law as evidence that it was no longer needed, said he was “deeply disappointed” by the ruling. “Today’s decision invalidating one of its core provisions upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent,” he said.

The decision will have immediate practical consequences. Changes in voting procedures that had required advance federal approval, including voter identification laws and restrictions on early voting, will now be subject only to after-the-fact litigation.

“With today’s decision,” said Greg Abbott, Texas’ attorney general, “the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government.”

Chief Justice Roberts said that Congress remained free to try to impose federal oversight on states where voting rights were at risk, but must do so based on contemporary data. When the law was last renewed, in 2006, Congress relied on data from decades before to decide which states and localities were covered. The chances that the current Congress could reach agreement on where federal oversight is required are small, most analysts say.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority opinion. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The majority held that the coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, originally passed in 1965 and most recently updated by Congress in 1975, was unconstitutional. The section determines which states must receive preclearance from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington before they make minor changes to voting procedures, like relocating a polling place, or major ones, like redrawing electoral districts.

The current coverage scheme, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, is “based on 40-year-old facts having no relationship to the present day.”

“Congress — if it is to divide the states — must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions,” he wrote. “It cannot simply rely on the past.”

The decision did not strike down Section 5, which sets out the preclearance requirement. But without Section 4, which determines which states are covered, Section 5 is without significance — unless Congress chooses to pass a new bill for determining which states would be covered.

It was hardly clear, in any event, that the court’s conservative majority would uphold Section 5 if the question returned to the court in the unlikely event that Congress enacted a new coverage formula. In a concurrence, Justice Thomas called for striking down Section 5 immediately, saying the majority opinion had provided the reasons and merely left “the inevitable conclusion unstated.”

The Supreme Court had repeatedly upheld the law in earlier decisions, saying that the preclearance requirement was an effective tool to combat the legacy of lawless conduct by Southern officials bent on denying voting rights to blacks.

Critics of Section 5 say it is a unique federal intrusion on state sovereignty and a badge of shame for the affected jurisdictions that is no longer justified.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was one of the towering legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, and Chief Justice Roberts said its "strong medicine" was the right response to "entrenched racial discrimination." At the time it was first enacted, he said, black voter turnout in the South stood at 6.4 percent in Mississippi.

In the most recent election, by contrast, “African-American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six states originally covered by Section 5.”

The chief justice recalled the Freedom Summer of 1964, when the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered near Philadelphia, Miss., while working to register black voters. He mentioned Bloody Sunday in 1965, when police officers beat marchers seeking the right to vote in Selma, Ala.

“Today,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “both of those towns are governed by African-American mayors. Problems remain in these states and others, but there is no denying that, due to the Voting Rights Act, our nation has made great strides.”

In summarizing her dissent from the bench, an unusual move and a sign of deep disagreement, Justice Ginsburg called on the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to make a different point.

“The great man who led the march from Selma to Montgomery and there called for the passage of the Voting Rights Act foresaw progress, even in Alabama,” she said. “'The arc of the moral universe is long,’ he said, but ‘it bends toward justice,’ if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.”

“That commitment,” she said, “has been disserved by today’s decision.”

She said the focus of the Voting Rights Act had properly changed from “first-generation barriers to ballot access” to “second-generation barriers” like racial gerrymandering and laws requiring at-large voting in places with a sizable black minority. She said Section 5 had been effective in thwarting such efforts.

In any event, she said, Congress, which reauthorized the law by a large majority in the House and unanimously in the Senate, was the right body to decide whether the law was needed and where.

The Supreme Court had once before considered the constitutionality of the 2006 extension of the law in a 2009 decision, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder. But it avoided answering the central question, and it seemed to give Congress an opportunity to make adjustments. Congress, Chief Justice Roberts noted on Tuesday, did not respond.

Justice Ginsburg suggested in her dissent that an era had drawn to a close with the court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act, or V.R.A., in Shelby County v. Holder, No. 12-96.

