The Supreme Court on Monday morning agreed to take up the case of a Catholic preschool challenging its exclusion from a Colorado “universal preschool” program. The justices also agreed to review a Texas man’s challenge to his sentence for possession of a gun, although they declined to weigh in on the constitutionality of the conviction itself. The announcements came as part of a list of orders released on Monday from the justices’ private conference on Friday, April 17.
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In St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, the court granted a petition for review filed by a Catholic preschool in Littleton, Colorado, which argues that its exclusion from Colorado’s universal preschool program is a form of religious discrimination in violation of the First Amendment, because Colorado will not provide it with an exemption from rules that would require it to admit everyone – including LGBTQ children and children with LGBTQ parents.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit rejected the preschool’s argument. In its view, the state’s conditions were neutral and generally applied to every preschool, regardless of relgion – the kind of government actions, the Supreme Court held in 1990 in Employment Division v. Smith, that normally do not violate the Constitution.
The preschool came to the Supreme Court last fall, asking the court to take up the case. Although the justices on Monday turned down the preschool’s request to reconsider Employment Division v. Smith, they will hear oral arguments in the case .
The court also granted review in Beaird v. United States, in which Kendrick Beaird was convicted of being a felon in possession of a gun. Beaird challenged (among other things) the constitutionality of his conviction, arguing that it violated the Second Amendment, but the court agreed only to take up his challenge to an enhancement to his sentence based on his possession of a magazine classified under commentary to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines as a “large capacity magazine.” The justices on Monday agreed to decide whether a 1993 case on how courts should deal with commentary to the Sentencing Guidelines still governs.
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In District of Columbia v. R.W., the justices summarily reversed a ruling by the D.C. Court of Appeals – Washington, D.C.’s highest court – that had thrown out the convictions of a teenaged driver, known in court papers as R.W., for (among other things) unauthorized use of a vehicle.
R.W. was arrested in 2023 when a police officer, responding to a call to “check out a suspicious vehicle at a suspicious address,” saw two people running from a parked car. When the car then began to back up, with its rear door still open, the police officer blocked the car from going any further, got out of his own car, told the driver – R.W. – to put his hands in the air, and drew his gun.
R.W. argued that the arresting officer did not have reasonable suspicion to stop him, and he asked the trial court to exclude all of the evidence that the police acquired after he was told to put up his hands. The trial court rejected that request, and R.W. was adjudicated to be delinquent and sentenced to one year of probation. R.W. appealed the denial of his request to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which reversed.
The D.C. Court of Appeals agreed with R.W. that the police officer did not have reasonable suspicion to stop him. It reasoned that the trial court should not have considered the radio call that the officer received, which dispatched him to investigate a “suspicious vehicle.” First, the court observed, the police officer did not know why the call was made or why the vehicle was considered suspicious. Second, the court continued, the radio call instructed the officer “to look only for a suspicious vehicle” – a direction that “was so broad as to be useless.”
The D.C. Court of Appeals also held that the trial court should not have relied on the flight by the two other passengers as the police officer arrived on the scene. “Because here the only fact associating R.W. and the other two occupants of the vehicle at the time of the seizure was their altogether mundane presence in the same car,” the police officer could not reasonably infer that R.W. and those occupants “were associated in a suspicious manner.”
The District of Columbia came to the Supreme Court in late August, asking the justices to weigh in. In a six-page, unsigned opinion, the court reversed. The key question, in the court’s view, was whether the officer “had a reasonable suspicion that R.W. was engaged in criminal wrongdoing” before he told R.W. to put his hands up. And for the court, the answer to that question was yes. Even if it weren’t enough that the officer had seen “every person in R.W.’s car respond strangely to an approaching police car,” the court wrote, R. W.’s conduct after that – backing up with the door open – “strongly suggested that he was (like them) engaged in unlawful conduct he wished to hide from police.” “Pretending that the most revealing aspect of the encounter did not happen is incompatible with the totality-of-the-circumstances approach required by our precedents,” the court concluded.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor indicated, without more, that she would have denied the District’s petition.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s decision, in a three-page opinion. In her view, the court should not have intervened, much less done so without additional briefing and oral argument. The D.C. Court of Appeals, she suggested, had applied the right test; the Supreme Court was simply quibbling with how it had done so. “Even if I would have assigned more heft to a particular fact in my own first-instance assessment,” she concluded, “I would not word-smith a lower court in this fashion.”
