The Supreme Court's Shadow Docket

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NPR

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 16.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2023

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Roe. Brown. Obergefell. Dobbs. These Supreme Court decisions are the ones that make headlines, and eventually history books. But today, the vast majority of the Court's work actually happens out of the public eye, on what's become known as the shadow docket. The story of that transformation spans more than a century, and doesn't fall neatly along partisan lines. Today on the show: how the so-called court of last resort has gained more and more power over American policy, and why the debates we don't see are often more important than the ones we do.

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Terry Gross, the host of Fresh Air. We bring you in-depth, long-form interviews
0:05.8	with actors, directors, musicians, authors, journalists, and more. Listen to our PeeBuddy
0:11.4	Award-winning Fresh Air Podcast from WHYY and NPR.
0:16.9	Late into the night on July 13, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee was supposed to already be dead.
0:33.9	But he wasn't. The 47-year-old, missing an eye, way-power-necked tattoos, had been convicted
0:40.4	in 1999 of murdering a family of three. And on this July Monday, 21 years later, he'd been scheduled
0:48.9	to die by lethal injection. But just ahead of the execution, a judge intervened, putting
0:57.5	everything on hold.
1:02.2	In an order, the judge said before any execution, certain constitutional questions needed answers.
1:08.8	The government's lawyers disagreed, which sent the case to the Supreme Court.
1:18.8	Lawyers for the government and for Lee filed briefs, laying out why the execution should
1:23.7	or shouldn't move ahead.
1:26.2	The government's planned use of pentabarbital is likely to cause extreme, needless pain
1:30.6	and suffering, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
1:33.3	The Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner of painless death. Rather, the Constitution
1:40.0	prohibits only the super-addition of terror, pain, or disgrace to a capital sentence.
1:47.7	Around 2 a.m., the Supreme Court released a decision.
1:52.6	Plaintiffs in this case have not made the showing required to justify last minute intervention.
1:58.0	The plaintiffs' executions may proceed as planned. It is so ordered.
2:05.5	The U.S. has carried out its first federal execution some 17 years following a Supreme Court ruling.
2:13.9	Daniel Lewis Lee died by lethal injection after an early morning Supreme Court ruling.
2:19.6	Overnight, as the Supreme Court stepped in, as the Supreme Court, as the Supreme Court.
	...

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