Source: https://www.scotusblog.com/2011/12/relist-and-hold-watch-7/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 12:19:33+00:00

Document:
Compared to last week’s smorgasbord, this week’s order list was slim pickings. Two of the post-Thanksgiving leftovers discussed last week reached their expiration date, with the Court denying cert. without comment on a couple of once-relisted cases, The Bronx Household of Faith v. New York City Board of Education, 11-386 (a First Amendment case involving religious groups’ use of New York City Board of Education facilities) and Beauchamp v. Wisconsin, 11-148 (a Confrontation Clause case involving dying declarations).
The sole new relist this week is Ryburn v. Huff, 11-208, in which a divided panel of the Ninth Circuit denied qualified immunity to two police officers who entered a family’s home without a warrant while investigating what turned out to be a false rumor that the family’s son was planning a school shooting; the petition alleges a split about whether Brigham City v. Stuart merged the emergency and exigent-circumstances exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement (the Ninth Circuit concluded it did not).
The Court relisted for a second time in RadLAX Gateway Hotel v. Amalgamated Bank, 11-166, the Chapter 11 bankruptcy case discussed in last week’s post. The rest of the crop are long-running state-on-top habeas relists involving claims that a court of appeals gave insufficient deference to state-court decisions: Hardy v. Cross, 11-74 (relisted eight times); Cash v. Maxwell, 10-1548 (seven times); and Wetzel v. Lambert, 11-38 (six times). At the risk of becoming a broken record, we should be seeing opinions of some sort in those cases quite soon.
The Court appears to be holding Smith v. Florida, 09-10755, a capital petition denied in June 2011, in which (as Lyle previously noted) the Court took the unusual step of CFR’ing on a petition for rehearing. The rehearing petition asked the Court to hold Smith’s petition pending Williams v. Illinois, 10-8505 – granted the same day the Court denied Smith’s petition and argued on the merits yesterday – which also involves a Confrontation Clause claim based on discussion of a lab test of DNA evidence at trial by someone other than the lab technician who actually did the test. This is the Court’s second hold on a rehearing petition in as many weeks. And the Court also appears to have added King v. United States, 11-7029, and Cain v. United States, 11-7043, to the growing list of cases held for Dorsey v. United States, 11-5683, and Hill v. United States, 11-5721, involving the retroactive application of the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the crack-powder cocaine sentence differential.
If a case has been relisted once, it generally means the Court is paying close attention, increasing the chance of a grant. But once a case has been relisted more than twice, it is generally no longer a likely candidate for plenary review, and is more likely to result in a summary reversal or a dissent from the denial of cert.

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