Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court these days is generally in the business of helping executions go forward. But on Thursday night, the court did something notable: It told Alabama no.

Even then, the court wasn’t unanimous. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the refusal to let the nitrogen gas execution of Jeffery Lee proceed.

What prompted the rare rejection? In line with the typical shadow docket practice, the court didn’t explain itself. Nor did the dissenters, who merely noted their disagreement.

But a deeper look at the case helps us understand why a majority of the court was unwilling to help the state this time.

A Trump-appointed judge had permanently blocked Alabama from killing Lee using the nitrogen method, due to the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In her ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Emily Marks made it clear that she wasn’t stopping officials from executing Lee for the 1998 murders of Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson. Rather, she was only barring the nitrogen method while leaving the state free to use others, such as a firing squad.

Yet the state still pressed to execute Lee with nitrogen on Thursday. The next roadblock it hit was a divided appellate panel, which declined to lift Marks’ injunction. Trump-appointed Judge Robert Luck dissented, stressing the high bar the justices have set for Eighth Amendment claims and accusing Lee of delaying his claim until the last minute. Luck noted that Lee’s victims didn’t get to choose how they died.

The appellate dissent reflects the Supreme Court majority’s view on capital punishment. So, when Alabama filed an emergency application to the justices on Thursday, it felt like the setting of a familiar scene: A lower court halts an execution, only for the high court majority to let it move forward. We have seen this movie before.

Plus, the court previously permitted nitrogen gas executions in Alabama. In the case of Anthony Boyd last year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor lamented the majority’s refusal to extend him what she called “the barest form of mercy,” which she said would have been letting him die by firing squad, which “would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to 4 minutes.” She issued a similar dissent the year before in the case of Kenneth Smith, which she concluded “with deep sadness, but commitment to the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.”

Lee’s case was different, as his lawyers and a key outside advocate explained to the justices. His lawyers said it was “unlike every previous method of execution challenge that this Court has considered.” They said that unlike prior cases where lower courts issued temporary stays for inmates, this one had a permanent injunction that followed “a full three-day bench trial on the merits — the first such trial anywhere on the constitutionality of nitrogen asphyxiation.”

That key outside advocate was Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck, a Supreme Court expert who filed an amicus brief. He said Alabama was trying to do something procedurally that it shouldn’t be allowed to do. “After all,” Vladeck wrote, “allowing Alabama to execute Mr. Lee through a grant of emergency relief would necessarily frustrate this Court’s ability to conduct plenary review of the district court’s final, permanent injunction.”

To be clear, the justices can still reverse Marks’ ruling in a future round of litigation. Or, as the judge noted, the state can execute him by other means. The question on Thursday night was whether the court would make the case moot by letting Alabama execute Lee before the state’s appeal could be fully vetted in an orderly fashion. With that in mind, it would almost be unremarkable that the court rejected the state’s emergency application, if it weren’t for the fact that the justices had previously intervened to help governments conduct executions over lower courts’ objections.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that three justices voted to let Lee’s execution go forward as planned, its unconstitutionality notwithstanding. Of course, while none of the justices explained their views, we can presume that the three dissenters are prepared to disagree with the lower courts’ constitutional analysis if and when the case comes back to the high court.

Next week, the justices are set to issue another round of opinions from cases argued this term, as we creep toward the end of June, when some of the court’s most contentious decisions have historically come.

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A federal judge refused to halt the UFC Freedom 250 cage fights set for this weekend at the White House, despite a lawsuit that called the event a “volcano of corruption” that will mark “the first private, for-profit sporting event ever held on White House grounds.”

In a ruling on Friday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, said he rejected the plaintiffs’ emergency application because they failed “to establish both a substantial likelihood of standing and irreparable harm, and because the equities and public interest weigh against emergency relief.”

The case was brought by activist Susan Douglas and Vietnam War veteran Paul Romano, who challenged the use of the Lincoln Memorial chamber and the South Lawn of the White House. Represented by the Public Integrity Project, they alleged that the event runs afoul of federal regulations and isn’t the purely patriotic display that President Donald Trump and UFC head Dana White have portrayed.

The plaintiffs said it will “feature million-dollar VIP packages, brand placement opportunities adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial, and an exclusive broadcast on the President’s favored streaming service.” The streaming service they referred to is Paramount Plus, noting in their complaint that the UFC’s broadcast partner, Paramount Skydance, is run by Trump allies Larry and David Ellison and “has decided that no American will be able to take in this ‘celebration of America’ without first paying $8.99 plus tax for a Paramount Plus streaming subscription.”

Calling the event a “volcano of corruption,” the plaintiffs said that it “will mark an inflection point in American history.” They added, “The images it generates will one day appear in the history books — and not in the chapters about times remembered fondly.”

White said the goal is to “celebrate the 250th birthday of America” in putting on the fights among professional mixed martial artists on the South Lawn of the White House in a massive structure called “the Claw.”

The plaintiffs noted that the event coincides with Trump’s 80th birthday on Sunday and that White is a close friend and ally of the president. They said Trump is giving White and his company “what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.”

Douglas and Romano added that Trump stands to benefit directly, citing reporting that earlier this spring he bought stock in the company that owns the UFC.

They said White “has good reason to stick to his story” about the event being a celebration of America because, they observed, federal law “tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces, which are national parklands.”

