Guns, Faith, Terror on Court's Docket

The U.S. Supreme Court began its annual term Monday, with a new justice, Sonia Sotomayor, on the bench. The court will consider a number of interesting cases involving gun-ownership rights, occasions on which Miranda rights can be invoked, terrorism law, and whether a cross originally conceived as a war memorial on federal land amounts to a government endorsement of Christianity.

That last case, Salazar v. Buono, which will be heard early in the term, involves a cross first erected in 1934 in a remote part of the Mojave Desert as a memorial to veterans of World War I. Since the cross is on federal land, one Frank Buono objected to it as an endorsement of a particular religion. Congress tried to get around the objection through a land swap that made the acre on which the cross stands a privately held parcel, in exchange for taking some previously private property in the vicinity, but the 9th Circuit ruled that was an illegitimate maneuver and the cross still constitutes a government endorsement of religion. The cross is covered, awaiting the high court's decision.

Another case, Shatzer v. Maryland, involves a man in prison who was questioned about alleged sexual abuse of his 3-year-old son and invoked his Miranda rights not to speak without a lawyer present. Some 31 months later, having acquired new evidence, police questioned him again, without a lawyer present. Did his original invocation of his Miranda rights still hold?

At stake in U.S. v. Stevens is a 1999 law that made it illegal to create, possess or sell a "depiction of animal cruelty." Since this involves depiction rather than the actual act, does it violate First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and expression?

In McDaniel v. Brown, the court will determine whether a convicted child rapist was wrongly granted a new trial on the basis of insufficient evidence as the result of testimony from an alleged DNA expert that turned out to be false.

In two cases joined together, Holder v.

Humanitarian Law Project and Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, the court will determine whether it is constitutional to make it a crime to provide "material support" to a foreign organization determined by the government to be a terrorist organization. Another case will test whether 17 Uighur Chinese detainees at Guantanamo, who were determined by the Bush administration not to be a terrorist threat but can't be sent to China, where they might face persecution, can be released on American soil.

Two cases involving sex offenders are on the court's docket, as is a case, Berghuis v. Smith, that seeks to clarify whether the jury pool in that case was unrepresentative of a fair cross-section of the community. A couple of employment discrimination cases are also on the docket.

Possibly the most controversial case, to be argued in January or later, is Maloney v. Chicago, which will decide whether the high court's landmark decision in D.C. v. Heller that the Second Amendment established an individual right to keep and bear arms can be applied against states and localities. Since the District of Columbia is a federal enclave, that question is still unresolved.

Over the years, mainly through the vehicle of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court has decided that most of the individual rights granted in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, apply against state and local governments (decisions some constitutional scholars have criticized). However, the Second Amendment — as well as the Third Amendment's ban on the forced housing of soldiers in private homes and some parts of the Fifth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments — has never been "incorporated" into state and local law by the high court. In a separate case in New York, Sotomayor ruled that it should not be, so it's not difficult to guess how she will vote. But a majority of the court might decide differently.

All in all, it looks like a potentially memorable term for the high court.

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