I was just reading this article on the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a case regarding removing the feeding tube from Theresa Schiavo (a woman in a vegetative state). The Supreme Court refused without comment on this one.
My question is does this in effect count as a decision by the court? By not hearing the case and not commenting are they saying, in effect, that the lower court’s decision was correct or does it mean nothing? Other alternatives I see is the SCOTUS does not view it as a constitutional issue so is not subject to their review or it is a political hot potato and they just don’t want to touch it (that last is my cynical side…I seriously hope that is not the case).
Perhaps another way to put this is what do those involved in this case (either side) take away from this decision (or rather non-decision) when trying to figure on future legal action?
This may be headed to GD territory but I am thinking there may be a factual answer to how the courts work in this regard.
SCOTUS is permitted (with very rare exceptions) to set its own calendar, deciding which cases to take. (There was extensive discussion of this in GD about a month ago.)
SCOTUS refusal to take a case has two implications, with regard to your questions:
(1) Legally, the highest lower-court decision stands. I.e., if a man is convicted in trial court, the conviction is reversed in appeals court, and SCOTUS denies cert., the appeals court decision stands and the man goes free.
(2) The decision not to grant cert. is a legal nullity. I.e., it does not rule on the lower court’s decision – it doesn’t affirm it, it certainly doesn’t reverse it. It merely says that there aren’t sufficient grounds to review it again, in the opinion of at least six SCOTUS justices (it only takes four to grant cert.). It therefore is not precedent except insofar as it was before SCOTUS took up the question of granting cert. – i.e., the ruling of the high state court stands as precedent for that state; the Federal Circuit Court ruling stands as precedent in that circuit – but neither is applicable as binding precedent (though certainly citeable as supportive precedent) anywhere else than in that state or circuit.
To extend a bit from Poly’s excellent summary - if there’s a conflict between two different courts, and the Supremes deny cert., the conflict simply continues. Usually, conflicts are exactly the reason the Court will intervene, but if it’s a lopsided issue - let’s say, eight of the circuits rule YES, with only one circuit (all too often, the Ninth) saying NO, and the rest haven’t ruled yet - the Court may decline to rule on a case with the hope that the outlyer circuit will come to its senses.
I don’t know how familiar you are with this particular case but it has been dragging on for something like fourteen years. The woman’s husband maintains she would never want to live the way she is living now and her parents maintain that she would never, as a good and true Catholic, commit suicide by refusing heroic measures. Or some such BS; after all these years, the parents still maintain the woman can be rehabilitated in spite of overwhelming medical opinion to the contrary. The Governor of Florida caused a bill to be passed by the state legislature, giving him the authority to intervene. He then ordered the re-insertion of a feeding tube that had been removed on court order a few days previously. After all the legal manouvering, the State Supreme Court found the so-called Terry’s Law to be unconstitutional, which meant the feeding tube should be removed, hence the petition to the Supremes. According to a news story on TV a few hours ago, the Governor will fight on to preserve this oh-so-precious life that effectively ended long ago. Personally I think he is currying favor for his own run at the Presidency. I also think Florida has some really pressing problems that deserve his full and undivided attention; this one doesn’t. I really wish the Supremes had settled it once and for all.
Could this also be a result of the “politics” involved? Several examples:
** SCOTUS refuses to hear a case because the justices believe the country is not yet ready for their authority decision just yet. (The issue is still quite “new” on the national agenda and the justices would prefer more time, and cases to develop, before stepping to render a decision.)
** SCOTUS refuses to hear a case because whatever the decision they render will polarize the country. (The only issue that regularly comes to mind here are Second Amendment cases.)
** SCOTUS refuses to hear a case because they really want a more cut-and-dried issue to be addressed. (The closest case that comes to mind is the recent Pledge case where SCOTUS actually ruled on whether the plantiff had the standing to bring the case or not.)
** SCOTUS refuses to hear a case for political considerations, i.e., SCOTUS really isn’t as impartial as we assume them to be. (The classic case is the Florida 2000 decision concerning the 2000 presidential election.)
GD-territory political rants aside, help me understand the process here. Obviously, when the Florida Supreme Court found the law unconstitutional, Ms. Schiavo wasn’t immediately removed from life support. So was there some sort of “we-think-this-is-
bunk-but-don’t-do-anything-until-the-Supreme-Court-considers-an-appeal” provision? Even if it isn’t officially taking a position, does the SC denial of cert constitute a final enough decision that they can go ahead and take her off life support? Who would oversee/enforce this? The Florida SC?
I’m not familiar with the legal specifics of this case, but if the issue in the case is one where carrying out the court’s order will result in an irreversible result (for example, death), the court will stay its own ruling to allow the losing party to appeal to a hgher court. The court can act on its own motion to issue the stay or one of the parties to the case may move for it. I’m assuming that’s what happened here, the FL SC struck down “Terry’s Law” on federal constitutional grounds and ten stayed its own ruling pending the utcome of any further appeal. Once the appeal is resolved (in this case, by denial of cert), the court will lift its stay.
