Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup Friday, December 4, 2020

Each week, the Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup presents a few tidbits of news and Twitter posts from the past week concerning appellate advocacy. As always, if you see something during the week that you think we should be sure to include, feel free to send a quick note to either (1) Dan Real at [email protected] or on Twitter @Daniel_L_Real or (2) Catharine Du Bois at [email protected] or on Twitter @CLDLegalWriting.

US Supreme Court Opinions and News

• The Supreme Court has been asked to block the certification of Pennsylvania’s results in the 2020 presidential election. The case argues that absentee voting provisions were unconstitutional under the state constitution. Experts opine, however, that the Court’s scheduling order asking for responsive briefs one day after the Safe Harbor Deadline indicates that the case is unlikely to affect the election results. The Safe Harbor Deadline is the federal deadline for states to resolve outstanding challenges to their elections. Once it has passed, the state’s slate of appointed electors is considered to be locked in. See reports in USA Today and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
  
  
• The Court heard oral argument about the retroactive implications of their April decision on unanimous jury verdicts. In April, the Supreme Court ruled that non-unanimous jury verdicts for serious crimes (whether federal or state) are unconstitutional. Then, the ruling applied only to future cases; the court left unanswered the question of whether the decision should apply retroactively. The current case asks whether April’s decision should apply to prisoners in Louisiana and Oregon convicted in the past by non-unanimous juries. (These are the only states that allowed such verdicts at the time of the April decision).  See reports from NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
  
  
• James Romoser posted a thread this week about the petitions the Court is considering this week.

Federal Appellate Court Opinions and News

• While acknowledging North Carolina’s “long and shameful history of race-based voter suppression,” the Fourth Circuit reversed a lower court and upheld the state’s law requiring voters to present photo identification before casting ballots. The court determined that the lower court had improperly considered the state’s “past conduct to bear so heavily on its later acts that it was virtually impossible for it to pass a voter-ID law that meets constitutional muster.”  See the order and reports from The Washington Post and The Hill.
  
  
• The Seventh Circuit reinstated ex-Penn State President Graham Spanier’s 2017 conviction for child-endangerment.  The ruling determined that the lower court improperly overturned the guilty verdict about Spanier’s mishandling of claims of sexual abuse against Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.  See the order and reports from the Philadelphia Inquirer and ESPN.

Other News

Beth Wilensky posted a thread on Twitter looking at the style and legal writing of an opinion of Third Circuit Judge Bibas. The thread points out the various ways that Judge Bibas employs good writing techniques, including using plain English and simple transitions.