WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider a case concerning a 2011 Alabama immigration law that makes it a crime to harbor or transport immigrants not authorized to be in the United States or to induce them to enter or live in the state. The move left in place an appeals court ruling blocking the law.
The justices, as is their custom, offered no reasons for turning down the appeal. Justice Antonin Scalia noted his dissent but also offered no reasoning.
The question in the case was whether the Alabama law conflicted with a similar federal law. In August, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the state law at the request of the Obama administration, saying federal immigration law and policy “comprehensively addresses criminal penalties for these actions undertaken within the borders of the United States, and a state’s attempt to intrude into this area is prohibited because of Congress.”
The Supreme Court has recently considered state efforts to address illegal immigration in connection with two Arizona laws.
In June, the court delivered a split decision on a 2010 Arizona law, upholding its most hotly debated provision but blocking others on the grounds that they interfered with the federal government’s role in setting immigration policy.
The court unanimously but tentatively sustained the law’s centerpiece, the one critics have called its “show me your papers” provision, leaving the door open to further challenges. The provision requires state law enforcement officials to determine the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest if they have reason to suspect that the individual might be in the country illegally.
But the court blocked three other provisions in the 2010 law, including one that would have subjected people in the country illegally to criminal penalties for activities such as seeking work.
“The national government has significant power to regulate immigration,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority on that decision. “The sound exercise of national power over immigration depends on the nation’s meeting its responsibility to base its laws on a political will informed by searching, thoughtful, rational civic discourse.”
In 2011, the court upheld a decision finding that a different Arizona law, this one imposing harsh penalties on businesses that hire illegal workers, was not pre-empted by federal law. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said the state law “simply seeks to enforce” a federal ban on hiring illegal workers.
Also Monday, justices dismissed an appeal from a Louisiana man who claimed that most of a seven-year delay between his arrest and murder trial was the result of a breakdown in the state’s system for paying defense lawyers in death penalty cases.
The court’s conservative justices prevailed in a 5-4 vote to say they should never have taken the case of Jonathan Edward Boyer, who eventually was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole. The outcome leaves his conviction and sentence in place.
The case was argued in January to address whether a state’s failure to pay lawyers for indigent defendant scan violate the Constitution’s guarantee of a speedy trial.
The justices occasionally agree to take up a case and then think better of it after the case is argued. When that happens, there is no decision from the high court, and the lower court ruling that was appealed is allowed to remain in place.
The case is Boyer v. Louisiana, 11-9953.
In other court business, justices unanimously upheld a federal appeals court decision validating Virginia’s limitation of its Freedom of Information Act to state citizens and some media outlets.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond had thrown the case out before its appeal to the Supreme Court, but the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia struck down a similar citizens-only Freedom of Information Act in Delaware.
Other states, including Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, New Hampshire and New Jersey, have some form of law limiting access to public records for non-citizens.
The case is McBurney v. Young, 12-17.
Information for this article was contributed by Adam Liptak of The New York Times and by Jesse J. Holland of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 04/30/2013