Sept. 24, 2025 – Each term of the U.S. Supreme Court has its own flavor from the mosaic of cases that the Court granted certiorari. The 2025-26 Term begins split evenly between criminal and civil cases.

Rory Little on SCOTUSblog sees 15 of the 31 cases on the Court’s docket as “criminal law and related.” Of the 10 cases scheduled for oral argument in the first two weeks of October, half are criminal cases.

The following are highlights of what’s on the docket, criminal and civil, with room for the Court to add more cases during the term.

Criminal Cases

With Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) out in force, Urias-Orellana v. Bondi shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Although predating ICE’s current enforcement priorities, the case involves Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana’s quest for asylum as a refugee for himself and his family, which may be granted on fear of persecution in the native country.

Urias-Orellana fled El Salvador because of a violent vendetta by a cartel hitman against his extended family. Two half-brothers had already been shot but survived, although one is in a wheelchair from the attack.

Threats and a physical attack on Urias-Orellana happened throughout El Salvador as the family moved to protect itself.

Although the immigration judge found Urias-Orellana’s testimony credible, the judge denied asylum for him and his family. The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) agreed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit denied review.

Although the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) provides for judicial review of a BIA decision on “questions of law,” it doesn’t “establish a deferential standard of review for legal determinations made in connection with asylum-eligibility decisions,” Urias-Orellana argued in his brief.

Urias-Orellana adds that Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo justifies de novo review, while he claims the government wants to get by on de facto Chevron deference reversed by Loper Bright.

But, as the government argued in its certiorari brief, “Unfulfilled threats of harm are generally insufficient. … In addition, the mistreatment must be at the hands of the foreign government” or groups that the government cannot control.

The question has created confusion, the government agreed, while arguing that the Court of Appeals applied the proper substantial-evidence standard. Deferential review is proper because the immigration judge and the BIA have specialized expertise in immigration law.

Case v. Montana presents a Fourth Amendment question regarding the degree of suspicion law enforcement officers must have, under the emergency-aid exception, to enter a residence without a warrant.

Police did so here because William Trevor Case, who had a history of suicide-by-cop threats, threatened suicide on the phone to his ex-girlfriend, who called police.

Police knew Case well. They also spent at least 40 minutes, including announcing themselves, before entering the house.

Once police were inside, Case came from behind a curtain with “what appeared to be a black object.” An officer fired.

Case was convicted of felony assault on a police officer after the trial court refused to suppress the evidence of the search, which included Case’s handgun.

After losing before the Montana Supreme Court, Case’s appeal argues that probable cause was necessary for the warrantless entry for emergency aid under the community caretaking doctrine.

The state of Montana argues that police acted objectively reasonable and, therefore, constitutionally: The warrantless entry passes all relevant standards of suspicion.

The case presents a circuit split between the Montana Supreme Court and three Court of Appeals circuits while revisiting an issue the U.S. Supreme Court addressed in 2021’s Caniglia v. Strom, explained John Elwood in SCOTUSblog.

Barrett v. United States addresses a double jeopardy challenge for an act violating both 18 U.S.C. sections 924(c) and 18 U.S.C. section 924(j).

The crime in Section 924(c)(1)(A) involves firearm use or possession while the latter crime is committed while “in the course of a violation of subsection (c), causes the death of a person through the use of a firearm.”

Dwayne Barrett was the driver in a robbery in which a victim was shot dead. Barrett was found guilty of aiding the use of the gun that was discharged and aiding in the gun used to commit murder.

The district court said the two crimes merged. The Second Circuit disagreed because they were separate offenses. The case was remanded for punishment for both crimes.

Barrett appeals, arguing that the one crime is a lesser-included charge.

The government contends in its brief that “[t]here is no clear indication that Congress authorized cumulative punishments” and the two crimes do not violate double jeopardy.

The government had argued against certiorari because at Barrett’s resentencing, “‘the district court could structure’ his sentence” or the government dismiss a charge to avoid constitutional problems, Amy Howe wrote in SCOTUSblog.

When the government subsequently “declined to defend” the Second Circuit decision, Howe said, the Supreme Court appointed an amicus curiae to brief and argue the case.

Amicus argues that Congress authorized cumulative punishments and disputes both the petitioner’s and government’s brief in seeking the Supreme Court to affirm the Second Circuit.

Civil Cases

Lebene Konan wants her mail delivered to her address. In U.S. Postal Service v. Konan, she states that for two years “she and her tenants did not receive mail because Postal Service employees intentionally did not deliver it to a designated address.”

Konen, who is Black, claims racial harassment. Postal Service employees changed the locks to prevent her from getting the mail and changed records to show a white tenant owned the property. The Postal Service required only her to provide identification to get her mail at the post office.

