Don Cruse

More grants under the new petition rules

This week’s orders list brought eight more grants under the new petition rules. The Court has set these for argument in the November and December sittings.

Two very unusual voting splits

We are nearing the Court’s self-imposed June deadline to clear its docket of argued cases. This week, that crunch brought us two very unusual voting splits.1

A per curiam with a three-Justice dissent.

In In re J.D.H., a child, No. 25-0588, the Court issued a per curiam in a parental-termination case. The court of appeals had dismissed the appeal as untimely; the Court through a per curiam reversed and remanded “for a hearing on whether the petitioner’s counsel was ineffective in filing a late notice of appeal.”

But three Justices joined a signed dissent to the per curiam. Justice Sullivan, joined by Justices Young and Hawkins, would have held that the appellate courts lacked jurisdiction over a direct appeal that was as untimely as this one, no matter how sympathetic.

A majority author who wrote a concurrence to their own opinion.

Your eyes are not deceiving you. Justice Busby wrote both a majority opinion and a concurrence to his own opinion in this Medicaid-fraud case.

That doesn’t happen every day. During my time tracking the Court, the only similar example is Justice Willett concurring to his own opinion in In re Bexar County Criminal District Attorney's Office, No. 05-0613.

  1. Both of these confused my database on first pass. As I write this, the per curiam with dissents is still not showing up in the right place in my voting charts. It’s showing as a “per curiam” only, rather than a case with “divided opinions.” That will be sorted shortly. ↩