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The Supreme Court's final decisions of the term generally do well to emphasize the current court majority’s priorities — and this year was no different. It wrapped up last week by gutting affirmative action, giving business owners a license to discriminate and striking down student loan relief on what amounted to policy grounds.
But a less obvious event on Friday did just as well to reflect the GOP majority’s views — namely, in an “order list” that included cases the court decided to turn away. In doing so, the majority effectively made a host of decisions by not making them at all — on matters of voting, jury bias, qualified immunity and more.
These denials hammer home the power the court has over its docket, where it takes four votes to grant review of an appeal and Republicans hold a 6-3 majority.
Here are some of the cases the court denied Friday, over dissent from the Democratic appointees:
- Felon disenfranchisement in Harness v. Watson. Over dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court rejected a challenge to voting rights rules in Mississippi. In 1890, the state constitution listed several crimes as bases for disenfranchisement, believing that Black people would be convicted of those crimes more than white people. The racist relic stands today and will continue to stand, thanks to the Supreme Court's rejection. Jackson called out the majority’s hypocrisy for declining to take up the appeal after supposedly embracing equality in the affirmative action ruling the day before. “Thus, the majority’s decision not to take up this matter is doubly unfortunate,” the Joe Biden appointee wrote, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
- Jury bias in Clark v. Mississippi. As the case name suggests, this one also came from Mississippi. The state already had a bad history with racism in jury selection, as shown by the infamous case of Curtis Flowers, which featured a Black man tried for murder a staggering six times, pursued by a white prosecutor armed with white jurors. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Flowers on the grounds that a Black prospective juror at Flowers' latest trial shouldn’t have been excluded. But the state apparently didn't get the memo. “In yet another death penalty case involving a Black defendant,” Sotomayor wrote in the case of Tony Terrell Clark, the state court flouted the Flowers precedent. Because the U.S. Supreme Court majority refused to intervene, she wrote, “a Black man will be put to death in the State of Mississippi based on the decision of a jury that was plausibly selected based on race.”
- Qualified immunity. Sotomayor also dissented from two denials in cases raising qualified immunity, the controversial court-created doctrine that lets law enforcement escape civil accountability based on absurd technicalities. In one case, centered on Ryan Stokes, a Black man fatally shot in the back by police in Missouri, Sotomayor argued the “purportedly ‘qualified’ immunity becomes an absolute shield for unjustified killings, serious bodily harm, and other grave constitutional violations.” In the other (where Jackson dissented as well), Sotomayor lamented in the case of Nicholas Gilbert, who died in St. Louis police custody, that his “parents and society deserve better from our courts.”