Supreme Court won’t hear challenge to Alaska campaign finance laws
For the second week in a row, the Supreme Court did not add any new cases to its docket for the 2024-25 term. In a list of orders released on Monday morning, the justices turned down several dozen petitions for review that they had considered at their private conference on Friday, including petitions asking them to weigh in on the constitutionality of state campaign finance laws and an Alabama man’s death sentence.
The justices once again did not act on several high-profile petitions for review, involving issues such as the constitutionality of the admissions program for three of Boston’s elite public high schools and a challenge to a Wisconsin school district’s plan to provide support to transgender and nonbinary students. The justices will meet again for another private conference on Friday, Nov. 22.
More than 14 years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which removed limits on independent political expenditures by corporations and unions, the justices declined to weigh in on a challenge to the constitutionality of two campaign-finance laws enacted by Alaska voters in 2020.
The laws were put in place to target the role of “dark money” – money spent to influence elections, but without the public knowing the source of the funds. One regulation requires anyone who gives more than $2,000 in a calendar year to groups that spend money to influence the elections of candidates to report the donation within 24 hours. A second regulation requires election ads to disclose when a majority of the donations that fund it come from outside Alaska.
Five voters and two groups that spend money on elections went to federal court in Alaska, arguing that the regulations violate the First Amendment. A federal district judge rejected their request to block the regulations before the 2022 elections, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld that decision.
The challengers came to the Supreme Court this summer, asking the justices to take up their case. They contended that the regulations are an “outlier among all state and federal campaign finance rules” that place “unprecedented burdens on citizens’ right to speak about matters of public concern.” But after considering the appeal at five consecutive conferences, the justices ultimately denied review on Monday without comment.
The Supreme Court on Monday also refused to overturn the death sentence of Michael Iervolino, who was convicted of the 2019 shooting death of 20-year-old Sloan Harmon. Iervolino argued that his trial should have been moved to another venue, but Alabama’s highest court for criminal cases rejected that argument and upheld his sentence.
Prosecutors described Harmon’s murder as the result of a road rage incident. The case received widespread publicity because the victim was the son of the local district attorney. News articles discussed Iervolino’s history of criminal convictions and his recent release from jail; the coverage also contained comments from law enforcement officials describing the victim as a “great citizen” and a “great serviceman” and lamenting the impact of his loss on the community.
At Iervolino’s trial, both the district attorney and the judges in St. Clair County recused themselves from the proceeding. Iervolino argued that he could not receive a fair trial because of the victim’s relationship to the local district attorney and because of the news coverage that the case had received. But the trial judge twice denied Iervolino’s request to move the trial elsewhere, and he was convicted and sentenced to death.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the trial court’s denial of Iervolino’s motion to move the trial, as well as his conviction and death sentence. The Alabama Supreme Court declined to review his case.
Iervolino came to the Supreme Court this summer, asking the justices to take up his case and reverse. He contended that the “failure to provide a fair hearing by a panel of impartial, indifferent jurors violates the most basic requirement of due process.”
The state countered that Iervolino had not shown that he could not receive a fair trial in St. Clair County. Most of the news coverage of the murder was published nearly two years before the trial began, it observed. Only 18 of the 70 prospective jurors said that they had heard about the case, the state emphasized. Of those 18 prospective jurors, the state wrote, six were excused from the jury pool, while the other 12 said they had not prejudged the case based on their knowledge of it.
The justices requested the record in Iervolino’s case from the lower court – a sign that at least some justices were giving the case a close look – but ultimately denied review without comment.
The justices also declined to weigh in on a technical question arising from the challenge to a West Virginia law that bans transgender girls and women from competing in girls’ and women’s sports at the middle school, high school, and college levels. The justices did not act, however, on West Virginia’s petition for review of a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that allowed a 13-year-old transgender girl to remain on her school’s track and cross-country teams.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
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