In landmark cases, the Supreme Court set standards for pro se cases, which include boundaries for not only those individuals who choose to represent themselves, but also for the standby counsel in these particular cases.

• In Faretta v. California (1975), the Supreme Court ruled that the defendant, Anthony Faretta, had the constitutional right to refuse legal counsel and to represent himself in a state criminal trial. This case set the standards for pro se cases following it by upholding the constitutional right of an individual to represent him or herself in court. However, the Court also ruled that a defendant who voluntarily self-represents him or herself in court may not argue after the proceedings that they received ineffective counsel.
• In Mckaskle v. Wiggins (1984), the Supreme Court considered what the role of ‘standby counsel’ should be in pro se criminal cases. According to the Court, Wiggins’s sixth amendment right had not been violated by the presence of a standby counsel at his criminal trial, as he was still able to defend himself in any way he saw fit. This case established limits on the role of the standby counsel in pro se trials by refining standards that were set by Faretta.
• In Martinez v. Court of Appeal in California (2000), the Supreme Court ruled that an appellant who was the defendant of a state criminal case does not have the right to refuse the counsel of an attorney in a court of appeals; this ruling contrasts with the decision in the Faretta v. California case. The opinion of the Court was that the sixth amendment only extended to the defendant’s right to self-representation in criminal and civil cases, and that there is no such right in a court of appeals.

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1. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012)—In what is casually known as the “Obamacare” decision, the Supreme Court limited the federal regulation of commerce, claiming that under the Commerce Clause the federal government doesn’t have the power to force states to expand their Medicaid programs under threat of stopping payments. Under the Taxing and Spending Clause, however, the federal government may levy taxes on individuals who choose not to make purchases. Lead by Chief Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court upheld the “individual mandate” within the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.” Aside from securing Obama’s place within history and giving his re-election campaign a large boon, the ruling has strongly limited federal spending and its coercion of states.

2. United States v. Antoine Jones (2012)—When the local police suspected a D.C. nightclub owner, Antoine Jones, of narcotics possession, they secretly placed a global positioning system device on his car. After being convicted on the strength of that evidence, Jones appealed the use of it, claiming that the device constituted an unwarranted search. The Supreme Court agreed, and ruled that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle and then using the device to monitor the vehicle’s movements constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. This ruling is just the beginning of the legal navigations that will follow as tracking and search technology advances.

3. Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC (2012)—The Supreme Court ruled that the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment bars the government from interfering in ministerial appointments for religious organizations, including hearing wrongful employment termination suits. Public opinion was divided on the ruling, with conservatives lauding the opinion and liberals asserting that religious organizations should abide by the same rules as other non-profits.

4. Miller v. Alabama (2012) and Graham v. Florida (2010)—In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that a sentence of life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole, may not be imposed on juvenile non-homicide offenders. In 2012, they expanded the decision to rule as cruel and unusual punishment mandatory life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders (including murder charges).

5. Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011)—In 2005, California passed a law criminalizing selling violent video games to minors. The Supreme Court struck the law down as unconstitutional, claiming that video games are protected forms of media speech, and states may not ban the sale of them to minors. The ruling sparked a large public controversy, with conservatives decrying the ruling as “disappointing,” and liberals invoking the threat to the First Amendment that the law had posed.

6. Padilla v. Commonwealth of Kentucky (2010)—In the middle of a frenzied immigration reform controversy, the Supreme Court ruled that defense attorneys must inform clients of deportation and other “collateral consequences,” or civil punishments that accompany criminal charges, under three circumstances.

   1. Where the law is clear, attorneys must advise their criminal clients that deportation “will” result from a conviction.
   2. Where the immigration consequences of a conviction are unclear, attorneys must advise that deportation “may” result.
   3. When the immigration is ever in question, attorneys must inform their client; they cannot remain silent on the subject.

