This week we highlight petitions pending before the Supreme Court that address, among other things, whether the burden of persuasion in qualified immunity cases should be on the plaintiff or on the defendant, whether the due process clause is violated when the prosecution relies on material, perjured testimony to secure a conviction but did not know the testimony was perjured until after the trial, and whether the Supreme Court’s unanimous holding in Cooper v. Oklahoma clearly established that Georgia could not impose the burden of requiring proof of intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt.

The petitions of the week are below the jump:

Anderson v. City of Minneapolis, Minnesota

19-656

Issues: (1) Whether the burden of persuasion in qualified immunity cases should be, in part or entirely, on the plaintiff as held by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in this case and by the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 10th and 11th Circuits, or whether it should be placed on the defendant, as held by the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 9th and District of Columbia Circuits; (2) whether, under the state-created-danger doctrine, due process is violated when first responders fail to provide any treatment to a person suffering from severe hypothermia, and instead erroneously declare him dead; and (3) whether the 8th Circuit erred in dismissing this state-created-danger case on qualified immunity grounds.

Luna-Garcia v. Barr

19-673

Issue: Whether, under 8 U.S.C. § 1229(a)(1), a noncitizen is entitled to written notice of the time and date of her removal proceedings when she provides a foreign address to the U.S. attorney general as the “address … at which [she] may be contacted” under Section 1229(a)(1)(F)(i).

U.S., ex rel. Schneider v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.

19-678

Issue: Whether the government is entitled to absolute deference regarding its decision to dismiss a False Claims Act action under 31 U.S.C. § 3730(c)(2)(A), or whether the qui tam relator should be granted the right to demonstrate that the government’s rationale for dismissal is “fraudulent, illegal, or arbitrary and capricious.”

Corbitt v. Vickers

19-679

Issues: (1) Whether qualified immunity is an affirmative defense (placing the burden on the defendant to raise and prove it) or whether it is a pleading requirement (placing the burden on a plaintiff to plead its absence); (2) whether the Supreme Court should recalibrate or reverse the doctrine of qualified immunity.

Indiana v. Ruiz

19-924

Issue: Whether, when analyzing whether a station-house interview is a custodial interrogation under Miranda v. Arizona, the ordinary security features and layout of a police station weigh in favor of a determination that the interview was “custodial.”

Monex Deposit Company v. Commodity Futures Trading Commission

19-933

Issues: (1) Whether 7 U.S.C. § 9, the Commodity Exchange Act’s “prohibition against manipulation,” empowers the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to punish conduct that does not manipulate any commodities market, simply because the conduct involves a retail transaction in a commodity; and (2) whether the CFTC violated fundamental principles of due process when it abruptly reversed its 30-year position that the petitioner Monex Deposit Company’s business model was not subject to the CFTC’s regulatory authority and retroactively applied its new and incorrect position in this $290 million enforcement action.

Raulerson v. Warden

19-941

Issue: Whether the Supreme Court’s unanimous holding in Cooper v. Oklahoma clearly established that Georgia could not impose the burden of requiring proof of intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt, particularly when state supreme courts in Indiana, Tennessee and other states recognized that Cooper would not allow their states to require a defendant to prove intellectual disability even by a lower standard of clear and convincing evidence.

Wisconsin Department of Revenue v. Union Pacific Railroad Co.

19-949

Issue: Whether a state violates Subsection (b)(4) of the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976 by exempting intangible personal property of non-railroads from its personal property tax, but not exempting such property for a limited group of taxpayers that includes railroads.

Farrar v. Williams

19-953

Issue: Whether the due process clause is violated when the prosecution relies on material, perjured testimony to secure a conviction but did not know the testimony was perjured until after the trial, as six courts have held, or whether the prosecution’s contemporaneous knowledge of the perjured testimony is required, as eight courts have held.

Craig v. O’Kelley

19-956

Issues: (1) Whether a panel decision decided nine days before the relevant conduct in question constitutes clearly established law to deprive government officers of qualified immunity; (2) whether timing constitutes an extraordinary circumstance as articulated by Harlow v. Fitzgerald, such that a police officer may nonetheless be entitled to qualified immunity despite the law’s being clearly established nine days earlier; and (3) whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit erred in holding that a general principle of law announced in Moore v. Pederson firmly established with the requisite degree of particularity that the officers violated clearly established law in the particular circumstances they faced.

Recommended Citation: Andrew Hamm, Petitions of the week, SCOTUSblog (Mar. 5, 2020, 3:19 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/03/petitions-of-the-week-85/