The Trump administration said the plan is to hold a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday; a ceremonial weigh-in at the Ellipse on Saturday, followed by a concert headlined by the Zac Brown Band; and seven UFC matches to be held on the White House South Lawn on Sunday.

Defending the event, the administration called it a “collaboration” with the UFC and called the suit meritless, arguing, among other things, that the plaintiffs lack legal standing to bring the case in the first place. Rather than being truly harmed, officials said, the plaintiffs sought to “seek out that which offends their sensibilities, just so they can complain about it.”

The administration said the suit’s last-minute nature alone should defeat it, calling the timing “inexcusable” because “these events were publicly announced almost a year ago; the dates were confirmed by the White House three months ago; and site preparations have been publicly visible for weeks.” The plaintiffs insisted they “acted promptly as soon as their injuries accrued and the full scope of the event’s lawlessness became clear.”

The plaintiffs alleged that they suffered “aesthetic injuries” from the Claw’s construction and that Douglas in particular “will suffer aesthetic injury if the UFC Freedom 250 weigh-ins are permitted to occur at the Lincoln Memorial.” Douglas said she “regularly travels to the affected areas for protests and has specific plans to visit on four occasions between now and the conclusion of UFC Freedom 250, including on the nights of both the weigh-ins, June 13, and the June 14 fights.”

Romano said he “has no choice but to see the offending aesthetics, as he must frequently travel through the area for work [as a part-time ride-share driver]. He therefore has no choice but to observe the desecration of these sites.” As a Vietnam War veteran, he said he suffers “the dignitary and emotional harms that come from national memorials being used for corrupt purposes.”

But in his ruling on Friday, Mehta said the plaintiffs couldn’t show they were “directly affected” by the government’s actions.

“Even if Plaintiffs had established standing, the court still would deny emergency relief because Plaintiffs have not proven irreparable harm,” the judge went on, adding that their “unreasonable delay in filing suit” further hurt their claim. He said they waited more than two weeks after visible preparations commenced at the White House to seek emergency relief.

Mehta also said that the “for-profit elements of UFC Freedom 250 have long been known” and that the “absence of congressional approval and a NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] review is not new information.”

On the environmental front, the judge said that the plaintiffs failed to show any harm that would come from the press conference and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, and that the UFC estimates it will spend $700,000 to remediate grass damaged by the Claw on the South Lawn.

The judge concluded that the risk of any significant environmental damage “therefore appears remote,” whereas the harms on the government side include the time, effort and money that have gone into planning the event, as well as the interests of spectators, remote viewers and the millions of dollars the UFC and related organizations have spent.

“The potential loss of those dollars resulting from a last-minute, court-ordered stoppage cannot be ignored,” the judge wrote.

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“In a recent column, you wrote that one of Donald Trump’s personal lawyers had written to the Supreme Court justices ‘to suggest that they “may wish to consider the petitions together” once the upcoming one is filed’ in the E. Jean Carroll appeal. How is that legal? Does the Supreme Court entertain these sorts of communications?” — LG

Hi LG,

It is common practice for lawyers to alert courts to relevant developments in their cases. Supreme Court practice is no exception.

While it’s perfectly legal to write such letters, the degree to which the justices “entertain” them can be hard to pinpoint. They aren’t formal motions that the court either grants or denies. Rather, they aim to bolster the positions that the lawyers were already pressing. Therefore, it can be tough to isolate a letter’s effect, if any, in the context of the broader case in which it appears. The recent letter in Trump v. Carroll is a good example of that, for reasons I’ll explain below.

First, some background to help understand the letter’s significance (and potential insignificance) in the context of this complex litigation.

There are two separate but related civil cases that Carroll brought against Trump. They both stem from her claim that he assaulted her in a department store dressing room decades ago and defamed her about it in 2019 and 2022.

In one of the cases, a jury in 2023 awarded her $5 million in damages after finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and for defamation over his 2022 statements. In the other, a jury in 2024 awarded her $83.3 million in defamation damages over his 2019 statements.

The $5 million case is further along in the appellate process, with the president’s Supreme Court petition pending for months, but the court keeps putting off its decision on whether to grant review.

The court doesn’t explain why it reschedules petitions.

But even before Trump filed the letter in question, I speculated that some justices may want to put off deciding whether to review the first petition until the second one is before them. The second case involves statements Trump made while he was in his first term as president, and his appeal in that one raises issues, including presidential immunity, that the justices may be more interested in than the issues raised in the already pending petition, which centers on more legally mundane complaints about the evidence used against him at trial.

At any rate, even if there isn’t direct legal overlap between the two cases, the court may want to deal with them together.  

It’s against that backdrop that we saw the June 2 letter from Trump lawyer Justin Smith, whom the president has nominated to be a judge on the St. Louis-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. Smith works for the law firm (also based in St. Louis) founded by John Sauer, which has represented Trump in several matters, including the Carroll litigation and the criminal immunity appeal that Sauer argued to the justices in 2024. Sauer is one of several of Trump’s personal lawyers now serving in top Justice Department posts; he is the solicitor general, the DOJ’s top lawyer representing the United States at the Supreme Court.