7. Berghuis v. Thompkins (2010)—In the investigation of fatal shooting in 2000, a suspect, after being read his Miranda rights, stayed silent for three hours. At the end of three hours of fruitless interrogation, the police switched to a religious tack, asking the suspect if he prayed for forgiveness for the murders. When he answered yes, the police used the admission as incriminating evidence. The suspect appealed his conviction on the premise that by refusing to talk for three hours, he had invoked his right to remain silent and that the police had violated his Fifth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed 5-4, claiming that the right to remain silent does not exist unless the suspect invokes it. The decision was highly controversial, and critics decried the erosion of Miranda rights and coercive power the ruling gives the police.

8. Ricci v. DeStefano (2009)—In 2009, the New Haven, Connecticut fire department administered a promotional exam to 118 firefighters. The test produced racially skewed results, where all top scorers were white with the exception of two Hispanics. Not wishing to violate Title VII, the city threw out the test results and promoted no one. The twenty candidates who received the highest scores protested, eventually bringing their case in front of the Supreme Court, who ruled that municipalities may not decline to certify the results of an otherwise fair exam merely because it would have made disproportionately more white applicants eligible for promotion.

9. Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008)—In a particularly brutual rape case, a man raped his eight-year-old step-daughter, causing serious internal damage, and the judge sentenced him to death. The man appealed the sentencing, claiming that capital punishment for a rape charge constituted cruel and unusual punishment, a violation of the Eight Amendment. The Supreme Court upheld his claim 5-4, decreeing that a death sentence may not be imposed for the crime of rape, when the victim did not die and death was not intended. The decision received criticism of both the heinous nature of the crime and the restriction of states’ rights from both presidential candidates at the time.

10. Boumediene v. Bush (2008)—In another lawsuit concerning the U.S. War on Terror and Guantanamo Bay, a prisoner challenged the United States’ right to detain him at Guantanamo Bay without a writ of habeas corpus. The Supreme Court found that fundamental rights of the Constitution apply to the Guantanamo detainees as well, including habeas corpus.

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January 30, 2014
Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were found guilty by an Italian appeals court for the 2007 murder of Knox’s roommate, Meredith Kercher.

They were first convicted of the murder in 2009 and each served four years in Italian prison; however, in 2011, an appeals court acquitted them of these charges due to a lack of evidence, and Knox returned to her hometown of Seattle.

In 2013, Italy’s Supreme Court dismissed the 2011 acquittal believing that during the appeal the court did not “consider all the evidence and discrepancies in testimony needed to be answered.” Italy’s Supreme Court designated a Florence appeals panel to further examine and reopen the case.

The retrial began on September 30th, 2013 in Florence, Italy. However, neither Knox nor Sollecito, were present at the start of the trial. Knox remained at home in Seattle throughout the entire trial, while Sollecito returned to Italy in November to defend his innocence.

After 12 hours of deliberations, the jury reinstated the original guilty verdicts against Knox and Sollecito that were given to them in the 2009 trial. The judge has sentenced Knox to 28 ½ years in prison and Sollecito to 25 years.

Knox watched the verdict live on television from her home in the U.S. and when the guilty verdict was read she said that she was “frightened and saddened” by the verdict, further commenting that “Having been found innocent before, I expected better from the Italian justice system… There has always been a marked lack of evidence. My family and I have suffered greatly from this wrongful persecution. This has gotten out of hand.”

So what happens next? The presiding judge has 90 days to write his arguments behind the jury’s guilty verdict and then the lawyers of Knox and Sollecito will have 90 days to appeal. Ted Simon, Knox’s attorney, said there will definitely be an appeal and that Knox’s extradition should not even be discussed at this time.

November 5, 2012
The past year of Amanda Knox’s life may have been better than the previous four years, but it was still far from normal.

Freed from Italian prison for now a little over a year, Amanda Knox is currently living in Seattle, lying low in a “seedy” part of town, and working on her memoir. She is dating a former boyfriend, James Terrano, a classical guitarist, and spends most of her time alone.

