Wednesday, June 30, 2010Last Update: 6:55 PM PT

     (CN) - The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld without comment a federal law banning large donations to political parties, also called "soft-money" contributions.
     The soft-money ban limits the amount of individual donations to political parties, even if the money is not spent on federal elections.
     Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas voted to hear the case next term.
     The ruling affirms a March district court ruling that the ban -- part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 -- is constitutional.
     A special three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., rejected Republicans' claim that parts of the law, often called McCain-Feingold for its sponsors, could not be reconciled with a January high court decision striking down corporate campaign funding restrictions.
     But that decision, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, left intact a 2003 Supreme Court decision upholding soft-money bans. In McConnell v. FEC, the justices had ruled that "large soft-money contributions to national parties are likely to create actual or apparent indebtedness on the part of federal officeholders."
     The panel cited McConnell in dismissing the challenge brought by national, state and local Republican groups.
     The "whole point" of the soft-money ban -- and the high court's decision to uphold it -- was to stop political parties from using soft-money donations to fund activities that "ultimately influenced federal elections and benefited federal candidates," D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the special panel.
     The justices affirmed that ruling Tuesday without comment, overriding the dissents of Justices Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas.

     (CN) - The Supreme Court on Tuesday told Georgia courts to reconsider the death sentence of a convicted kidnapper, citing new evidence that childhood abuse and head injuries significantly impaired his impulse control.
     Demarcus Sears is the only Georgia convict to be sentenced to death for a crime other than murder. He was convicted of kidnapping with bodily injury after he and an accomplice kidnapped a woman in Georgia and killed her in Kentucky.
     Sears had challenged the constitutionality of his death sentence for mere kidnapping, but the high court considered only his Sixth Amendment claim that his attorney's mitigation theory flopped.
     Since Sears' sentencing, psychological experts have reported that Sears suffers from "significant frontal lobe abnormalities" stemming from a history of "multiple head trauma, substance abuse and traumatic experiences."
     Sears' attorney did not offer this evidence during the sentencing phase, however. Instead, witnesses testified that a death sentence would shock and devastate Sears' stable, middle-class family.
     "But the strategy backfired," the Supreme Court wrote. "The prosecutor ultimately used the evidence of Sears' purportedly stable and advantaged upbringing against him during the state's closing arguments."
     Evidence later surfaced that Sears tested at or below the first percentile in several categories of cognitive function, "making him among the most impaired individuals in the population in terms of ability to suppress competing impulses and conform behavior only to relevant stimuli," according to expert assessments.
     The trial court acknowledged that Sears' Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel had been violated, but said it was "impossible to know" if the error had prejudiced Sears.
     In an unsigned opinion, the justices cited two errors in the lower court's ruling. First, it had relied too heavily on the assumed "reasonableness" of the attorney's mitigation theory -- that a death sentence would devastate Sears' middle-class family.
     "Second, and more fundamentally, the court failed to apply the proper prejudice inquiry," the justices wrote.
     The court vacated the Georgia court's ruling and sent the case back to state court.
     In a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that the new mitigation theory would unlikely change Sears' death sentence.
     "While the court takes pain to describe all the elements of Sears' new mitigation theory, down to the silliest, it does not trouble to describe the brutal circumstances of the crime -- which are at least just as relevant to assessing whether the different mitigation theory would probably have altered the sentence," Scalia wrote.
     "But the jury heard all about them. They heard Sears' confession that he kidnapped, raped, and murdered Gloria Wilbur, a 59-year old wife and mother." Scalia remained skeptical that substituting the "deprived-childhood-cum-brain-damage" defense for the "good-middle-class-kid-who-made-a-mistake" defense would have altered the verdict.
     Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito said they would have turned down the case.

     (CN) - The Second Amendment extends to the city and state level, a split Supreme Court ruled Monday in a 5-4 decision overturning Chicago's ban on handguns. The decision voids the 1982 ordinance that barred Chicagoans from having handguns in their homes.
     In 2008, the high court held that the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, striking down a Washington, D.C., law banning handgun possession.
     The underlying case involves Chicago and one of its suburbs, Oak Park, which banned handgun possession.
     Four Chicago residents sued the city, claiming the ban "left them vulnerable to criminals."
     The low court rejected the arguments, and noted that the 7th Circuit had previously upheld the constitutionality of the ban and that the Supreme Court's previous decision explicity refrained from deciding whether the Second Amendment applied to the states.
     The 7th Circuit affirmed.
     "We have previously held that most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights apply with full force to both the federal government and the states," Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. "Applying the standard that is well established in our case law, we hold that the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the states."
     Chief Justice John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas agreed.
     Retiring Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent.
     "Procedural guarantees are hollow unless linked to substantive interests; and no amount of process can legitimize some deprivations," he wrote. "I have yet to see a persuasive argument that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thought otherwise. To the contrary, the historical evidence suggests that, at least by the time of the Civil War if not much earlier, the phrase 'due process of law' had acquired substantive content as a term of art within the legal community."