Smith’s letter is only a paragraph, so I’ll quote it while adding context in brackets and skipping over case citations. It says:

I write to advise the Court that President Donald J. Trump intends to file a petition for a writ of certiorari [asking the justices to grant review] in [the $83.3 million case] within the next month. Because [the $83.3 million case] involves the same parties and overlaps with the President’s pending petition for a writ of certiorari in [the $5 million case], the Court may wish to consider the petitions together. Like the pending petition in [the $83.3 million case], [the $5 million case] arises from decisions by the Second Circuit [New York-based federal appeals court], which recently denied rehearing en banc [by the appeals court’s full slate of judges after a three-judge panel ruled against Trump] in [the $83.3 million case,] over the dissent of three judges[, two of whom were appointed by Trump and one of whom was appointed by George W. Bush].

In a nutshell, the letter tells the justices: Heads up, the second petition is coming soon. As you note, it also says the court “may wish to consider the petitions together.”

But the letter doesn’t directly ask the court to do anything. To the extent that it’s asking for something, it’s essentially urging the court to not deny review of the $5 million petition before the justices have a chance to consider it alongside the $83.3 million petition. But Trump was already seeking review in the $5 million case, so the letter isn’t really asking for anything new in that regard.

Plus, when Trump filed the $5 million petition back in November, it was apparent that the $83.3 million case would eventually come to the justices too, but the appeals court hadn’t ruled against Trump in that one yet. The justices were already formally aware of the $83.3 million case before Smith’s letter because it’s discussed in the $5 million case petition.

Because the court doesn’t explain its scheduling moves, we can’t say for sure why it has been delaying consideration of the $5 million petition. For now, all we can definitively say is that the justices were not unanimous about immediately wanting to deny review, as they do for most petitions. That’s a better signal for Trump than it is for Carroll, though it doesn’t dictate whether the court will ultimately grant review, which requires the votes of at least four justices. Nor does it dictate how a majority would rule if the court does grant review.  

As I noted above, the effect of Smith’s letter, if any, is difficult to isolate. The court had already been putting off considering the $5 million petition for months before he effectively asked the justices to keep doing so until the next petition comes. So, if the court keeps putting it off, then it will be hard to know whether it’s doing so because of Smith’s letter or because the court is doing what it was going to do anyway.

On that note, the court rescheduled the petition yet again this week, further suggesting that it is waiting for the second petition. Whether Smith’s letter had any role in the latest rescheduling is hard to say because the court has continued the delay it had already been conducting.  

After the second petition is filed (Smith said in the June 2 letter it would come “within the next month”), Carroll will have an opportunity to respond, and the court is about to break for the summer after it finishes issuing the term’s remaining opinions over the next few weeks.

Therefore, we may not know whether the court is going to grant review in either petition until the fall. And even if the already pending petition were to be granted soon, the case wouldn’t be argued and decided until the next court term, which starts in October. At this point, it would be surprising if the court acts on the pending petition before receiving the second one.

All in all, it may be a while before we know the fate of these cases and whether Carroll can collect on the damages she won or whether the court will help the president again.

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The Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s attempt to execute Jeffery Lee with nitrogen gas after lower courts stopped the state from executing him with that method.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch voted to side with the state, according to the court’s unexplained order on Thursday night denying the state’s emergency application.

On Tuesday, a Trump-appointed judge in Alabama blocked the state from executing Lee under its nitrogen-hypoxia protocol. U.S. District Judge Emily Marks found that Lee proved the state’s method violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

She emphasized that although she was issuing a permanent injunction against the nitrogen method, she wasn’t banning the state from executing Lee. She said the record showed his alternative proposal of the firing squad “significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain as compared to nitrogen-hypoxia.”

Under precedent adopted by the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority, an inmate who challenges an execution method as unconstitutional must propose an alternative method that is feasible, readily implemented and significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain.

Having scheduled Lee’s execution for Thursday, Alabama officials moved to lift Marks’ injunction in an effort to proceed as planned. Procedurally, they first had to ask Marks herself for relief. In their motion to the judge, they said she downplayed the risks of the firing squad, as well as the state’s concern about finding willing and able executioners for the shooting method.

State officials further said the fact that they scheduled Lee’s execution for Thursday “should have sunk his claim.” They said that “however easy or hard it would be to implement a firing squad in the abstract, there’s no support for the view that it could be done two days from the Court’s decision that it satisfies the Eighth Amendment test.”

Marks rejected the motion to lift her injunction, noting that the state’s urgent motion did “little more than repeat the arguments it made previously,” which she also had rejected. She added that the state had no right to complain about the timing because it was the state that set Lee’s execution while litigation was pending.

A divided three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declined to disturb Marks’ ruling. The panel’s majority recounted that a judge’s permanent injunction like the one Marks issued is entitled to deference and can be overturned only if the judge abused her discretion. With that in mind, the majority said her findings were “amply supported by the evidence presented.”

And noting that courts reviewing motions for urgent relief consider the “irreparable harm” at stake, the majority observed: “It goes without saying that Mr. Lee would suffer irreparable harm if he were executed pursuant to a method that the district court has found unconstitutional.”

On the other hand, the majority said the state’s preferred Thursday execution timing “is not a magical date” and that “the injury to the State caused by a delay would not be irreparable because the district court’s injunction allows it to execute Mr. Lee by any other authorized method (including lethal injection or the electric chair).”

Trump-appointed Judge Robert Luck was the panel dissenter. He began by recalling that Lee was sentenced to die for robbing and murdering Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson 26 years ago. “Unlike his victims, Lee was allowed to choose his method of execution,” he added, referring to Lee’s initial choice of nitrogen hypoxia as an alternative to lethal injection during a previous round of litigation.

