The Supreme Court gives two wins to the defense bar today.
The most impact will come from Rehaif v. United States, 588 U.S. --- (2019). The Court held that for prosecutions under 18 U. S. C. §922(g) (gun crimes like felon in possession, etc.) the knowledge requirement extends to the defendant's prohibited status.
In other words, in a felon in possession case for instance, the government will have to prove both that the defendant knowingly possessed the gun, and knew of his or her felony status: "To convict a defendant, the Government therefore must show that the
defendant knew he possessed a firearm and also that he
knew he had the relevant status when he possessed it. "
This is a big change. And as the dissent points out, it may entitle many people with prior 922 convictions to seek relief (though that is speculation at this point).
In any event, this is a very good decision.
In the other case, Flowers v. Mississippi, 588 U.S. --- (2019), the Supreme Court vacated a murder conviction based on a Batson violation. Here are the salient points:
Four critical facts, taken together, require reversal. First, in the six trials combined, the State employed its peremptory challenges to strike 41 of the 42 black prospective jurors that it could have struck—a statistic that the State acknowledged at oral argument in this Court. Tr. of Oral Arg. 32. Second, in the most recent trial, the sixth trial, the State exercised peremptory strikes against five of the six black prospective jurors. Third, at the sixth trial, in an apparent effort to find pretextual reasons to strike black prospective jurors, the State engaged in dramatically disparate questioning of black and white prospective jurors. Fourth, the State then struck at least one black prospective juror, Carolyn Wright, who was similarly situated to white prospective jurors who were not struck by the State.
We need not and do not decide that any one of those four facts alone would require reversal. All that we need to decide, and all that we do decide, is that all of the relevant facts and circumstances taken together establish that the trial court committed clear error in concluding that the State’s peremptory strike of black prospective juror Carolyn Wright was not “motivated in substantial part by discriminatory intent.” Foster v. Chatman, 578 U. S. ___, ___ (2016) (slip op., at 23) (internal quotation marks omitted). In reaching that conclusion, we break no new legal ground. We simply enforce and reinforce Batson by applying it to the extraordinary facts of this case.
