US Supreme Court

President Joe Biden is nodding to his most stalwart supporters in promising to nominate a Black woman for the new vacancy on the Supreme Court. Black women are the most reliable and enthusiastic bloc of Democratic voters. Biden won 93% of their votes in 2020. Black women are more likely to vote than Black men and are the foundation of most Democratic campaigns. Like women of all races, they have been graduating from college at increasingly high rates. Biden's historic nomination will also try to compensate for two centuries when the court was overwhelmingly white.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement gives President Joe Biden a chance to make his first nomination to the high court. It’s also a chance for Biden to fulfill a campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to the high court. The women seen as leading candidates for the post include federal court judges, a state court judge and a longtime civil rights leader.

In their book, Justice Deferred - Race and the Supreme Court (2021, Belknap Press), historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Court’s race record—a legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Court’s race jurisprudence.The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice.

In their book, Justice Deferred - Race and the Supreme Court (2021, Belknap Press), historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Court’s race record—a legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Court’s race jurisprudence. The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice.

The Supreme Court has rejected a plea from South Carolina to reimpose the death penalty on a South Carolina inmate whose death sentence stood for two decades until a federal appeals court threw it out in August. Chief Justice John Roberts did not comment Friday in denying the state's request. The order requires the state to conduct a new sentencing hearing for inmate Sammie Stokes, if it wants jurors to sentence him again to death. Otherwise, Stokes will spend the rest of his life in prison. He was sentenced to death in 1999 for the rape and murder of 21-year-old Connie Snipes in Orangeburg County.

States have begun to ramp up the amount of rental assistance reaching tenants but there are still millions of families facing eviction who haven't gotten help. The Treasury Department says just $5.1 billion of the estimated $46.5 billion in federal rental assistance, or only 11%, has been distributed by states and localities through July. Several states, including Virginia and Texas, have been praised for moving quickly to get the federal money out. But there are still plenty of states, from South Carolina to Arizona, who have distributed very little. The concerns about the slow pace intensified Thursday, after the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a temporary eviction ban put in place because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Monday - Wednesday, Oct 12 - 15, 9:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. - The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on President Trump's Supreme Court nominee,…

This episode of the South Carolina Lede for September 29, 2020, features: the latest on absentee voting by mail; what the Supreme Court fight could mean…

Saturday, September 26, at 5:00 p.m. President Trump will announce his nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Sept. 18.…

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is being remembered in a private ceremony at the high court, where her body is lying in repose. Watch the…