“For as long as we’ve had an Eighth Amendment, the Supreme Court has never held that a state’s method of execution qualifies as cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment,” Luck wrote. “Because we shouldn’t do so here, I would grant the state’s motion to stay the injunction.”

Lee’s jury had recommended a life sentence, but the judge sentenced him to death under Alabama’s “judicial override” option, which has since been abolished.

The state cited Luck’s dissent in seeking emergency relief from the Supreme Court on Thursday. Officials told the high court that if the lower court ruling in Lee’s favor stands, it would be “unprecedented in American history.” The state said it would not only “portend the first-ever permanent ban on a legislatively enacted method” but would also “expand the concept of cruelty well beyond the bounds of the Eighth Amendment.”

Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck, an expert on the Supreme Court’s so-called shadow docket, submitted an amicus brief opposing the state. He said Alabama was trying to do something procedurally that it shouldn’t be allowed to do. He explained that unlike in other emergency challenges that states have brought to the justices, Alabama wasn’t challenging a temporary execution stay issued by a lower court, but rather a permanent injunction.

“After all,” Vladeck said in the brief, “allowing Alabama to execute Mr. Lee through a grant of emergency relief would necessarily frustrate this Court’s ability to conduct plenary review of the district court’s final, permanent injunction.”

Highlighting that point, Lee’s lawyers told the justices that the case was “in a procedural posture unlike every previous method of execution challenge that this Court has considered.” They noted that unlike other emergency litigation in capital cases, “this case comes to the Court following a full three-day bench trial on the merits — the first such trial anywhere on the constitutionality of nitrogen asphyxiation.”

They said Lee wasn’t challenging his death sentence or the state’s ability to execute him but rather “only the method that Alabama intends to employ.” They said the state wanted to make the case moot by executing Lee “using an unconstitutional and permanently enjoined method,” but that the state hadn’t “cited a single case in which this Court has intervened in a capital case in such an extraordinary way.”

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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority of turning “a deaf ear” in a case that split the court along party lines over the proper way to interpret legal texts. It was the latest battle in a long-running legal war between the Republican and Democratic appointees’ different approaches, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett leading the way for the majority.

The case, FS Credit Opportunities Corp. v. Saba Capital Master Fund, involved a federal law called the Investment Company Act. In her opinion for the court’s six Republican appointees, Barrett said the question was whether the law lets private parties sue to rescind any contract that allegedly violates the act. “The answer is no,” she wrote, rejecting activist investors and backing investment funds, the Chamber of Commerce and the Trump administration.

“If a statute does not spell out a right of action, we examine the statute’s text and structure to determine whether it implicitly provides one,” the Trump appointee wrote. She said the question was whether the phrase “rescission at the instance of any party” implies that private parties may sue.

“It does not,” she concluded. “In sum, nothing in the text or structure of the ICA indicates that Congress authorized private parties to enforce virtually every provision in the statute. For a cause of action to exist, we would have to create it.”

Jackson said in her dissent that the court betrayed its proper role “to give effect to the will of the people” rather than “supplant it.”

The Biden appointee said the court refused to “consult all reliable indicia of Congress’s intent” or to wrestle with congressional committee reports “that unequivocally expressed Congress’s ‘wish’ that the statute continue to be interpreted to allow private suits.”

She said the court “turns a deaf ear to the unified call of text, statutory structure, and history, and substitutes its own views as to the undesirability of private enforcement.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined Jackson completely. Justice Elena Kagan only joined partly and wrote her own short dissent to explain why. She said her views on the proper use of background legislative history materials, as opposed to only looking at the final text of a law, “fall someplace in between the majority’s and the principal dissent’s. The one-sentence version is: Reliance on legislative history may be appropriate when statutory text in context remains, after careful review, stubbornly ambiguous.”

Kagan said she didn’t think the investment law at issue displayed such a lack of clarity. But putting aside the part of Jackson’s dissent focused on legislative history, Kagan said she agreed with Jackson’s reasoning in support of private rights of action here. Kagan said she “therefore gladly” joined part of Jackson’s dissent while declining to join the part about the value of congressional reports related to the law.

Kagan’s slight separation from Jackson and Sotomayor also makes this case the latest example of her staking out a position between the majority on the one hand, and her two Democratic-appointed colleagues on the other in some cases.

Barrett said Jackson’s use of legislative history showed why courts should stick to the final text.

“Far from demonstrating the value of legislative history, the dissent models its misuse,” Barrett wrote. The Trump appointee quoted a well-known saying in legal circles that was championed by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the famous proponent of textualism for whom Barrett clerked and who dueled on this subject with retired Justice Stephen Breyer, for whom Jackson clerked.

“The classic criticism of using legislative history is that it is ‘the equivalent of entering a crowded cocktail party and looking over the heads of the guests for one’s friends,’” Barrett wrote, adding, “True to form, the dissent navigates around unwelcome guests.”

Jackson said it was “wrong to suggest that a court’s reference to and reliance on statements in committee reports is like picking out friends at a crowded party.” She said, “the better analogy is to consulting the user’s manual the manufacturer writes to guide piecing together its product.”

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A “volcano of corruption” is what plaintiffs suing to stop this weekend’s UFC fights at the White House called the planned event, telling a judge that President Donald Trump and his allies are poised to profit “from the first private, for-profit sporting event ever held on White House grounds.”

The stark portrayal comes in the final court filing before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee in Washington, decides whether to let the event proceed as planned.

