Over a dissent by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court on Monday sent the case of a Texas woman convicted of hiring someone to commit murder back to the lower court for another look. And its denial of review in two other criminal cases drew written dissents – one from Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, in a case involving the role of race in whether someone has been “seized” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment, and another by the court’s three Democratic appointees in the case of a Texas man who – with the state’s support – was seeking a new proceeding to determine whether he is intellectually disabled and cannot be executed.
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The court’s actions came as part of released from the justices’ June 18 conference. The justices will meet for another conference – the final regularly scheduled conference before their summer recess – on Thursday, June 25. The court is likely to release orders from that conference on Monday, June 29, at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
In Grayson v. United States, the court sent the case of Ashley Grayson, a Texas-based social-media influencer convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for hiring someone to kill a rival influencer, back to a federal appeals court for it to reconsider its earlier ruling in light of the government’s concession that the lower court applied the wrong rule.
The government’s case against Grayson relied heavily on a FaceTime call between Grayson and an aspiring influencer, Olivia Johnson. Unbeknownst to Grayson, Johnson had recorded the call, in which she asked for an advance on the murder that Grayson had solicited her to commit (but which Johnson never tried to go forward with).
Grayson tried to bar prosecutors from using the recording of the call. She argued that the Federal Wiretap Act, which both makes it illegal to “intentionally intercept” an electronic communication and prohibits the use of illegally intercepted communications as evidence at trial.
The trial judge in Grayson’s case allowed prosecutors to use the recording under an exception known as the “clean hands” rule. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld that ruling. It pointed to a 1995 ruling in which that court held that “[d]espite the fact that the recordings were illegally intercepted, we held that suppression is not warranted in a criminal prosecution where the ‘government played no part in the unlawful interception.’”
Grayson , where she argued (and the federal government agreed) that there is no “clean hands” exception to the Federal Wiretap Act and that the 6th Circuit’s rule is at odds with the decisions of other courts of appeals.
The government nevertheless urged the justices either to deny review or to send the case back to the lower court for another look. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer that there is no need for it to intervene because the issue that Grayson has asked them to review rarely arises. “This case,” Sauer wrote, “appears to be the first in 30 years in which either the” 6th Circuit “or any district court in that circuit has applied” the 1995 ruling’s “clean hands” exception. And in any event, Sauer added, the application of the “clean hands” rule might not ultimately affect the outcome of Grayson’s case – for example, because it isn’t clear whether the recording was illegally obtained in the first place.
In , the court sent the case back to the court of appeals. Alito penned a one-paragraph dissent from that disposition of the case in which he contended that even if the 6th Circuit applied the wrong rule, that error didn’t make a difference. “Even setting aside the FaceTime recording,” Alito wrote, “a mountain of properly admitted evidence proved” Grayson’s “guilt.”
The court also on Monday declined to hear the case of Dontae Carter, who was charged and convicted of eight counts related to his possession of a gun. Police in Washington, D.C., found the gun when they approached a group of men gathered outside. In response to a question from an officer, Carter lifted his shirt to show the police that he did not have a gun in his waistband; an officer then asked him to “hik[e]” his pants up, which he did. At that point, another officer noticed an L-shaped bulge in Carter’s groin area. When police frisked Carter, they found a gun.
Carter sought to have the gun and a statement that he made to the police after it was discovered excluded from the evidence used against him on the ground that it violated the Fourth Amendment’s bar on unreasonable seizures.
The trial judge rejected Carter’s argument, but the District of Columbia Court of Appeals – D.C.’s highest court – reversed that ruling and threw out his convictions. Writing for the court, Senior Judge Eric Washington framed the issue at the center of the case as whether Carter was “seized” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment when the police officer asked him to raise his pants. And that in turn, Washington wrote, hinged on whether a reasonable person in his place “would have ‘felt free to terminate’ the interaction and ‘go about their business.’”
