Supreme Court Term 2025-2026

A statewide coalition of nonpartisan community organizations sued state and county officials, asserting that the practice of disenfranchising voters for failure to handwrite the date on the outer return envelope of their mail ballot packet, despite the lack of any purpose or use for the handwritten date, violates the fundamental right to vote guaranteed by the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Free and Equal Elections Clause.

This case concerns the First Step Act of 2018, in which Congress made major reductions to the mandatory minimum sentences for certain federal drug and firearm offenses. These changes result in sentences many decades shorter than were required under the previous laws. The question in this case was whether people who were initially sentenced prior to enactment of the First Step Act, but whose sentences were vacated and remanded for resentencing after enactment of the law, can benefit from its major reductions in applicable mandatory minimums. For defendants like Mr. Carpenter, who was originally sentenced to a draconian 116 years in prison as a result of the pre-First Step Act mandatory minimums, applying the First Step Act can mean the difference between dying in prison and having the opportunity to eventually go free. Unfortunately, although there is a split among federal courts of appeals on this question, the Supreme Court denied cert in this case in February 2024.

Whether a U.S. citizen gets a day in court to challenge the federal government’s revocation of her spouse’s immigrant visa.

This case in the Indiana Supreme Court concerns whether a case is moot when someone is released from a civil commitment while appealing the commitment order. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, alongside the ACLU of Indiana, filed an amicus brief arguing that the appellant’s case is not moot, despite her release from civil commitment, because the Indiana Constitution favors adjudicating appeals by people whose liberty has been curtailed, because it meets a traditional mootness exception for cases that at capable of repetition yet evading review, and because it also meets Indiana’s public interest exception to mootness.