Supreme Court adds four new cases to 2025-26 docket

The Supreme Court on Friday evening released orders from the justices’ private conference on Thursday. The justices added four new cases, involving issues such as federal sentencing, the death penalty, and civil procedure, to their docket for the 2025-26 term. 

The court had originally been scheduled to release the list of orders on Monday morning at 9:30 a.m. But after a software malfunction resulted in email notifications regarding individual cases included on the order list being sent prematurely to lawyers involved in those cases, the court opted to release the entire list shortly after 6 p.m. on Friday. 

The justices granted Alabama’s request to review the case of Joseph Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Durk Van Dam. In 2024, after considering the case at 22 consecutive conferences, the justices sent Smith’s case back to a federal appeals court for it to clarify its ruling that executing Smith would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because he is intellectually disabled. 

At that time, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch indicated that they would have taken up the case and heard oral arguments then, without waiting for the lower court to reconsider it. 

When the case returned to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, that court once again ruled that Smith’s death sentence should be set aside. It emphasized that it had reached its conclusion “based on the complete record, including any relevant expert testimony.” And it “unambiguously reject[ed] any suggestion that a court may ever conclude that” a defendant in a capital case is intellectually disabled simply because “the lower end of the standard-error range for his lowest of multiple IQ scores is 69. And we didn’t so conclude the last time we opined in this case.” 

The state came back to the Supreme Court last year, once again asking the justices to intervene. Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour told the court that “[e]valuating multiple IQ scores is ‘complicated,’” and the Supreme Court “‘has not specified how’ to do it.” 

In a brief unsigned order on Friday, the justices granted the state’s request and agreed to weigh in on “[w]hether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores in assessing” a claim that a capital defendant is intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be executed. 

The justices agreed to take up three other cases, two of which will be argued together. In Rutherford v. United States and Carter v. United States, they will decide whether federal courts can consider changes to criminal law that do not apply retroactively as “extraordinary and compelling reasons” warranting a sentence reduction. 

And in Coney Island Auto Parts v. Burton, the justices agreed to decide a procedural question – whether Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(c)(1) imposes a time limit to set aside a default judgment that is void for lack of personal jurisdiction. 

The justices declined to review a petition filed by Ohio in the case of Karla Ayers, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for arson and child endangerment after her father’s house in Massillon, Ohio, where she lived with her toddler son, her father, and his family, burned down. Ayers told investigators two different stories about the origins of the fire – that her son had been playing with a lighter and set a mattress on fire, and that she had fallen asleep with a cigarette on the mattress. 

At Ayers’s trial, an expert testified for the prosecution that there appeared to be two ignition points on the mattress, undermining Ayers’s suggestion that the fire was accidental. Prosecutors also told the jury that Ayers had previously threatened to burn the house down. 

Several years after her appeals were concluded, the Ohio Innocence Project took on Ayers’s case. It hired an expert, John Lentini, who authored a report rebutting the prosecution’s expert. Lentini wrote that the state’s expert had used methods that were “unreliable, unscientific, and at odds with generally accepted fire investigation methodology.” 

Ayers then filed a motion for federal post-conviction relief arguing (as relevant here) that her trial lawyers had failed to provide the kind of representation required by the Constitution. A federal district court threw her case out, ruling that she had come to court too late, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit reversed and revived it. The appeals court concluded that Lentini’s report was the kind of “factual predicate” that would justify allowing Ayers to file her petition for post-conviction relief after the one-year statute of limitations had run, because she could not have “discovered” it earlier. 

The state came to the Supreme Court last fall, asking the justices to weigh in. After considering the case at four consecutive conferences, the court turned aside the state’s appeal, leaving the 6th Circuit’s ruling in place.  

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Thomas, penned a short statement regarding the decision not to grant review. He contended that the court of appeals was wrong to treat “newly discovered support for a previously available claim as sufficient to restart the 1-year limitations period.” But there was no reason to intervene now, he said, because Ayers has been released from prison. But he cautioned that “lower courts should not construe the denial of review as approval of the decision below.” 

The justices declined to take up two other high-profile appeals: one from the Republican National Committee asking them to review a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court allowing election officials to count provisional ballots from voters whose mail ballots were invalidated, and a challenge to the District of Columbia’s ban on high-capacity magazines.