“Beyond question, the V.R.A. is no ordinary legislation,” she wrote. “It is extraordinary because Congress embarked on a mission long delayed and of extraordinary importance: to realize the purpose and promise of the Fifteenth Amendment,” the Reconstruction Era amendment that barred racial discrimination in voting and authorized Congress to enforce it.

“The court errs egregiously,” she concluded, “by overriding Congress’s decision.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a civil rights worker murdered in 1964. He was Michael Schwerner, not Schwermer.

Via NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

Will Prop 8 End Not With a Bang but a Legal Whimper?

Justice Anthony Kennedy — widely viewed as the pivotal swing vote — got pulses racing early in today’s same-sex-marriage argument at the Supreme Court. There is “immediate legal injury” being done to 40,000 California children being raised by same-sex parents who are not allowed to marry, he insisted. These children “want their parents to have full recognition and full status,” he said — and “the voice of those children is important in this case.”

Court watchers immediately flooded Twitter and live blogs with the news: after that “vivid” comment, it was suddenly looking like there might be five votes — Justice Kennedy and the court’s four liberals — for a sweeping pro-gay-marriage ruling. But before long, Justice Kennedy seemed to reverse direction, openly questioning whether the court had made a mistake in accepting the case at all.

Today’s oral arguments — in a challenge to California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage — took place under a glaring national spotlight. Television cameras and throngs of reporters descended on the Supreme Court. Crowds of ordinary citizens gathered out front to express their views and to try to influence the Justices, in some cases with wacky signs in tow. (Sample: “Gays have every right to be as miserable as I make my husband.”) For months now, there has been a growing expectation that the Supreme Court would use this case to issue a landmark constitutional ruling, resolving for the history books whether same-sex couples have a right to marry.

But the Justices’ questions at oral argument suggested another possibility: that the Proposition 8 case may end not with a bang but with a hypertechnical legal whimper. It is always perilous trying to predict what the Supreme Court will do based on the Justices’ comments at oral argument, but it now may be that the likeliest outcome is a punt on the hard constitutional questions: the Justices may simply dismiss the case. That would most likely mean that a lower-court ruling invalidating Prop 8 would remain in effect — which would keep same-sex marriage legal in California but not affect other states.

That is one way to count the votes at today’s oral argument: put Justice Kennedy with the court’s four conservatives, and there are not enough votes for a bold pro-gay-marriage ruling. It is not, however, the only way. At another point in the argument, Justice Kennedy said the case could take the court into “uncharted waters” or a “wonderful destination” — though he also worried that it could be a “cliff.” In that brief and highly contradictory comment — which is already being closely parsed — Justice Kennedy seemed to be deeply ambivalent: worried about the risks of a broad pro-same-sex-marriage ruling, while nevertheless excited about the possibilities.

The court will have another chance to wrestle with the question tomorrow, in a second case that challenges the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages and decrees that states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. That case, however, could well be resolved as a question of states’ rights or other legal doctrines that do not directly engage the key question of whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

Even some supporters of same-sex marriage think that a modest Supreme Court ruling — like one that allows same-sex marriages to continue in California but does not extend them further — could be a good thing. Political support for gay marriage continues to grow by the day — Senator Mark Warner of Virginia just got on board yesterday — and the momentum shows no sign of slowing. Advocates for a political solution argue that there will be less polarization and backlash if same-sex marriage gets adopted through the political process.

Appealing though that argument may be in some ways, it has serious flaws. If the Supreme Court fails to act, gay people in some parts of the country may have to wait many years before their home states recognize their right to marry — or they may have to move in order to marry. And rights that legislatures give they can also take away. Only the Supreme Court can declare that gay people have a fundamental constitutional right to marry — no matter what the politicians say.

It is for these reasons that how Justice Kennedy comes down matters so much. Same-sex marriage is no longer the “uncharted waters” that he fears. We now have evidence from across the country that gay marriage has enormous upsides — including for the children Justice Kennedy rightly worried about — and no discernible downsides. Nondiscrimination is, in all its forms, a “wonderful destination,” as Justice Kennedy so aptly put it. By the time the Supreme Court’s term ends in late June, we will know if he proved courageous and forward-looking enough to lead the nation there.

via Time Magazine