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Upcoming Supreme Court Cases, Part II
By Tony Snyder | November 12, 2009
To follow up on last month’s post, we have two more cases worth monitoring:
Graham v. Florida / Sullivan v. Florida
These two cases involves the Eighth Amendment’s preclusion of cruel and unusual punishment. At issue is whether life imprisonment, with no possibility for parole, for juveniles on nonhomicide charges, violates the Eighth Amendment.
Neither Graham’s nor Sullivan’s cases were related to one another, other than they both share the common theme they were sentenced to life imprisonment for their individual charges. Mr. Sullivan was a 13-year-old charged as an adult for the sexual assault of an elderly woman, while Mr. Graham was a 19-year-old who violated his parole by committing attempted armed robbery while on parole for two previous robbery attempts.
In 2005, the Supremes ruled that defendants under the age of 18 could not be sentenced to death because of their “lack of maturity”. The court is now being asked to extend that “lack of maturity” reasoning to noncapital offense.
National Rifle Association v. Chicago / McDonald v. Chicago
These two cases involve the Second Amendment’s right to gun ownership. At issue is whether the city of Chicago has the constitutional authority to ban the sale of handgun within the city limits.
The background to these cases involves an ordinance preventing residents of Chicago from owning a handgun within the city limits, under the theory of curtailing violence. Prior to 2008, the Supremes had held the Second Amendment only pertained to federal laws, not state or local laws. However, in the District of Columbia v. Heller case, the Supreme Court held that individuals have a right to bear arms—period—regardless of which level of government enacted the law. As such, they determined that D.C. had violated the Second Amendment and struck down the ordinance as unconstitutional.
(Scriber’s Note: Expect the Supreme Court to rule Chicago’s ordinance as unconstitutional.)
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