She pointed to mail held at the post office and returned to the sender as “undeliverable.”

She alleges the acts “caus[ed] tenants to move out and cost[] her at least $50,000 in rental income, plus emotional distress and the hassle of chasing down bills via FedEx,” according to John Elwood on SCOTUSblog.

Konan sought recourse through the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which waives federal sovereign immunity for “‘negligent or wrongful act or omission of any employee of the Government’ under ‘circumstances where the United States, if a private person, would be liable’ under state law,” under 28 U.S.C. sections 1346(b)(1) and 2674.

She says the mail was not “lost” and an intentional act cannot be “miscarriage” so the FTCA exception for “[a]ny claims arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter” under 28 U.S.C. section 2680(b) doesn’t prevent her claim.

Konan won at the Fifth Circuit.

The Postal Service argues on appeal that the act of intentionally failing to deliver the mail was a “miscarriage” by the ordinary meaning of that term, and it was a “loss” because the deprivation of mail creates a loss, and “[n]othing in the text, history, or purposes of the FTCA rebuts the presumption of consistent usage.”

The Postal Service points out that the Fifth Circuit departed from other circuits in those key terms, Elwood said.

The Supreme Court in Dolan v. U.S. Postal Service held the FTCA exception includes mail that fails to arrive, arrives late, or arrives at the wrong location – and the Postal Service argues now that applies even to intentional acts.

Campaign finance limits receive new scrutiny in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission.

After losing en banc at the Sixth Circuit, petitioners argue that dollar “limits on coordinated party expenditures” under 52 U.S.C. section 30116 violate the First Amendment regarding “party coordinated communications.”

Petitioners include former Senator and now Vice President J.D. Vance. The Supreme Court granted the Democratic National Committee and related organizations the right to intervene.

Petitioners argue that the Federal Election Campaign Act prevents party committees from coordinating with the party’s candidate, absent minimal exceptions, as the price for permitting such committees to speak in favor of the candidate – which they claim violates standard practice for about 200 years.

The law “severely restricts parties’ spending in coordination with their own candidate,” petitioners explain.

Calling the limitations “a form of speech rationing in search of a rationale,” petitioners dispute that the practice is “an anticorruption measure.”

The Sixth Circuit decision, as they describe it, expressed the intermediate appellate court’s limits; because it didn’t have a free hand, petitioners invite it from the Supreme Court.

The government doesn’t want to defend, seeking a split argument because it “acquiesced in certiorari and conceded that the statute violates the Constitution” and asking the Supreme Court to appoint an amicus curiae.

The DNC intervenors “promised to ‘provide a vigorous and informed defense of the coordinated expenditure limits now under attack,’” Howe explained.

Transgender Sports

Two cases raise the issue of whether state laws may prohibit a transgender girl or woman from playing on the female team in high school or college.

In West Virginia v. B.P.J., a 14-year-old who “has known she is a girl for as long as she can remember” and is on puberty blockers challenges the state law.

A key consideration of whether transgender girls can play in girls’ sports is whether their body has been affected by potentially athletic enhancing testosterone – something that hasn’t happened with B.P.J., she said in her brief opposing the grant of certiorari.

The Fourth Circuit held that the West Virginia law violated Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex in sports opportunities, and that P.B.J. raised “a cognizable as-applied challenge” that state law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Little v. Hecox places the issue in college sports. Idaho law prohibits Lindsay Hecox, a 24-year-old transgender woman, from participating on the Boise State University women’s track and cross-country teams.

Although Hecox recognized herself as a transgender woman after high school, she takes testosterone suppression and estrogen – keeping her testosterone level “well below those required to meet” eligibility on those teams.

The state of Idaho argues the law protects women’s athletic opportunities against unfair competition from transgender women who may have male physical advantages.

The Ninth Circuit held that Hecox has a likelihood of success in her Equal Protection claim, affirming the district court’s injunction against applying the law to Hecox, and that the law “likely does not survive heightened scrutiny.”

Hecox, however, dismissed her claim with prejudice and argued a suggestion of mootness on Sept. 2 that the Supreme Court should dismiss her case. Petitioners have opposed the motion, which the Supreme Court has not decided.

The two cases take off where the Court left in its last term.

“The cases will likely be among the most closely watched of the upcoming term, and they come on the heels of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision upholding Tennessee’s ban on certain medical treatments for transgender minors in United States v. Skrmetti, which was released on June 18,” Howe wrote.

But Skrmetti dodged the big doctrinal issue – level of scrutiny, Elwood wrote. Does heightened scrutiny apply, as the lower courts used, or intermediate scrutiny, as the laws’ defenders argue – or isn’t transgender status a quasi-suspect class?