“The event will feature million-dollar VIP packages, brand placement opportunities adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial, and an exclusive broadcast on the President’s favored streaming service,” plaintiffs Susan Douglas and Paul Romano told the judge.

The streaming service they referred to is Paramount Plus, noting in their complaint that the UFC’s broadcast partner, Paramount Skydance, is run by Trump allies Larry and David Ellison and “has decided that no American will be able to take in this ‘celebration of America’ without first paying $8.99 plus tax for a Paramount Plus streaming subscription.”

“Such a volcano of corruption, if allowed to go forward, will mark an inflection point in American history,” they said. Douglas, an activist, and Romano, a Vietnam War veteran, alleged that the government’s planned event runs afoul of federal regulations.

“The images it generates will one day appear in the history books — and not in the chapters about times remembered fondly,” the plaintiffs said of the activities set to culminate with professional mixed martial artists fighting on Sunday on the White House’s South Lawn in a massive structure built for the event, known as “the Claw.”

Douglas and Romano are challenging the use of the Lincoln Memorial and the South Lawn for the event, which Trump and UFC head Dana White have said is a celebration of America. The plaintiffs noted that the event coincides with Trump’s 80th birthday on Sunday and that White is a close friend and ally of the president’s. They said Trump is giving White and his company “what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.”

Douglas and Romano added that Trump stands to benefit directly, citing reporting that he bought stock in the company that owns the UFC earlier this spring.

They said White “has good reason to stick to his story” about the event being a celebration of America because, they observed, federal law “tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces, which are national parklands.”

The Trump administration said the plan is to hold a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday; a ceremonial weigh-in at the Ellipse on Saturday, followed by a concert headlined by the Zac Brown Band; and seven UFC matches at the White House South Lawn on Sunday.

Defending the event, the administration called it a “collaboration” with the UFC and called the suit meritless, arguing, among other things, that the plaintiffs lack legal standing to bring the case in the first place. Rather than being truly harmed, officials said, the plaintiffs sought to “seek out that which offends their sensibilities, just so they can complain about it.”

The administration said the suit’s last-minute nature alone should defeat it, calling the timing “inexcusable” because “these events were publicly announced almost a year ago; the dates were confirmed by the White House three months ago; and site preparations have been publicly visible for weeks.” The plaintiffs insisted they “acted promptly as soon as their injuries accrued and the full scope of the event’s lawlessness became clear.”

The plaintiffs alleged they suffer “aesthetic injuries” from the Claw’s construction and that Douglas in particular “will suffer aesthetic injury if the UFC Freedom 250 weigh-ins are permitted to occur at the Lincoln Memorial.” Douglas said she “regularly travels to the affected areas for protests and has specific plans to visit on four occasions between now and the conclusion of UFC Freedom 250, including on the nights of both the weigh-ins, June 13, and the June 14 fights.”

Romano said he “has no choice but to see the offending aesthetics, as he must frequently travel through the area for work [as a part-time ride-share driver]. He therefore has no choice but to observe the desecration of these sites.” As a Vietnam War veteran, he said he suffers “the dignitary and emotional harms that come from national memorials being used for corrupt purposes.”

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In response to a lawsuit seeking to halt what plaintiffs called a “deeply corrupt” plan to hold UFC cage fights at the White House this weekend, the Trump administration pointed to events hosted under prior administrations.  

“No one raised a cavil at the Biden ice-rink or Elton John stage,” the government said in its opposition filing.

It said that during Joe Biden’s presidency, the White House “erected a 48 foot by 68 foot ice-skating rink on the South Lawn, complete with a 100-ton air cooled refrigeration system and pump, lighting system, and sound system,” for an event that the filing said was “supported by the National Hockey League and Comcast.”

In response to criticism of what the new lawsuit called the Trump administration’s “unlawful” building of the “92-foot-tall, 600-ton steel structure it calls ‘the Claw,’” the administration said the White House had previously “erected substantial temporary structures when hosting concerts,” citing a 2022 Elton John performance on the South Lawn.

It added that President Barack Obama “regularly put on exhibitions at the White House in partnership with private entities, including the South by South Lawn event; the concert entitled BET Presents: Love and Happiness: An Obama Celebration; as well as a Beyonce concert.”

The administration argued that “the historic precedent of Presidents erecting temporary fortifications … and Congress acquiescing to those activities” bolsters the legality of this weekend’s planned festivities.

The suit’s success doesn’t fully hinge on whether Judge Amit Mehta, the Obama appointee who is overseeing this emergency litigation in Washington, D.C., finds the historical comparisons compelling. That’s because the administration has raised several legal grounds on which Mehta can reject the suit, and it is likely that at least one of those grounds will succeed in defeating the effort and allowing the event to continue as planned, regardless of how corrupt it may be.

One of the challenges the plaintiffs face is whether they have legal standing to bring their case, meaning whether they are uniquely harmed in a way that a successful suit could remedy. (Otherwise, anyone could bring a lawsuit about anything against anyone.) Standing has also been contested in challenges to other recent executive actions, including the White House ballroom and the “anti-weaponization” fund.

The plaintiffs in the UFC case are activist Susan Douglas and Vietnam War veteran Paul Romano. They told Mehta that they “are suffering aesthetic injuries from the erection of ‘the Claw’ on the South Lawn” and that Douglas in particular “will suffer aesthetic injury if the UFC Freedom 250 weigh-ins are permitted to occur at the Lincoln Memorial.”

