After two weeks hearing oral argument (including a short holiday week), the Supreme Court has the next two weeks “off” before its November sitting. But a final bit of SCOTUS action today comes in the form of this order list with two cert grants, a lot of cert denials, and two summary reversals. The cert grants are in one civil and one criminal “Indian” case, and the question presented in Denezpi v. US, 20-7622, from this cert petition is:
Is the Court of Indian Offenses of Ute Mountain Ute Agency a federal agency such that Merle Denezpi’s conviction in that court barred his subsequent prosecution in a United States District Court for a crime arising out of the same incident?
The two SCOTUS per curiam summary reversals both involve short unanimous decisions overturning rulings by the Ninth and Tenth Circuits that denied qualified immunity to police officers. The Ninth Circuit case, Rivas-Villegas v. Cortesluna, No. 20-1539 (S. Ct. Oct. 18, 2021) (available here), is described by the Justices as involving “Rivas-Villegas plac[ing] his knee on Cortesluna for no more than eight seconds and only on the side of his back near the knife that officers were in the process of retrieving.” The Tenth Circuit case, City Tahlequah v. Bond, No. 20-16689 (S. Ct. Oct. 18, 2021) (available here), is described by the Justices as involving two officers shooting to death a suspect who “raised the hammer [which he grabbed during a tense encounter] higher back behind his head and took a stance as if he was about to throw the hammer or charge at the officers.”
Though I do not follow discussions and debates over policing doctrines closely, I know that there has been considerable interest in encouraging the Supreme Court to cut back (or even eliminate) the judge-created doctrine of qualified immunity. These two new decisions would seem to suggest that this current Court seems just fine with applying qualified immunity and that any significant changes to the doctrine for the police will need to come from other branches.