The Supreme Court Decided Six Cases Today, Four Upholding Individual Claims against Government Agencies

The United States Supreme Court delivered six opinions this morning which are remarkable as a group.  Four of the six were unanimous; Four of the six were in favor of the individual and against the government; and in none of them did the justices align strictly according to their traditional conservative v. liberal reputations.

Four of the cases were favorable to individual civil rights and, in their particular spheres, may be important to civil rights practitioners.  Plaintiffs cases involving “wrong house” assaults by federal agents were given a breath of life in Martin v. United States allowing those cases to proceed despite the government’s restrictive reading of Federal Tort Claims Act language.   In Parrish v. United States, the Court revived a pro se prisoner’s claim where a hyper-technical procedural rule was used to ban his suit in the courts below.  The Court, in Soto v. United States held that combat injured veterans could proceed with claims even though, once again, the government attempted to bar them based on tortured language in the United States Code.  Finally, in A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, the Court read the ADA more broadly to allow recovery against the school district for failure to implement an IEP.

In one ruling against the individual, the Court decided for the IRS and against the petitioner who was attempting to continue with a due process hearing before the Tax Court.  Based on the fact that no levy was still in place, the Court in Commissioner v. Zuch found that the Tax Court lacked jurisdiction and the matter had to be dismissed.

Of course, the other case in which the individual lost against the state was a criminal case, Rivers v. Guerro. Unanimous and sadly authored by Justice Jackson without dissent, the Court once again invoked the AEDPA statute to procedurally preclude Mr. Rivers from presenting potentially exculpatory evidence that he discovered after his first habeas petition.  The application of AEDPA may not have been unforeseen but it, once again, places procedural bars to claims of actual innocence.