Welcome back, Deadline: Legal newsletter readers. The first week of the new Supreme Court term is in the books.

It started Monday morning with rejection — many rejections — on an order list that featured a long list of cases the justices won’t be hearing. Among the failed filings were a First Amendment appeal from a Michigan mother whose sons were barred from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts to middle school. The court similarly declined to consider Roy Moore’s bid to revive a defamation lawsuit over an ad during his losing Senate campaign in 2017, which the Alabama Republican said falsely portrayed him as soliciting sex from a 14-year-old girl.

The list also featured a statement from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who began the term on familiar ground: speaking out about matters of crime and punishment. Her solo statement came in an Alabama death penalty case that the court declined to review, in which the trial judge had ordered the arrest of a prospective juror for being 30 minutes late. Other potential jurors said they didn’t want to anger the judge. Although Sotomayor agreed with her colleagues that the case didn’t warrant review, the Obama-appointed justice said the danger of jurors worrying about expressing themselves “is especially acute in a capital case such as this one, where the defendant’s life hangs in the balance.”

Sotomayor’s statement followed her dissent last week in the Christa Pike case ahead of the instantly infamous botched lethal injection in Tennessee. The botch was made possible, in part, by the GOP-appointed majority’s unexplained order that let Pike’s execution go forward. The majority did so over dissent from Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that said the state was rushing before Pike’s legal claims could be resolved and that, “[s]tunningly, the Court acquiesces.”

As of this writing, Pike is alive but her fate is uncertain. Will the state again try to carry out her execution for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer? The Supreme Court is unlikely to stand in the way if so. In a 1947 ruling stemming from a botched electrocution, a divided court said Louisiana could try again. With or without that 1947 precedent, today’s court has broadly been in the business of letting the machinery of death turn.

Indeed, the court let another execution proceed by lethal injection this week, rejecting multiple stay applications from Jamaal Howard in Texas. Among the claims his lawyers raised was intellectual disability. Jackson was the only justice to note her dissent, after which Howard was executed at the state prison in Huntsville for the 2000 murder of Vickie Swartout.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants to revive military executions — and to livestream the firing squad shooting for all to see. Announcing the planned December execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, Hegseth said the government will publicize it “because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” Such a public execution would further solidify the U.S. as a global outlier on capital punishment while potentially producing terrorist propaganda in the process.

After Monday’s order list, the justices took the bench — but only eight of them. That’s because Justice Samuel Alito recused himself at the last minute from the first hearing of the term, in Suncor v. Boulder. The case carries nationwide implications for whether oil and gas companies can be sued in states courts over climate change damage. Alito withdrew because of his financial interest in the energy sector, which has led him to recuse himself from prior cases, too.

His absence could prove pivotal for the outcome of the closely watched appeal. It raises the prospect of a 4-4 deadlock, which would be a win for Boulder. For the companies to win, they need the justices to upend the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that said the suit can move forward. A tie would leave the state court ruling intact, without the justices making a nationwide precedent one way or the other.

The hearing did not clearly indicate which way a majority of the eight-member bench is headed, so we won’t have a true sense of how much Alito’s absence mattered until we see the decision, expected by July. That is, if we get a decision and not a deadlock.

Next week, the justices return to the bench for the second half of their two-week October hearing session. We’ll also get another order list with the latest action on pending appeals.

And we could soon learn the outcome of several shadow docket applications, including ones raising separate but thematically related gender issues. In one of them, the Trump administration wants the justices to let the government enforce its ban on gender-affirming medical care for inmates. In another, a high school wrestler in Washington state wants an order from the justices that protects her “from male competitors in girls’ wrestling.” The court has recently ruled against transgender people in a series of cases involving sports, the military, passports and gender-affirming care for minors.

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The post First week back at SCOTUS: Rejections, a short-handed hearing and another execution appeared first on MS NOW.

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