Washington acknowledged that it was a “close case,” but he ultimately concluded that the officers’ conduct had been “coercive” and that this effect would have been exacerbated by the fact that Carter is Black. “Given the facts of this case,” Washington said, “we believe that such apprehension would have led an objective and reasonable Black man in Mr. Carter’s shoes to feel as though he had to comply with the officers’ demands rather than terminating the encounter.” Because police officers did not have reasonable suspicion or probable cause to seize Carter, Washington indicated, they violated the Fourth Amendment – and both Carter’s gun and his subsequent statement to police should not have been admitted.
The federal government – which is responsible for prosecuting crimes in D.C. – , calling the lower court’s ruling “deeply flawed.” The inquiry into whether Carter was seized, Sauer wrote, “‘does not vary with the state of mind of the particular individual being approached.’” Moreover, he added, the ruling “threatens to seriously hinder law enforcement in the Nation’s capital.”
Carter to deny review. More than 45 years ago, he said, that race is “not irrelevant” in determining whether a young Black woman “‘reasonably’ would ‘have felt unusually threatened by the officers, who were white males.’” Moreover, he added, the lower court in his case “expressly held that ‘any reasonable person’—not just an objectively reasonable Black man—’would be fearful of failing to cooperate under these circumstances.’”
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Over , the justices turned down the government’s request to weigh in. Alito wrote that he “would grant the petition” for review. Stressing that the Constitution “‘almost never’ allows government actors to treat persons differently based on their race,” Alito contended that “[i]t is dangerous to allow an individual to be treated differently based on statistics, studies, or expert testimony that purports to show that members of the racial or ethnic group to which he belongs are more likely to act in a certain way than are members of other groups.”
And in Saldaño v. Texas, Justice Sonia Sotomayor – joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented from the court’s decision not to grant relief to a Texas man who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1996.
When the state attempted to set an execution date in 2021, Victor Saldaño argued (among other things) that he was intellectually disabled and therefore could not be executed under the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia. In 2024, both the state’s experts and Saldaño’s own experts agreed. Saldaño filed an application for post-conviction relief in state court and asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals – the state’s highest court for criminal cases – to send the case back to the trial court for it to rule on his Atkins claim.
When the TCCA declined to do so, and both asked the Supreme Court to send the case back for consideration of this. In a brief, unsigned on Monday, the court rejected that request.
In , Sotomayor stressed that the court’s ruling “not only does a profound disservice to Saldaño, who now might be executed without any court ever determining whether he is, in fact, intellectually disabled,” but also “severely undermines the State’s interest in ensuring the legitimacy of its criminal system.”
In a brief, separate order on Monday in Newberry v. Texas, the court sent the case of Michael Newberry, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a 1996 robbery and murder, back to the TCCA for another look.
The state had agreed with Newberry that, as a result of the prosecutors’ failure to provide key evidence, Newberry had not received a fair trial, and the state trial court recommended that he get a new trial.
The TCCA rejected that recommendation in a brief, unsigned order, writing only that Newberry had “not met his burden to prove that he is entitled to relief.”
Newberry in January, asking the justices either to reverse the TCCA’s decision without additional briefing or oral argument or to take up the case and hear argument.
In in the Supreme Court, the state echoed Newberry’s contention that the TCCA’s “decision cannot stand.” Although it “recogniz[ed]” the TCCA’s “critical duty to exercise independent judgment, the State of Texas believes that the TCCA’s unreasoned and unprecedented decision upsets the public’s interest in ordered justice and further denies” Newberry “the due process he was deprived of nearly thirty years ago.”
On Monday, however, the justices returned Newberry’s case to the lower court “for further consideration in light of the position asserted by Texas” in its brief.
The justices did the same in the case of Jeffrey Busby, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison for selling 2.84 grams of methadone. On appeal, he argued that testimony against him by a forensic drug analysis specialist who had simply reviewed another analyst’s work violated his right under the Sixth Amendment to confront the witnesses against him.
Mississippi agreed that the testimony violated the Constitution, but it said that any error was harmless. The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected the state’s position and that there was no constitutional violation.
Busby in February, asking the justices to summarily reverse the state supreme court’s decision. The that the court “should summarily vacate the Mississippi Supreme Court’s judgment and remand for further proceedings” – which the justices did on Monday.