What happened
The Supreme Court declined to take up two cases that drew written dissents from Justice Samuel Alito, leaving in place rulings in a school-speech dispute over anti-abortion club flyers and an Alabama capital case involving a prosecutor's comments about a murder weapon.
In the school case, Justice Alito said a high school freshman who founded a Noblesville Students For Life club challenged administrators' refusal to approve flyers showing students with “Defund Planned Parenthood” placards. The Seventh Circuit rejected the First Amendment claim after asking whether Tinker or Hazelwood supplied the governing standard, a choice Justice Alito described as pivotal because the two cases impose very different tests for school censorship.
Justice Alito wrote that “lower courts have struggled to ascertain its precise limits” since Hazelwood and said the court should clarify how that doctrine fits with later government-speech decisions. He said he would have granted the petition to address the relationship between Hazelwood and the court's subsequent government-speech cases.
The court also denied review in Alabama v. Powell, where Justice Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said he would have summarily reversed an Alabama appellate ruling that overturned a capital conviction. According to the dissent, the Alabama court treated a prosecutor's closing-argument statement about who knew where the gun was as an impermissible comment on the defendant's failure to testify.
Justice Alito said the state court's approach conflicted with United States v. Robinson, which he described as limiting when a prosecutor's remarks violate the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Because the Alabama decision contradicted Robinson, he wrote, he would grant certiorari and summarily reverse.
The order list also granted review in three cases: Genalo v. Black, Guerrero v. Johnson and Kian v. Florida. In Genalo, the justices directed the parties to brief whether G.M.'s case is now moot, but the supplied order-list spans do not provide additional merits context for the grants.