WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that states were free to let only their own citizens make requests under their freedom of information laws. The court also dismissed a case concerning the right to a speedy trial for poor criminal defendants, after it had been briefed and argued. And the court declined to consider a case concerning part of a tough 2011 Alabama immigration law, leaving in place an appeals court ruling blocking the law.
The lone decision issued Monday was in a case, McBurney v. Young, No. 12-17, brought by Roger Hurlbert, a California man who collects property records for commercial clients, and Mark McBurney, a Rhode Island man who once lived in Virginia and sought information concerning child support payments. They sued after Virginia refused to comply with their requests under its freedom of information law based on their citizenship.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for a unanimous court, said that provisions of the Constitution meant to ensure that citizens of different states are treated the same in many settings did not apply to what he called a noncommercial service whose fixed costs were borne by state taxpayers. Much of the information was available in other ways, he added. “Requiring noncitizens to conduct a few minutes of Internet research in lieu of using a relatively cumbersome state FOIA process,” he wrote, “cannot be said to impose any significant burden.”
Justice Alito wrote that at least seven other states had laws limiting requests for information to their citizens. The Virginia law contains an exception for representatives of newspapers and magazines with circulation in Virginia and of radio and television stations that broadcast there. It does not address Internet publications.
The New York Times Company, along with many news organizations and advocacy groups, filed a briefsupporting the plaintiffs.
SPEEDY TRIAL A January argument that was the occasion for Justice Clarence Thomas’s first remark from the bench in almost seven years failed on Monday to produce a decision. The justices dismissed the case, Boyer v. Louisiana, No. 11-9953, as improvidently granted.
The court offered no opinion explaining the move, but seven justices debated its wisdom. In a concurrence, Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia, said the court had accepted the case on a mistaken understanding of the facts.
The question the justices had agreed to decide was “whether a state’s failure to fund counsel for an indigent defendant for five years” in a capital case “should be weighted against the state for speedy trial purposes.” Justice Alito wrote that it turned out that “the single largest share of the delay in this case was the direct result of defense requests for continuances.”
The delay, moreover, seemed to assist the defendant, Jonathan E. Boyer, who was convicted of only second-degree murder despite overwhelming evidence that he had robbed and killed a driver who had picked him up while he was hitchhiking.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan, said the case would have provided an important opportunity for the Supreme Court to instruct states “that they have an obligation to protect a defendant’s constitutional right to a speedy trial.”
Justice Sotomayor said there were “systemic problems in Louisiana,” adding that “conditions of this kind cannot persist without endangering constitutional rights.”
Neither opinion addressed the subject matter of Justice Thomas’s lighthearted remark in January, which seemed to take issue with the competence of lawyers trained at Harvard or Yale. The remark was muffled by cross-talk, and the transcript issued that day rendered it as, “Well — he did not.”
Nine days later, the court issued a revised transcript in which Justice Thomas was reported to have said, “Well, there — see, he did not provide good counsel.”
IMMIGRATION The court declined to hear a case concerning an Alabama law that made it a crime to harbor or transport immigrants not authorized to be in the United States or to induce them to enter or live in the state.
The justices, as is their custom, offered no reasons for turning down the appeal. Justice Scalia noted his dissent, but also offered no reasoning.
The question in the case, Alabama v. United States, No. 12-884, was whether the Alabama law conflicted with a federal law. In August, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, blocked the state law at the request of the Obama administration, saying that federal immigration law and policy comprehensively address “criminal penalties for these actions undertaken within the borders of the United States, and a state’s attempt to intrude into this area is prohibited because Congress has adopted a calibrated framework.”