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Welcome to the advisory opinions podcast. I'm David French with Sarah Isker and we've got a lot of stuff today.

We've got some scotus stuff, some quick notes on scotus cases, some notes on potential cases are rising out of the midterms, a free speech case out of the ninth circuit involving a collision between a beauty pageant and a transgender contestant, and then some wildness out of the state of Washington regarding race and civil trials.

So yeah, this Washington case is fascinating is one word to describe it.

Sarah, but let's let's not get there yet. Let's not get there. You've got some stuff from scotus.

Well, we spent so much time, of course, on the Harvard and North Carolina affirmative action cases.

We didn't really even discuss the fact that of course there were other cases being argued last week, three others, two of which merit quick mention on this pod in case the decisions come out in some fun, interesting way and we want to come back.

I want to be able to say, obviously we talked about these favor argue.

The first one, which I do not expect a particularly interesting opinion on based on the oral argument is called cruise via Arizona.

Now, here you have a guy who was sentenced to death and during the course of that, the jurors were not told that he could receive life without the possibility of parole.

And actually in 1994, in a Supreme Court case called Simmons V. South Carolina, the Supreme Court held that jurors must receive such information to rebutton inference that the defendant poses a future danger to their community.

Arizona basically just declined to ever apply Simmons.

And so in 2016, the Supreme Court decided a case called Lynch via Arizona that just was like, yeah, Arizona, this applies to you to welcome to the club that's been here for a while.

But Mr. Cruz would like to revisit his death sentence in light of that, but you're running into Arizona State procedural rule 32.1G, which requires a significant change in the law for post conviction review.

That's what this is going to turn around. And you had Justice Thomas with what was perhaps a telling question, is there even a federal interest here? Like, why are we here?

Which you can chalk up to being just Justice Thomas in his ordinary questioning nature, but unfortunately for team Cruz, the Chief Justice also jumped in said Arizona basically wasn't acting with any hostility and applying this rule and suggested that perhaps Arizona was just limiting post conviction review, which was perfectly within the state's purview.

So David, I'm expecting this in fact to be upheld. It will have no particular bearing on anyone outside of the state of Arizona, really.

And not even on the Simmons or Lynch rule, but just in fact on sort of the state's ability to limit post conviction review, which I think they will say is pretty broad.

Next up, how do case called Jones V Hendrix? Now, this way sort of thought was a little bit interesting because we've talked about some of the underlying parts of this case as well. And again, we're going to have a criminal case here.

Where it's not actually going to be on the facts, which are like the really fun criminal cases, David, like, you know, the opening your garage door and running in the curtallage case here, Mr. Jones was convicted at trial being a felon in possession of a firearm under 18 USC 922 G.

He was sentenced to 27 years. He's more than 20 years in when the Supreme Court decides Rayhoff, the United States, which we talked about briefly David. And this was where the felon in possession requires the government to prove that the defendant knew he was prohibited from possessing a firearm.

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