The United States Supreme Court issued three important rulings yesterday, securing immigrant rights in Arizona, extending leniency to convicted minors and protecting campaign contributor’s freedom of speech.
Arizona v. United States of America, which was ruled in favor of The United States, addressed the Arizona state law, filed as SB 1070, that gave various rights to law enforcement that are now deemed unconstitutional.
“[Section] 6 authorizes state and local officers to arrest without a warrant a person ‘the officer has probable cause to believe . . . has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States’,” as stated in the publicly released court decision .
The Supreme Court ruled that Arizona was not justified in creating and enforcing laws that overreach the established Federal Laws on immigration.
“States are precluded from regulating conduct in a field that Congress has determined must be regulated by its exclusive governance,” the court decision said.
In the case of Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled in line with the Eighth Amendment, providing a restriction on sentencing minors to capital punishment. With this decision the court established that a sentence of life in prison with no parole is equal to the death penalty in the case of a minor charged for homicide.
The court ruled that “[Supreme Court Justices] therefore hold that mandatory life without parole for those under the age of 18 at the time of their crimes violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on ‘cruel and unusual punishments,’” in the published court ruling.
The Supreme Court established that minors have more “capacity for change” than adults as they progress into maturity.
In the case of American Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Montana Attorney General, Steve Bullock, the Supreme Court ruled the state law prohibiting campaign contributions according to political stance was unconstitutional.
A Montana state law provides that a “corporation may not make . . . an expenditure in connection with a candidate or a political committee that supports or opposes a candidate or a political party,” according to the publicly released court decision. The Supreme Court reversed the Montana State Supreme Court ruling saying that, “Montana’s arguments in support of the judgment below either were already rejected in Citizens United, or fail to meaningfully distinguish that case.”
The Supreme Court will announce the decision on President Obama’s Health Care reform Thursday. The decisioning will verify if the reform measures are constitutional.