They said Douglas “regularly travels to the affected areas for protests and has specific plans to visit on four occasions between now and the conclusion of UFC Freedom 250, including on the nights of both the weigh-ins, June 13, and the June 14 fights.” They said Romano “has no choice but to see the offending aesthetics, as he must frequently travel through the area for work. He therefore has no choice but to observe the desecration of these sites.” They added that Romano in particular, being a Vietnam War veteran, suffers “the dignitary and emotional harms that come from national memorials being used for corrupt purposes.”

They also said the two of them would have submitted public comments had the “massive construction project” been submitted for environmental review, as required.

Their suit said the plan for the event “is for fighters to conduct the ceremonial weigh-ins and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, make pre-fight walkouts from the Oval Office, and do combat in a massive structure now under construction just steps from the Executive Residence.”

In its opposition filing, the administration said the plaintiffs “intend to seek out that which offends their sensibilities, just so they can complain about it. This contradicts the fundamental standing principle that injuries cannot be self-inflicted. … None of Plaintiffs’ alleged harms entitles them to an early stoppage of this weekend’s matches.”

The administration also said the last-minute nature of the suit should defeat the emergency request, calling the timing “inexcusable” because “these events were publicly announced almost a year ago; the dates were confirmed by the White House three months ago; and site preparations have been publicly visible for weeks.”

If the bid to halt the event is rejected on preliminary grounds like standing, then the courts may never weigh in on the merits of the plaintiffs’ underlying legal claims about the administration running afoul of permitting requirements and the like, which the administration also contests.

In their complaint filed Saturday, the plaintiffs zeroed in on the relationship between UFC head Dana White and President Donald Trump. The plaintiffs argued that the event is poised to benefit the two men personally, rather than benefit the country — a distinction the plaintiffs maintain has legal significance in their favor.

White said the goal is to “celebrate the 250th birthday of America” when he puts on the cage fights among professional mixed martial artists on the South Lawn in “the Claw.”

The plaintiffs cast the card in a less patriotic light.  

While observing that the event coincides with Trump’s 80th birthday, they noted that White is a close friend and ally of the president, who is giving White and his company “what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.”

The plaintiffs added that Trump stands to benefit directly too, citing reports that earlier this spring he bought up to $50,000 worth of stock in the company that owns the UFC.

They said White “has good reason to stick to his story” about the event being a celebration of America because, they observed, federal law “tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces, which are national parklands.”

In the opposition filing, the administration called the event “a collaboration” between the White House, executive agencies and the UFC.  

Mehta gave the plaintiffs until Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET to file a final reply brief. If he sides with the plaintiffs, the administration signaled in its opposition filing that it is prepared to quickly appeal.

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There’s more than one reason that Todd Blanche should not be attorney general of the United States. You’ll be hearing plenty about them in the days and weeks ahead, following President Donald Trump’s nomination of his former criminal defense lawyer to lead the Department of Justice.

One way to view the nominee is through a single word: “tainted.”

That’s how a judge described Blanche’s investigation into Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who became a prime target of the administration’s crudely incompetent deportation regime last year. The Trump-controlled government illegally sent Abrego to El Salvador in violation of a court order, then resisted additional court orders for his return, and then finally secured his return but only to greet him with an indictment that a judge recently dismissed as unconstitutionally vindictive.

It’s rare for judges to grant vindictive prosecution motions, but the actions of Blanche and his colleagues made it possible. Indeed, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw emphasized that he didn’t reach the conclusion “lightly” in his ruling last month.

But in dismissing the charges of illegally transporting undocumented immigrants, to which Abrego had pleaded not guilty, Crenshaw wrote that “absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution.” The Obama-appointed judge recalled that the government had closed its investigation into the Tennessee traffic stop at the center of the case in 2022. It was only reopened after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his right to remedy his illegal removal.

Crenshaw singled out the blundering of Blanche, who is currently the acting attorney general after Pam Bondi’s departure. He was deputy attorney general at the time of the Abrego probe. “Absent Blanche’s tainted investigation,” Crenshaw wrote in his May 22 ruling, Abrego’s illegal indictment would not have happened.

The judge noted that Blanche said in a Fox News interview that the executive branch only started investigating Abrego after a judge in Maryland “questioned” the decision to deport him illegally.

In fact, Crenshaw’s dismissal ruling was only made possible by his previous finding that Abrego could proceed with discovery into potential vindictiveness. Blanche played a starring role in that incremental ruling last year, where Crenshaw wrote, “Deputy Attorney General Blanche’s remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Abrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights to bring suit against the Executive Official Defendants, rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.”

Therefore, Blanche has not only acted as an instrument for Trump’s revenge but has done so in a manner that has thwarted that revenge’s success. To be sure, Blanche is a competent attorney, but he has chosen what might be termed a “tainted” path. If the GOP-controlled Senate confirms him to the top job full time, then a microscopically dim silver lining could be that his continued service to Trump will result in further fumbles.

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President Donald Trump will have another case coming to the Supreme Court from his personal docket. This one relates to the defamation lawsuit he filed against CNN over the network’s use of the phrase “big lie” regarding his claims about the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

In March, the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declined to consider his case, after a three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld a district judge’s ruling against him. Two of the three judges from the unanimous panel ruling were Trump appointees, as was the district judge who dismissed Trump’s suit in 2023. The judge did so on the grounds that the statements at issue were opinion, not factually false statements, and that Trump hadn’t shown that CNN acted with “actual malice.”

