Court turns down hearing cases on prison construction, school prayer

Over the objections of three justices, the Supreme Court on Monday turned down an appeal from the sheriff of New Orleans in a dispute over the city’s obligation to build a new facility for inmates with mental health issues. The dispute began more than a dozen years ago, when inmates at the prison in Orleans Parish went to federal court. They argued that the facilities there violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because they did not provide adequate housing for inmates with mental health conditions.

In 2013, the district court approved a consent judgment with a plan to address the constitutional violations. Several years later, the construction of a new treatment facility with 89 beds for inmates with mental health needs was added to the plan. But in 2020, New Orleans asked the court to lift its orders requiring the city to move forward with the construction of the new facility, on the theory that conditions had changed. The district court rejected the request, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that decision.

A new sheriff, Susan Hutson, returned to court, once again seeking to end the city’s obligation to build the new facility. She pointed to a provision of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a federal law that was intended to reduce frivolous lawsuits by inmates, which provides for the cut-off of future-oriented relief after two years.

The district court turned down the new request, and the 5th Circuit agreed.  

Hutson came to the Supreme Court in the spring, asking the justices to decide whether she was required to do anything other than showing that two years had passed since the entry of the plan.

A new sheriff, Michelle Woodfork, was elected on Oct. 11; she will take office in May.

After considering the case at five consecutive conferences, the court on Monday rejected Hutson’s appeal. Justice Neil Gorsuch indicated, without offering an explanation, that he would have granted her petition for review.

Justice Samuel Alito, in an opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented from the denial of Hutson’s petition. He wrote that “because the prison-building injunction was illegal from the beginning, the courts below should have terminated it.” But in any event, he continued, the lower courts should have required the challengers, not the sheriff, to show that the consent judgment and the plan were still needed. “By failing to intervene,” he said, “we leave New Orleans to pay for the Fifth Circuit’s serious errors.”

The court declined to take up a petition filed by a Christian school in Florida in a case involving prayers at a high school football game. Cambridge Christian School had asked the justices to review a ruling by a federal appeals court in favor of the Florida High School Athletic Association, which had turned down the school’s request to use the loudspeaker before a state championship game for a prayer. The FHSAA told the school that it believed that allowing such a prayer would violate the Constitution’s establishment clause, which bars the government from establishing an official religion or favoring one religion over another.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled for the FHSAA, and the Supreme Court on Monday left that decision in place.

Finally, the court asked the federal government for its views in a dispute between Nebraska and Colorado over water. There is no timetable for the U.S. solicitor general to file his brief.

Also on Monday, the court added one new case, a challenge to the Trump administration’s now-rescinded policy of turning back asylum seekers before they reach the U.S.- Mexico border, to its argument docket for the 2025-26 term; that grant was covered by SCOTUSblog in a separate story earlier on Monday.