The first and liveliest considered a decision of the Louisiana Supreme Court that a letter elicited by the police from a murder defendant was admissible as evidence even though a local judge had by then appointed a lawyer to represent him.
Earlier decisions by the United States Supreme Court have said the police may not initiate questioning after defendants have hired or asked for lawyers. But the Louisiana Supreme Court said the local judge’s action was not by itself enough, because the defendant had not also said that he accepted the appointment of the lawyer.
Academic commentators and some justices have described the state of the law on when the police are free to question people who have or want lawyers as murky, difficult and in places counterintuitive. But the affirmative-acceptance requirement did not seem to strike several justices on Tuesday as an improvement.
“He had just been told by a judicial officer, ‘I’m appointing counsel for you,’ ” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said of the defendant, Jesse Jay Montejo. “How does he know that in order to protect his right to counsel, he has to make some kind of an affirmative assertion?”
After Mr. Montejo was assigned the lawyer, police detectives urged him to write a letter to the victim’s widow, and provided him pen and paper. The letter, expressing remorse and asking for forgiveness, was used against Mr. Montejo at his trial. He was convicted and sentenced to death.
A decision in the case, Montejo v. Louisiana, No. 07-1529, is expected by June.
A second case argued Tuesday was billed in the briefs as “a first in the history of American jurisprudence.” At the beginning of her argument, Christina Rainville, a chief deputy state’s attorney for Vermont, said the case held the seeds of “chaos of constitutional proportions.”
But after an hour of argument, the case, Vermont v. Brillon, No. 08-88, seemed most likely to lead to a narrow ruling based on its exceptionally tangled facts.
In March, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that a three-year delay in bringing Michael Brillon to trial, for domestic assault as a habitual offender, had violated his constitutional right to a speedy trial, notwithstanding that the delays in the case had been caused by Mr. Brillon or his appointed lawyers.
The general rule is that the right to a speedy trial does not apply to self-inflicted delays. The State Supreme Court acknowledged that, but it said the inaction of assigned counsel should count against the state and not the defendant. That proposition, if applied to overburdened and underfinanced public defender offices around the nation, could indeed have broad consequences.
But the argument on Tuesday focused largely on Mr. Brillon’s complicated interactions with a parade of lawyers, some of whom he fired or threatened.
Lawyers for the state conceded that “it is theoretically conceivable that a systemic underfunding of the program for appointing defense counsel could create a constitutionally cognizable issue if speedy trial violations were occurring in case after case.”
Justice David H. Souter summarized where all this left the court.
“There is plenty of blame to go around,” Justice Souter said. “It seems to me that there isn’t an issue of principle dividing the parties here. It’s a series of issues of details.”
The third case argued Tuesday, Knowles v. Mirzayance, No. 07-1315, also seemed unlikely to generate a clean legal ruling. The defendant in the case, Alexandre Mirzayance, accused his former lawyer of having failed to present what he said was his only viable defense after his conviction of first-degree murder: that of not guilty by reason of insanity.
California state courts ruled that the lawyer’s choice was a reasonable one, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, disagreed.
Steven E. Mercer, a deputy state attorney general, said that “the Ninth Circuit has come at this matter with a chestful of monkey wrenches.” Several justices indicated that they were not inclined to second-guess the lawyer or the state courts.