Trump argued that CNN’s use of the “big lie” phrase was intended to associate him with Adolf Hitler and Nazi propaganda. But the appellate panel deemed his claim “unpersuasive,” calling his assumption that the term is clear enough to be a factual statement “untenable.” It called his other claims “meritless.”

The March denial from the full appeals court put the president on the clock to petition the justices if he wanted a chance at saving the case. A filing this month to the high court confirms that he will be petitioning the justices, but not quite yet. The filing said his petition is due June 15 but he wants an extension to Aug. 14. Such extensions are routinely requested and granted. The request was made specifically to Justice Clarence Thomas, which is also routine because Thomas is the justice assigned to field administrative requests like this from the 11th Circuit.

In his extension request, Trump’s personal lawyers appeared to re-up his rigged-election claims that he has continued to press. Previewing the petition they intend to file, they said the network’s “allegations were false, but were perceived as historical fact by large segments of CNN’s audience. In reality, President Trump was lawfully pursuing then-unresolved, and now proven, claims about election irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.” The filing does not appear to detail the “irregularities” or how they have been “proven.”

On top of the many high court cases related to his administration, the promised petition will only be the latest one from the president’s personal docket. He is already pursuing an appeal in the E. Jean Carroll litigation, in which he is vying to upend the millions of dollars in damages she won after a jury found him civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming her. The justices have not yet decided whether they are going to review his Carroll appeal, which involves two separate petitions, one of which has been pending for months and another that his lawyer said should be filed soon.

Separately, a petition is pending against CNN in another Trump-related defamation case. The petition was brought by Alan Dershowitz over the network’s coverage of his representation of Trump during his first impeachment trial in his first term. Like Trump in his CNN case, Dershowitz has lost in the lower courts. The justices have not yet decided whether they will review Dershowitz’s petition.

It takes at least four justices to agree to grant review.

Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.

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No Supreme Court justices dissented Monday from the court’s refusal to hear an appeal from Mississippi death row prisoner Tony Terrell Clark, who argued that he was forced to meet an “impossible” standard.

Clark had claimed that his right to an impartial jury was violated when Black people were kept off the jury because of their race. But to vindicate his rights on appeal in Mississippi state court, he said, he had to prove that the outcome of his trial would have been different without the jury violation.

Yet even though Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed with her colleagues that Clark’s appeal didn’t merit high court review, she penned a separate statement to call out what she deemed the “problematic” standard that the state’s top court applied against him, in the context of his claim that his trial counsel ineffectively challenged the prosecution’s strikes of prospective jurors.

Clark’s case involved an interplay between two types of legal claims: a “Batson” claim and a “Strickland” claim, both of which are named for the 1980s-era Supreme Court cases from which they came. Batson claims (from the case of Batson v. Kentucky) are when a defendant argues that a potential juror was illegally kept off the jury because of their race. Strickland claims (from the case of Strickland v. Washington) are when a defendant argues that their lawyer was ineffective. Defendants bringing Strickland claims must show two things: 1) that their lawyer was deficient and 2) that the defendant was prejudiced by the deficiency.

The “impossible” Mississippi standard, as Clark put it, was that to prove on appeal that he was prejudiced by his counsel’s mishandling of a Batson challenge, the state high court said he needed to show that the outcome of his trial would have been different had the lawyer performed effectively.

Sotomayor took issue with that. “The Mississippi Supreme Court’s approach, to the extent it requires a criminal defendant to show that a competently presented Batson challenge would have produced a different trial outcome, is almost certainly wrong,” the Obama-appointed justice wrote.

She noted that other courts have taken a different approach: They make the narrower inquiry of whether the Batson challenge itself would have been successful if the lawyer had handled it properly, rather than looking at whether the resulting trial would have turned out differently, as Mississippi does.

In his Supreme Court petition, Clark explained that his post-conviction counsel tried to meet the “impossible” standard by talking to a potential Black juror who was kept off the jury. “As common-sense dictates,” his petition said, the struck juror “could not offer an opinion on whether she would have voted guilty or for a death sentence if she was on the jury.”  

In her statement Monday, Sotomayor said her colleagues “should one day resolve” the issue and decide “that Strickland does not require the kind of prejudice analysis that the Mississippi Supreme Court has adopted for Batson-related ineffectiveness claims.”

But the justice conceded that Clark’s appeal didn’t present the proper case for doing so. She recalled that the state high court found that Clark failed to satisfy not only the prejudice prong but also the deficiency prong, and that he didn’t argue the deficiency issue to the justices. “Given the independent basis on which Clark’s Strickland claim failed below, I concur in the denial of Clark’s petition for a writ of certiorari,” she wrote.

Seeking to uphold Clark’s conviction and death sentence for the 2014 murder of 13-year-old Muhammed Saeed during a robbery, Mississippi’s lawyers likewise emphasized that the state court ruled against Clark on both the deficiency and prejudice prongs of the Strickland test.

When Clark’s case was previously before the high court in 2023, Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that said the court’s rejection of what was then his latest appeal meant that “a Black man will be put to death in the State of Mississippi based on the decision of a jury that was plausibly selected based on race.”

