Appellate Law

Mistakes in Big SCOTUS Cases? (UPDATED)

By Greg May

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I ran across a couple of interesting posts claiming that various SCOTUS justices got the facts just plain wrong in at least three significant cases, including two very recent ones. Make of them — both the blog posts and the mistakes — what you will.

CAAFlog, a military law blog, reports that both the majority and dissenting SCOTUS justices in Kennedy v. Louisiana, case no. 07-343 (June 25, 2008), were wrong in noting that the federal government had not made child rapists eligible for the death penalty. According to CAAFlog, the Uniform Code of Military Justice makes child rapists in the military eligible for the death penalty. Get more details at CAAFlog, where a couple dozen commenters opine on the significance of the omission.

Gabriel Malor, an anonymous blogger and recent law school grad studying for the bar, notes the CAAFlog post as a follow-up to his own post last week that Justice Stevens got some facts wrong in Hamdan and Heller.

UPDATE (7/7/08):  SCOTUSBlog explains how the mistake in Kennedy may play out, and how the Department of Justice accepted responsibility for the error.

Full post as published by The California Blog of Appeal on July 02, 2008 (boomark / email).