Stays can also be issued to allow parties to act to fulfill the court’s order without the onus of it being coerced by the court.
There is a General Question here, folks. Let’s stay focused on the actual question and leave the opinions (and specifics of this case which is merely an examplar and not the point of the thread) for GD (and, probably, the Pit).
“Cert” is short for “certiorari” – which is the writ by which the Supreme Court calls up any case that they decide that they will hear an “appeal” on. (An actual appeal is a matter of right, and there are only a very few circumstances where you can “take it all the way up to the Supreme Court” as a matter of right, rather than by their leave.)
Actually, “cert” in the normal uses of “granting cert” and “denying cert” is short, not for the writ itself, but for the petition for a writ of certiorari which those wishing to have a case considered by the court submit to request their review of it. It is those petitions which are granted or denied.
Does the USSC take some kind of action in denying cert or does it sort of just happen by inaction? Or both (like a President either directly signing a bill into law or letting it pass by leaving it unsigned for ten days).
For example, if I were to submit an appeal to the Supreme Court what happens if the Justices just ignore it? Is there some time limit before the original court can just declare its original standing is final and should be carried out? Suppose new justices take seats on the court and ten years later decide to grant me cert? Suppose the original justices denied me cert when I filed; can later justices decide to grant it?
The court issues a written denial. It can be as short as two words: “Certiorari denied.” The Court is not required to explain why it denies cert and it rarely does. Once it’s denied that’s it. I suppose the Court could, upon its own motion, decide to grant cert after denying it but I am unaware of such an instance (although I’m hardly a SCOTUS scholar).
Why wouldn’t the court explain its reasoning when denying cert? It would seem it would be useful for future cases if they explained why this or that case didn’t pass muster. Or is the issue here more that so many people hang on the resoning of the court that even a description of reasons for denial might conceivably be used by someone to guess the leanings/reasoning of the court?
That would be tantamount to taking the case – you don’t think that people who write to Cecil are unique in “creative” legal arguments like “I’m not guilty of income tax evasion because the Sixteenth Amendment is unconstitutional – and I can prove it!” or “It’s clear that in embarrassing Little Johnny before the whole class for acting up in it, his teacher was guilty of cruel and unusual punishment, and we’re going to appeal our suit against her all the way to the Supreme Court”, do you?
Some justices will write brief “dissents from the denial of cert” indicating in short opinions why in their opinion the case should have been considered. Messrs. Justices Brennan and Marshall used to do this for every capital case that was denied cert, as they personally believed the death penalty to be unconstitutional, and felt it was the least they could do for the men and women going to execution, to make the statement that in the eyes of at least two justices of the Supreme Court it was improper to take their lives.
By the time a typical case has gotten to a level where it can be appealed to the Supreme Court, it’s been through a couple of layers of (usually well thought through) arguments, briefs, and opinions already. While it is impossible to decide what will make the justices take a particular case, they can only handle perhaps at most 200 cases (and that by working themselves ragged) of the several thousand they receive cert petitions for. They tend to “shop” for cases where they can make particular statements, e.g., reversing, refining, or distinguishing a precedent set by an earlier case (cf. the abortion cases since Roe v Wade), decide between conflicting precedents set by circuit courts, etc. If they took the time to write up the reasoning why they decided not to take the time to hear and rule on every one of those several thousand cases… well, you get the point.
Here are the considerations that the U.S. Supreme Court uses when deciding to grant certorari or not:
In other words, the Supreme Court sees itself mainly charged with resolving conflicts among federal courts of appeal and state high courts, and to a lesser extent, resolving major questions of federal law that need authoritative resolution. They do not see themselves in the business of correcting legal errors of lower courts (unless they see the lower court’s decision as going against their prior rulings), so the fact that a lower court may have screwed up is really of little concern to them.
The denial of certorari does not mean that the lower court was right, just that the decision was not one which Supreme Court felt required its supervisory power.
The Court doesn’t explain its reasoning because the only real reason is that the case lost a show of hands and didn’t get four votes. The Court does take cases occassionally because it wishes to say something about the jurisdictional and prudential circumstances under which federal courts will take cases, but in those cases the court grants cert and writes an opinion that will have precedential value. A denial of cert doesn’t say anything about the lower court ruling one way or the other and has no precedential value, so an explanation of why cert was denied would be meaningless.
Besides that, the time it would consume to write an opinion on why cert was denied in each of the thousands of cases it gets would be staggering. Denials of cert go on for pages and pages even when they just say “certiorari denied.”
From reading the article, it appears that some appeals still exist in Florida state courts from her parents regarding a new trial. I don’t know what the substance of those appeals so it’s hard to say definitively, but at first blush they appear to be grasping at straws and that the issues are res judicata. For the time being, though, she’s still in legal limbo.
Incidentally, notice how the article says that the Supremes “ruled in favor” of her husband, which as we’ve been discussing here is technically incorrect: although the effect is much the same, they didn’t “rule” on anything.
He’s right. But, as the link below demonstrates, dissenting opinions in denials of certiorari are more common. And Justices sometimes even cite these dissents as authority.