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Additionally, the court declined to hear the case of Castro v. Guevara, arising from the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. Sotomayor wrote a statement regarding the court’s denial of review in that case. Under the convention, children who are wrongfully removed from their “country of habitual residence” are generally returned to that country so that any custody disputes can move forward there. The convention carves out several exceptions, however, including when the parent seeking the child’s return does not file a petition with the court for more than a year after the child’s removal and the child is “well settled” in the new country.
The case has its roots in efforts by Jose Leonardo Brito Guevara to have his then-3-year-old daughter returned from the United States, where her mother took her without his permission in November 2021, to Venezuela. Brito began those efforts soon after she left Venezuela, but his attempts to work through diplomatic channels moved slowly and ultimately proved fruitless, as did his endeavors to reach an agreement with the child’s mother, Samantha Estafania Francisco Castro.
Brito then went to federal court in Texas to seek the child’s return under the Hague Convention. The case eventually moved to a different district court in Texas, which did not hold a trial until March 2024 – more than a year after Brito filed his petition for her return and nearly two-and-a-half years after the child’s abduction to the United States.
The district court denied Brito’s request for the child’s return. Although Brito had provided enough evidence that the child had been wrongfully taken from Venezuela that she should normally be returned, the court ruled, she should stay in the United States because she was well settled there.
A divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that ruling. The majority concluded that it was “not persuaded that” the child had “formed such deep or enduring ties to her new environment that returning to her home in Venezuela would contravene her best interests.”
Castro then came to the Supreme Court in December, asking the justices to decide whether the court of appeals had applied the correct standard of review – specifically, whether it properly reviewed the district court’s decision “de novo” – that is, starting from a clean slate – or whether it should have instead determined only whether the lower court was clearly wrong.
After considering the case at four consecutive conferences, the court turned down Castro’s petition for review without comment. In a four-page statement, Sotomayor emphasized that the question at the center of the case “warrants this Court’s attention,” particularly because the 5th Circuit’s ruling “may be erroneous.” But, she said, this case might not be the right one to take up the issue because the child returned to Venezuela (following an order by the Supreme Court on its interim docket) in January. Given that, if the court were to grant review in this case, she observed, the determination of whether she is “well settled” in the United States “would look very different.”
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Finally, the court turned down a request to decide whether a Massachusetts school district violated a couple’s parental rights when it encouraged their child to socially transition over their objections and also hid that fact from them.
The question came to the court in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in 2022 by Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri, who contended that the Ludlow School Committee followed a protocol that directed school staff to use a student’s preferred name and pronouns without notifying that student’s parents. In so doing, the couple argued, the school district violated their parental rights under the Constitution, including both their right to direct their child’s upbringing and education and their right to make medical and mental health decisions for their child.
The lower courts rejected that argument, prompting the parents to come to the Supreme Court in July. They told the justices that the parental rights question is “urgent” and emphasized that “[m]ore than 1,000 public school districts have adopted secret transition policies, resulting in dozens of lawsuits and harming countless children.”
The school district countered that the protocol that the parents claim the school district followed “does not exist.” Instead, it said, the school staff simply tried to apply state law and regulations, along with guidance from the state department of education, to the child in this case. And even if the protocol did exist, it continued, the parents’ challenge is a narrow one, because they are not challenging the state law and regulations on which it would be based.
After considering the case at 13 consecutive conferences, the justices turned the couple’s petition for review down without comment. The order came less than two months after the justices granted a similar request on their interim docket from California parents. The majority in that case explained that those parents were likely to prevail on their claim that California’s policies violate the parents’ right to freely exercise their religion and their right to “direct the upbringing and education of their children.”
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