Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Appeals Court Decisions
Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.
Friends, the Supreme Court is conferring this very day about whether to take up Baker v. City of McKinney, which asks the question: If a SWAT team blows up an innocent person’s house to apprehend a fugitive, who pays for the damage? The unlucky homeowner or the public as a whole? Defying fairness, justice, and 150 years of Supreme Court precedent, last year the Fifth Circuit went with the former. Click here to learn more.
This week on the Short Circuit podcast: A 20-word victory at SCOTUS about walking on the wrong side of the road.
- Federal employees: The debt limit is unconstitutional! First Circuit: Every time default looms, Congress swoops in and saves the United States’ credit, just like MacGyver. Who’s to say it won’t again in the next episode? Your injury is thus entirely speculative, and your case is moot. Come back after the apocalypse and then perhaps we can talk.
- Allegation: Jamaican gang terrorizes man and his family for political reasons. He’s framed him for murder; a warrant is issued. He flees to the U.S. and is arrested. Man: If I’m deported, I face additional torture! First Circuit: There was probable cause for the warrant, so no asylum. But you might have a shot under the Convention Against Torture on remand.
- After 1 a.m., Collingdale, Penn. police officer tries to pull over suspected stolen car, but the driver speeds off. Forty minutes later, the officer sees the car again, and this time it pulls over. The officer draws his weapon, waits for backup, and then all three occupants are ordered out at gunpoint. They comply. A frisk uncovers a gun magazine. A look into the trunk yields evidence connecting the group to a string of armed robberies. Suppress the evidence? Third Circuit: No. Dissent: The record does not support the officer’s belief that the driver tried to evade him, and cops can’t just pull people out of vehicles at gunpoint or frisk them based on a hunch.
- In which the former CEO of a Dallas-based investment firm mired in bankruptcy proceedings petitions for mandamus to recuse the presiding bankruptcy judge. Fifth Circuit: The judge’s two novels do not display an impermissible bias, even though one of them (Hedging Death) involves a Dallas-based investment fund. Nor does the fact that the judge has sometimes said disobliging things about the CEO, since those disobliging things are supported by the record.
- Pro se allegations: Supervisor at Abilene, Tex. jail asks inmate to record gang member confessing to murder but declines to inform guards, who can’t be trusted not to out informants. Yikes! The guards discover the inmate’s recording device. A gang member assaults the inmate, leaving him with a broken nose and persistent headaches that have gone untreated. Fifth Circuit (unpublished): His failure-to-protect claim against the supervisor should not have been dismissed. [NB: Experts agree that on remand he actually has a decent shot at overcoming qualified immunity because the Fifth Circuit is on the side of the circuit split that doesn’t require a totally identical prior case when the claims don’t involve split-second decisions. Read all about the split-second split in IJ’s petition for certiorari in Martinez v. High.]
- The Michigan Court of Claims consists of judges from the Michigan Court of Appeals. Appeals from the former court go to the latter court (although the same judges don’t review their own cases). Michiganders who lost cases in the Court of Claims argue this violates their due process rights because judges might go soft on their fellow judges’ rulings. Sixth Circuit: Interesting theory, although S
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