In 2009, Mr. Davis obtained a new hearing from the Supreme Court by an unusual route, filing an original writ of habeas corpus with the justices rather than appealing from a lower-court ruling. The court responded by ordering a federal trial court in Georgia to consider whether new evidence clearly established Mr. Davis’s innocence. Several witnesses in the case against him had recanted, and some had implicated the prosecution’s main witness as the actual killer.
In August, the trial judge, Judge William T. Moore Jr., concluded that Mr. Davis’s evidence was “largely smoke and mirrors.” On Monday, the justices refused to review that ruling.
In other action on Monday, the court agreed to decide when schools run by churches are subject to federal antidiscrimination laws. Courts have recognized a “ministerial exception” to such laws grounded in religious freedom. That exception precludes judicial interference with relationships between churches and some employees with religious duties. But the courts have disagreed about the scope of the exception.
The case the court agreed to hear, Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, No. 10-553, involves a teacher at a Michigan school run by a Lutheran church who says she was discriminated against based on a disability, narcolepsy, in violation of federal law. The teacher, Cheryl Perich, taught mostly secular subjects but also taught four half-hour religion classes each week and attended chapel with her class.
A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Cincinnati ruled that the ministerial exception did not apply and that the suit could go forward, saying that “Perich’s primary duties were secular.” The church, in urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, said the appeals court had engaged in improper “religious second-guessing.”