The Supreme Court announced Monday it will hear two cases but most likely not until the start of their next term in the fall.
The first case they granted comes from Los Angeles and stems from a father and mother who were accused of abuse by their rebellious child. After obtaining court judgments that they were “factually innocent” of the charges with orders that their arrest record be sealed and destroyed the parents were nonetheless placed on California’s Child Abuse Central Index database of known or suspected child abusers.
A panel of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals concluded that California offers no mechanism for people to get off the database list even if they were placed there in error. The database is accessible to a wide array of state and private entities. The Ninth Circuit ruled that state violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause because people like Craig and Wendy Humphries are not given a fair opportunity to challenge their placement on the database.
Here is the question the Court will consider in Los Angeles County v. Humphries: “Are claims for declaratory relief against a local public entity subject to the requirement of Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978) that the plaintiff demonstrate that the constitutional violation was the result of a policy, custom or practice attributable to the local public entity as determined by the First, Second, Fourth and Eleventh Circuits, or are such claims exempt from Monell’s requirement as determined by the Ninth Circuit?”
The other granted case, Harrington v. Richter, also comes from California and features a convicted murderer who claims his lawyer did shoddy work in his defense. The justices have been asked to determine if: “In granting habeas corpus relief to a state prisoner, did the Ninth Circuit deny the state court judgment the deference mandated by 28 U.S.C. section 2254(d) and impermissibly enlarge the Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel by elevating the value of expert-opinion testimony in a manner that would virtually always require defense counsel to produce such testimony rather than allowing him to rely instead on cross-examination or other methods designed to create reasonable doubt about the defendant’s guilt?” The justices have also asked the parties to address: “Does AEDPA deference apply to a state court’s summary disposition of a claim, including a claim under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984)?”