The Supreme Court released its final order list for the Term today, and it unsurprisingly starts with a bunch of remands based on its recent big criminal rulings. I will do a distinct post on those remands, and here will instead focus on a few of the 11+ cases in which SCOTUS granted certiorari review for hearing the cases in the fall. Most of these cases (some of which are consolidated) deal with civil issues, but I see two that are federal criminal matters: Kelly, Bridget v. United States, No. 18-1059, and Shular, Eddie v. United States, No. 18-6662.
SCOTUSblog has this page covering Kelly, which emerges from the high-profile "Bridgegate" scandal in New Jersey and present this issue: "Whether a public official 'defraud[s]' the government of its property by advancing a “public policy reason” for an official decision that is not her subjective “real reason” for making the decision."
And the Shular case is yet another case raising an important technical issue in the application of the Armed Career Criminal Act, with the cert petition presenting this question: "Whether the determination of a 'serious drug offense' under the Armed Career Criminal Act requires the same categorical approach used in the determination of a 'violent felony' under the Act?"
Last but not last, the SCOTUS order list ends with a cert denial in a South Carolina case, McGee v. McFadden, which prompted a eight-page dissent from Justice Sotomayor starting this way:
Pro se petitioner Shannon McGee has a strong argument that his trial and resulting life sentence were fundamentally unfair because the State withheld material exculpatory evidence. See Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83, 87 (1963). The state courts offered flawed rationales for rejecting that claim. Nevertheless, the District Court denied McGee federal habeas relief, and both the District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit summarily declined to grant McGee a “certificate of appealability” (COA), 28 U.S.C. §2253(c), concluding that his claim was not even debatable. Without a COA, McGee cannot obtain appellate review on the merits of his claim. See ibid. Because the COA procedure should facilitate, not frustrate, fulsome review of potentially meritorious claims like McGee’s, I would grant the petition for writ of certiorari and reverse the denial of a COA.
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