Monday’s denial also follows a recent 5-4 ruling from the justices in favor of another Mississippi prisoner, Terry Pitchford, who also raised a Batson claim and argued that the state high court wrongly ruled against him, too. The Supreme Court decision in Pitchford’s favor was authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has long taken an interest in Batson claims, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson. Pitchford’s case didn’t raise the complication that Clark’s case did of the Strickland issue being layered on top of the Batson issue (though the Pitchford case raised other procedural issues that, as the 5-4 vote indicates, made it a close one).  

Sotomayor’s statement Monday appeared on the court’s order list, a routine document on which the justices announce the latest action in pending appeals. In line with the court’s typical practice, the justices didn’t explain why they denied Clark’s petition. There usually isn’t any comment from any of the justices accompanying denials. Therefore, Sotomayor’s statement made the case stand out and included a rare explanation for why at least one of the justices agreed to pass on the petition.

It takes four justices to grant review, giving the court’s six-justice GOP-appointed majority significant power not only over how cases are decided but over which cases are decided.

On that note, Monday’s order list also included a case in which Sotomayor and Jackson noted their dissent from the court’s decision to vacate a lower court ruling that sided with a defendant. The high court majority sent the case back to the lower court, ordering further review in light of the justices’ latest sentencing-related rulings that made it harder for prisoners to win compassionate release.

Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.

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A new lawsuit seeks to halt the “UFC Freedom 250” event that is scheduled for this coming weekend, calling it “deeply corrupt” and arguing that it runs afoul of federal regulations.

The plaintiffs are activist Susan Douglas and Vietnam War veteran Paul Romano. Represented by lawyers with the Public Integrity Project, they said in their complaint that they brought the case “to seek judicial relief for their injuries, uphold the rule of law, and protect our nation’s most cherished monuments from corrupt exploitation.”

Their complaint focuses on the relationship between UFC head Dana White and President Donald Trump. The plaintiffs argue that the event is poised to benefit the two men personally rather than benefit the country, a distinction the plaintiffs maintain has legal significance in their favor.

White said the goal is to “celebrate the 250th birthday of America” when he puts on the cage fights among professional mixed martial artists on the South Lawn of the White House in a massive structure known as “the Claw.”

The plaintiffs cast the card in a less patriotic light.  

While observing that the event coincides with Trump’s 80th birthday, they noted that White is a close friend and ally of the president, who is giving White and his company “what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.”

The plaintiffs added that Trump stands to benefit directly too, citing reporting that earlier this spring he bought up to $50,000 stock in the company that owns the UFC.

They said White “has good reason to stick to his story” about the event being a celebration of America because, they observed, federal law “tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces, which are national parklands.”

They said the plan for the event “is for fighters to conduct the ceremonial weigh-ins and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, make pre-fight walkouts from the Oval Office, and do combat in a massive structure now under construction just steps from the Executive Residence.”

Under the usual permitting regime, no special events can be held on the South Lawn or at the Lincoln Memorial, and structures can’t be built on the South Lawn without express authorization from Congress and a thorough environmental review. The plaintiffs conceded that there is a temporary regulation authorizing events that celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. But they said the UFC Freedom 250 event fails to satisfy even that relaxed rule because it would still require the event to be “for the celebration of the 250th anniversary of American Independence” and “planned, organized, and executed” by the federal government. The plaintiffs contend the UFC event is neither of those things.  

Their specific legal claims include alleged violations of National Park Service regulations, erecting structures on federal parkland without congressional authorization and failure to conduct environmental review.

When the government responds in court, one of its arguments may be that the plaintiffs don’t have legal standing to bring the case — that is, that they aren’t uniquely harmed by the spectacle such that a successful suit would heal them. The government has raised the standing issue in other recent pending challenges against high-profile executive actions like the White House ballroom and the “anti-weaponization” fund.

According to the plaintiffs’ complaint in the UFC case, Douglas is a retired government employee who frequently organizes and attends protests and other events on the National Mall, at the Lincoln Memorial and near the White House. Romano, they said, is a retired Air Force sergeant and former police officer with the Department of Defense who frequently travels along the National Mall and past the White House and Lincoln Memorial as part of his part-time work as a ride-share driver. They have both “protested and testified against alterations to DC’s monumental landscape,” per their complaint.

In an accompanying filing seeking a temporary restraining order against the government, Douglas and Romano argue that they “are suffering aesthetic injuries from the erection of ‘the Claw’ on the South Lawn” and that Douglas in particular “will suffer aesthetic injury if the UFC Freedom 250 weigh-ins are permitted to occur at the Lincoln Memorial.”

They said Douglas “regularly travels to the affected areas for protests and has specific plans to visit on four occasions between now and the conclusion of UFC Freedom 250, including on the nights of both the weigh-ins, June 13, and the June 14 fights.”

They said Romano “has no choice but to see the offending aesthetics, as he must frequently travel through the area for work. He therefore has no choice but to observe the desecration of these sites.”

They added that Romano in particular, being a Vietnam War veteran, suffers “the dignitary and emotional harms that come from national memorials being used for corrupt purposes.” And they said they would have submitted public comments if the “massive construction project” were submitted for environmental review as required.

In response to the suit, the White House released a statement:

This is an obstructionist, baseless, and dilatory lawsuit brought simply to prevent President Trump from hosting what will undoubtedly go down as one of the most historic sporting events in our Nation’s history during our semiquincentennial celebration. This iconic event is no different than the various other White House-hosted events on the South Lawn and properly permitted events on the Ellipse and National Mall throughout the year.

This article has been updated to include the White House’s statement.

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