User:The 1Seraph
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COVID-19
[edit]Holding
[edit]- The police power of a state must be held to embrace at least such reasonable regulations established directly by legislative enactment to protect public health and safety.
- State legislatures can legally penalize people who refuse to get vaccinated per the powers mentioned in sentence (1.).
Holding
[edit]- State quarantine law is reasonable exercise of police power in absence of federal preemption, and does not impermissibly affect interstate commerce nor violate Equal Protection, Due Process clauses or treaties with foreign governments.
Holding
[edit]- School districts could constitutionally exclude unvaccinated students.
- The ordinance reflected the broad discretion needed by authorities to protect the public health.
Due Process
[edit]Holding
[edit]- Prosecutor's reference in criminal proceedings to defendant's exercising his 5th amendment rights, and instruction allowing jury to consider it, violates that right.
- Prosecutors cannot explicitly or implicitly imply a defendant's guilt on the basis of the defendant choosing to exercise their 5th amendment rights.
Holding
[edit]- A suspect's silence during interrogation does not invoke their right to remain silent under Miranda v. Arizona.
- The invocation of that right must be unambiguous, and silence is not enough to invoke it.
- Voluntarily and knowingly responding to police interrogation after remaining silent constitutes a waiver of the right to remain silent, provided that a Miranda warning was given and the suspect understood it.
Building Case Against Abortion
[edit]Holding
[edit]- A Texas law classifying consensual, adult homosexual intercourse as illegal sodomy violated the privacy and liberty of adults to engage in private intimate conduct under the 14th Amendment. Court of Appeals for the Fourteenth District of Texas reversed.
Independent Counsel Cases
[edit]Holding
[edit]- The Independent Counsel Act is constitutional, as it does not increase the power of the judiciary or legislative branches at the expense of the executive.
Holding
[edit]- The Supreme Court does have the final voice in determining constitutional questions.
- No person, not even the president of the United States, is completely above the law.
- The president cannot use executive privilege as an excuse to withhold evidence that is "demonstrably relevant in a criminal trial."
- Nixon was forced to hand over the Watergate Tapes.
Holding
[edit]- The President is entitled to absolute immunity from legal liability for civil damages based on his official acts.
- A grant of absolute immunity to the President would not leave him with unfettered power. It stated that there were formal and informal checks on presidential action that did not apply with equal force to other executive officials.
- The President is not immune from criminal charges stemming from his official or unofficial acts while he is in office.
Holding
[edit]- The Constitution does not protect the President from federal civil litigation involving actions committed before entering office.
- There is no requirement to stay the case until the President leaves office.
- Presidential immunity would apply only if the President could show that a private civil lawsuit would somehow interfere with the President's constitutionally assigned duties.
Unitary Executive Theory
[edit]Holding
[edit]- Congress cannot reserve removal power over executive officers to itself, except for impeachment. The Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 violates the separation of powers doctrine.
Holding
[edit]- Defined the difference between executive officers and officers occupying “quasi-legislative” or “quasi-judicial” positions.
- The latter can only be removed with consent of Congress.
- FTC is quasi-legislative body therefore Humphrey's firing was unconstitutional.
- The President may not remove any appointee to an independent regulatory agency except for reasons Congress has provided by law.
Holding
[edit]- The President has the exclusive power to remove executive branch officials, and does not need the approval of the Senate or any other legislative body.
- Applies this strictly to purely executive officers.
- The power to remove appointed officers is vested in the President alone. According to Taft, to deny the President that power would not allow him to "discharge his own constitutional duty of seeing that the laws be faithfully executed."
Shurtleff v. United States (1926)
[edit]Holding
[edit]- Barring a specific prohibition in the statute creating an office, the President of the United States may remove any officer without cause.
Religious Freedom Cases
[edit]Holding
[edit]- By failing to act in a manner neutral to religion, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
- Although a baker, in his capacity as the owner of a business serving the public, "might have his right to the free exercise of his religion limited by generally applicable laws", a State decision in an adjudication “in which religious hostility on the part of the State itself” is a factor violates the "State’s obligation of religious neutrality" under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
- The Commission compared Phillips' religious beliefs to defense of slavery or the Holocaust. Kennedy found such comparisons "inappropriate for a Commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law".
Institutional Racism Cases
[edit]Holding
[edit]- The prosecution must turn over all evidence that might exonerate the defendant (exculpatory evidence) to the defense.
- Withholding exculpatory evidence violates due process "where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment." The court determined that under Maryland law, the withheld evidence could not have exculpated the defendant but was material to his level of punishment.
Holding
[edit]- Higher courts cannot mandate lower courts to provide exculpatory evidence in grand jury trials. Requiring the prosecutor to present exculpatory as well as incriminating evidence would alter the grand jury's historical role transforming it from an accusatory body that sits to assess whether there is adequate basis for bringing a criminal charge into an adjudicatory body that sits to determine guilt or innocence.
- The ruling protects prosecutors who withhold "substantial exculpatory evidence" in order to obtain an indictment, as the role of the grand jury is not to determine guilt, but rather to decide whether there is enough evidence of a crime; exculpatory evidence can be presented at trial.
Lubbock Cases
[edit]Holding
[edit]- Because any reasonable correctional officer should have realized that Trent Taylor’s conditions of confinement offended the Eighth Amendment, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit erred in granting the officers qualified immunity.
2nd Amendment Rights
[edit]Holding
[edit]- The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
- Provisions of the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 infringe an individual's right to bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment.
- Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court's opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller's holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those "in common use at the time" finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.
- The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District's total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of "arms" that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition – in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute – would fail constitutional muster. Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional. Because Heller conceded at oral argument that the D.C. licensing law is permissible if it is not enforced arbitrarily and capriciously, the Court assumes that a license will satisfy his prayer for relief and does not address the licensing requirement. Assuming he is not disqualified from exercising Second Amendment rights, the District must permit Heller to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home.
Holding
[edit]- The Due Process Clause incorporates the second amendment rights outlines in Heller against the States.
Landmark Cases
[edit]Holding
[edit]- The Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination requires law enforcement officials to advise a suspect interrogated in custody of their rights to remain silent and to obtain an attorney, at no charge if need be.
- i.e. an individual has the right to know and understand their rights.
- Supreme Court of Arizona reversed and remanded.
Holding
[edit]- Possession of a handgun near school is not an economic activity nor has a substantial effect on interstate commerce, and therefore cannot be regulated by Congress.
- The Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 is unconstitutional.
- This was the first time that the Supreme Court acted to limit the powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause.
Holding
[edit]- When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee's DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
Holding
[edit]- The Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth, excludes unconstitutionally obtained evidence from use in criminal prosecutions.
- Ohio Supreme Court reversed.
- If incriminating evidence is obtained without a proper search warrant, said evidence is inadmissible in the court of law as a violation of unreasonable search and seizure clause under the Forth Amendment.
Random Interesting Cases
[edit]Holding
[edit]- The physical presence rule is rejected as unsound and incorrect. States may charge sales tax on out-of-state purchases, even if the seller does not have a physical presence in the taxing state.
- This is specifically regarding online purchases.
- State sales tax can apply to online purchases.
Holding
[edit]- Tomatoes are "vegetables" and not "fruit" within the meaning of the Tariff Act of 1883 based on the common meaning of those words.