CNN
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The Supreme Court on Friday mistakenly sent out email alerts to attorneys and others laying out which cases it would hear days before it was scheduled to do so, the latest major technical glitch to come from the high court during its busiest month of the year.
The high court acknowledged that, due to an “apparent software malfunction,” notifications about which cases would be granted or denied its review – that were not supposed to be released until Monday morning – were mistakenly distributed on Friday afternoon.
The Supreme Court normally closely guards not only its opinions but also the decisions about whether to grant or deny a case. The court’s decision to hear a case – or not – can have significant consequences for the parties involved and can move markets.
Friday marks the second time within a year that the Supreme Court has had an important technical glitch during its busy month of June, when the justices are rushing to complete opinions for the term. Last year, the court posted an opinion in a major case before it was scheduled to be released and then quickly took it down.
Multiple attorneys in several cases received emails alerting them to whether the court would hear arguments in their case or not. But those decisions were not made public on the court’s online docket, which caused mass confusion among appellate attorneys.
“Accidents happen, and the court should be encouraged to provide more access to its rulings, like the email notification service that apparently caused today’s glitch,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
“That said, this is the second high-profile premature release of rulings in the last year,” Vladeck said. “Whether it’s a sign that the court is juggling too many balls at once or a symptom of some other problem, it’s not a great look for an institution the authority of which depends so profoundly on public confidence.”
Ultimately, the Supreme Court issued its “orders list” Friday evening in response to the glitch.
On that orders list, the court agreed to hear an appeal from state officials in Alabama who want to execute an inmate a lower court found has an intellectual disability. It declined to hear a voting dispute involving provisional ballots in battleground Pennsylvania.
The glitch involved an automated system that attorneys and members of the public can use to receive e-mail notifications when new items are added to docket pages, including orders and decisions by the court in those cases. It’s not clear how many people received the inadvertent early notifications.
Last year, the court inadvertently posted an opinion to its website showing that the justices would temporarily allow abortions in medical emergencies in Idaho. The court acknowledged that break of protocol but stressed that no opinion was final until announced by the justices. The court formally released the opinion in that case the next day.
And, in 2022, Politico obtained a draft opinion of the court’s blockbuster decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The order list that the court wound up releasing on Friday included several decisions about whether or not to hear high-profile cases, including the decision to grant the Alabama capital case.
Joseph Smith was convicted and sentenced to death for a brutal murder in 1997. The case turns on a years-old debate about how states determine whether a defendant is intellectually disabled and, therefore, ineligible for the death penalty.
A series of tests put Smith’s IQ at just over 70, a threshold referenced in an earlier Supreme Court decision. But the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals noted that the number isn’t a strict cutoff and that deviation in one of the tests could have put his actual IQ slightly below 70.
At issue in the Pennsylvanians ballot case was whether voters who make a mistake in how they prepared their mail-in ballots – specifically, by not enclosing them in a second “secrecy” envelope – could file a provisional ballot to make sure their vote was counted.
Beyond addressing that issue in a presidential battleground for future elections, the appeal also could have had national implications because it raised the question of when the Supreme Court will step in to review state court interpretations of state election law.
The Supreme Court also declined to hear a case involving a ban on high-capacity magazines in Washington, DC, and it turned away an appeal from an environmental group in Chicago that has been trying for years to halt construction of former President Barack Obama’s library in a historic park.
The inadvertent disclosure of the orders created confusion among appellate attorneys who had cases pending before the court.
CNN’s Chief Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
