I just received word that Justice City, USA, another blog, listed the Confrontation Blog as one of the top 50 Criminal Justice and Criminology Blogs. I didn't even know there were 50 blogs in the field! But it's an interesting list, which you can find at.
http://careersincriminaljustice.net/?p=60
In any event, my thanks to readers. I look forward to being able to comment with (relative) lack of restraint once Briscoe is decided.
7 comments:
How long does it normally take the Supreme Court to make a decision on a case once the oral arguments are made?
You never know. It can be anywhere from a few months to over a year.
Anonymous,
While there are exceptions, it is highly likely that there will be a decision by the end of the term, i.e., June or July.
Or a few days later, with a Vacate & Remand.
What happened to the (at least four) justices who voted to grant cert. and who presumably thought the answer in Briscoe wasn't clear under Melendez?
Briscoe decision is in. Vacated and remanded.
I suspect the conventional wisdom will be: The four Melendez-Diaz dissenters voted to grant cert in Briscoe in order to see if Justice Sotomayor would join an opinion overruling or (probably more likely) severely limiting Melendez-Diaz's holding.
It turns out, she wouldn't.
So then what do you do? Scalia's view all along (and I think Prof. Friedman's, before the Briscoe cert grant) was that Briscoe should never have been set for argument. Briscoe's facts are very close to Melendez-Diaz, so it's the kind of case that one would normally have expected the Court to GVR in a routine per curiam order after M-D came down.
Since it looks like Melendez-Diaz isn't going anywhere for awhile (and it would be sort of awkward to publish another 5-4 opinion where the majority says, "Uh, yeah, we meant what we just in Melendez less than a year ago"), the Court simply does what you would have expected it to do in the first place -- GVRs Briscoe in a per curiam order.
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