In September, her previous boyfriend and supposed-accomplice, Raffaele Sollecito, just completed his memoir, Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back with Amanda Knox. While Knox still hasn’t given her first formal interview, considered “one of the most coveted ‘gets’ being fought over by the American networks,” Sollecito has commented on his experience extensively, even admitting to being jealous of the attention that she got. Sollecito and Knox recently met up at Knox’s grandmother’s birthday party, which helped him come to terms with the girl he once dated. Says Sollecito, he realized almost immediately after seeing her after their release that she was not the she-devil that the media played her out to be, but instead “the Amanda that [he] loved for one week.”

Knox’s book is expected to come out in spring of 2013 and will supposedly net $4 million, most of which will go towards Knox’s staggering legal fees. Until then, Knox seems content to pass unnoticed through the ethnic neighborhood of Seattle in which she lives. Not surprising, considering her nightmarish four years spent in an Italian prison. As Sollecito explained, after getting out of prison, “everything was new…[it makes you] feel like a kid inside, just discovering.”

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For those of you scratching your heads wondering who Billy the Kid is; he is the western outlaw also known as William Bonney.  He died by the gun of Sheriff Pat Garrett at age 21. Despite his young age, Kid was said to have killed anywhere between 9 and 21 men. Richardson’s deputy chief of staff Eric Witt wants to clarify that they are not offering a general pardon for all of Kid’s crimes, but rather a pardon for the individual case of killing a sheriff.

Richardson is a known Billy the Kid aficionado, and is considering the pardon because of an alleged promise by Governor Lew Wallace.  He states, “Just think of all the good publicity New Mexico is receiving around the world on this…It’s fun”.  The defining issue revolves around the belief that Wallace promised this pardon in exchange for Kid’s knowledge in a murder case involving three men.  Those who oppose the pardon argue that there is no proof that Governor Wallace ever offered one; he may have simply tricked Kid in to offering up information.  Ancestor William Wallace argues that pardoning Billy the Kid would, “declare Lew Wallace to have been a dishonorable liar”.

Some of those in favor of Kid’s pardon have filed a petition, including defense attorney Randi McGinn who has offered to handle the case for free.  She writes, “A promise is a promise and should be enforced”.  McGinn also says that Wallace assured Kid that he had the authority to exempt him from prosecution should he cooperate and share his knowledge, but that Wallace never held up his end of the deal.

Sheriff Pat Garrett’s grandson, J.P. Garrett, argues that Richardson should have assigned an impartial historian to aid in the case, and believes that McGinn’s involvement may be a conflict of interest.  Richardson appointed Charles Daniels to the state Supreme Court, whom McGinn is married to. William Wallace agrees, also citing that McGinn has, “meager qualifications”.  Despite these accusations, McGinn claims that her only link to the administration is that she offered to handle the case for free because of Richardson’s lifelong interest in Billy the Kid.

Richardson told the Associated Press on Wednesday, “I don’t know where I’ll end up. I might not pardon him. But then I might”.  I guess we’ll just all have to anxiously await the outcome of this deceased outlaw’s judicial fate.

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“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.”  Regardless of whether you’ve heard them on TV or have been read them directly, most everyone knows what the Miranda warnings are.  These warnings are designed to protect a person’s right against self-incrimination and their right to have a lawyer. You must speak up in order to stay silent.

On June 1, 2010, in a 5-4 decision during the Berghuis v. Thompkins case, the Supreme Court ruled that in order to invoke one’s right to silence, one must first explicitly say that they want to invoke that right.  For instance, Thompkins, the accused in this case, decided to remain silent during his interrogation.  At some point, one of the investigators asked a question to which Thompkins simply responded “yes,” thereby implicating himself in the crime.  Because Thompkins did not tell the investigators that he was invoking his right to stay silent, his affirmative response to the questions could legally be used against him in court.  The statement was used, and a jury came back with a guilty verdict for Thompkins.  So, the lesson to be learned here is that if or when you are ever interrogated by the police, it is now legally assumed that you have waived your Miranda rights unless you speak up and say otherwise.

To read more about the Berghuis v. Thompkins case, click here or here.

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