Editorial: The Supreme Court hits and misses in two criminal cases

On Monday the Supreme Court bolstered the 4th Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures,� ruling that police officers may not enter a home without a warrant and seize property as part of their so-called “community caretaking� role. But in another decision handed down that day, the court was depressingly less protective of the right to a fair trial guaranteed by the 6th Amendment.

In the 4th Amendment case, the court ruled in favor of Edward Caniglia, a Rhode Island man whose guns were confiscated by police who entered his home without a warrant after his wife expressed concern that he might kill himself.

Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said the so-called “community caretaking� exception to the warrant requirement — established in a 1973 decision about the search of an impounded rental car — didn’t extend to searches of the home. Thomas noted that the court has said that the “very core� of the 4th Amendment’s protection was “the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.�

Unfortunately, a majority of the court was less sensitive to constitutional rights in another new ruling, this one involving the right to a jury trial.

Last year the court ruled that the 6th Amendment required that juries in state courts must be unanimous when they convict a defendant of a serious crime. But on Monday, by a 6-3 vote, the justices refused to apply that ruling retroactively in the case of Thedrick Edwards, who was in convicted in 2007 by a non-unanimous jury of armed robbery, rape, and kidnapping. Edwards had sought to overturn his conviction in a federal habeas corpus proceeding.

Writing for the majority, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said that under Supreme Court precedents, decisions announcing a “new procedural rule� were not retroactive in cases such as Edwards’. Kavanaugh’s opinion seemed to nullify a 1989 decision allowing retroactivity for “watershed rules� of criminal procedure implicating fundamental fairness.

Kavanaugh justified the decision by arguing that applying the court’s 2020 decision retroactively “would potentially overturn decades of convictions� in states that allowed non-unanimous jury verdicts. But that’s a matter of speculation.

More to the point, defendants such as Edwards shouldn’t be denied a new trial because they were convicted before the court decided that unanimity was essential. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in a powerful dissenting opinion: “If the right to a unanimous jury is so fundamental — if a verdict rendered by a divided jury is ‘no verdict at all’ — then Thedrick Edwards should not spend his life behind bars over two jurors’ opposition.