Justices decline gay-rights, NSA cases

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear closely watched cases on gay rights, campaign finance, lethal injections and National Security Agency data collection.

As is their custom, the justices gave no reasons for turning down the appeals.

The gay-rights case, Elane Photography v. Willock, No. 13-585, was an appeal from a wedding photographer in New Mexico who asserted a constitutional right to refuse to provide her services to gay and lesbian couples.

The issue was broadly similar to one argued before the court last month, over whether companies may refuse to provide insurance coverage for contraception on religious grounds. But the New Mexico case was based not on a claim of religious liberty but on one of free speech.

The photographer, Elaine Huguenin, objected to a New Mexico law prohibiting businesses open to the public from discriminating against gay people.

She said that requiring her to photograph same-sex weddings violated her First Amendment rights because she was forced to say something she did not believe.

She rejected a request from a lesbian couple, Vanessa Willock and Misti Collinsworth, to document their commitment ceremony.

The women, who hired another photographer, filed a discrimination complaint against Huguenin’s studio, Elane Photography.

The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled for the couple, saying Huguenin’s “services can be regulated, even though those services include artistic and creative work.”

Laws banning discrimination, the court said, apply to “creative or expressive professions.”

The justices also declined to hear a campaign finance case, Iowa Right to Life Committee v. Tooker, No. 13407.

It was a challenge to an Iowa law that bans contributions from corporations but allows them from unions.

The case was brought by James Bopp Jr., one of the lawyers on the winning side Wednesday in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a major campaign finance case.

The McCutcheon decision struck down aggregate contribution limits in federal elections.

In the Iowa case, Bopp challenged the law there on two grounds.

He said distinguishing between corporations and unions violated equal protection principles.

In any event, he added, “banning corporate political contributions violates the First Amendment.”

The Supreme Court also declined to hear two cases concerning whether death row inmates have a constitutional right to know what chemicals states plan to use to execute them.

The challenges said the court’s attention was needed to introduce order to a capital justice system in disarray.

Drug shortages and boycotts have caused prisons to scramble to locate lethal chemicals, raising what opponents of the death penalty say is the possibility of executions so painful that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In January, executions in two states seemed to go awry. An Oklahoma inmate’s last words, 12 seconds after he was injected with lethal chemicals, were: “I feel my whole body burning.” A week later, an Ohio inmate “struggled, made guttural noises, gasped for air and choked for about 10 minutes before succumbing to a new, two-drug execution method,” according to The Columbus Dispatch.

One case, Sepulvado v. Jindal, No. 13-892, concerned Christopher Sepulvado, who was convicted of scalding and beating his 6-year-old stepson to death.

Sepulvado’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to decide whether due process “entitles a condemned inmate with timely notice of the method by which he will be executed.”

A second case, Zink v. Lombardi, No. 13-8435, was brought by death-row inmates in Missouri.

It asked the justices to review an appeals court decision that required them to specify an acceptable form of execution in order to challenge the one that the state intended to employ.

And in another rejection Monday, the justices declined an early look at a constitutional challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of millions of Americans’ telephone records, instead allowing the dispute to work its way through the usual lower-court process.

Conservative lawyer Larry Klayman had persuaded a federal judge in December to rule that the agency’s activities likely violate the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches.

The judge in Washington, D.C., put his decision on hold pending a government appeal.

The justices rejected without comment Klayman’s longshot request to bypass the appeals process and hear the case immediately.

Klayman argued that the constitutional questions raised were too important to wait for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reach a decision.

But the Supreme Court rarely grants such requests.

It could take many months before the justices consider any legal challenge to the collection program disclosed by former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden.

Klayman’s lawsuit is one of two National Security Agency cases winding their way through the federal appeals system.

Information for this article was contributed by Adam Liptak of The New York Times and by Sam Hananel of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 4 on 04/08/2014

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