Professor Joel Johnson, "Cert Alert: Supreme Court Cases of Interest" Summer 2025 -- ABA Criminal Justice Magazine

Professor Joel S. Johnson's latest installment of his quarterly column, "Cert Alert: Supreme Court Cases of Interest," has been published in the Summer 2025 edition of the ABA Criminal Justice Magazine. The column discusses pending criminal cases before the Supreme Court.

From Supreme Court Cases of Interest:

At the time of this writing, several cases on the Court’s criminal docket for the October 2024 term have not yet been decided. Nearly all of this term’s cases presented questions concerning the interpretation of federal penal statutes, continuing a multi-year trend of focusing on relatively narrow issues of federal statutory criminal law. But looking ahead, three of the four criminal cases on the docket for next term concern broader constitutional questions—one involving the scope of the Ex Post Facto Clause, another concerning a double jeopardy issue, and the third involving the right to counsel.

Barnes v. Felix was one of the few cases this term that presented a constitutional issue relating to criminal law and procedure—excessive force under the Fourth Amendment (albeit in the context of a civil suit brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983). In an opinion by Justice Kagan, the Court unanimously rejected the moment-of-threat rule that some lower courts had developed to restrict the scope of the “totality of the circumstances” considered when determining whether an officer’s conduct was reasonable. In rejecting that rule, the Court made clear that the assessment of whether an officer acted reasonably in using force must include “all relevant circumstances,” which includes “facts and events leading up to the climactic moment.”

The complete article may be found at American Bar Association