The specific issue before the Court in this sharply-divided death-penalty case was whether the Constitution bars the states from imposing the death penalty for the rape of a child where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in death of the victim.

By a 5 to ...

This is an unusual and, at times, perplexing, Confrontation Clause decision that bolsters the right of criminal defendants to confront their accusers under highly unusual circumstances. The 6-3 decision will also probably make it more difficult to win convictions in certain types of domestic abuse and child molestation cases; and ...

[Editor's Note: For some commentaries on this ruling, see

• "Supreme Court Denies Rehearing in Child Rape Case," by Tony Mauro, as published on Legal Times at
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202424956066 on October 2, 2008 and

• "Court Won’t Revisit Death Penalty Case," by Adam Liptak, The New York Times, October 1, 2008, ...

As a Government agent in this case observed, computers can be repositories of one’s most private, even subconscious, thoughts. Asked why he examined Internet history files when searching a defendant’s computer for gambling records, he explained they “help[ ] to give you what the user was thinking about . . ...

Just as a servile and weak-kneed Congress was capitulating to a petulant President and a powerful lobby of the telecommunications companies who participated in the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program by enacting the “FISA Amendments Act of 2008,” Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the N.D.Cal. has presented a dramatic and compelling ...

Here the Court almost casually extended the Fourth Amendment's "open container" exception to computers, holding that a warrant authorizing the seizure of particular documents also authorizes the search of a container likely to contain those documents.

The defendant in this case argued that, because the search warrant did not specify ...