The US Supreme Court [official website] on Monday granted certiorari [order list, PDF] in United States v. Bryant [docket; cert. petition, PDF], a case concerning Indian rights to counsel. 18 USC §117(a) [text] makes it a federal crime for any person to “commit[] a domestic assault within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States or Indian country” if the person “has a final conviction on at least 2 separate prior occasions in Federal, State, or Indian
tribal court proceedings for” certain domestic violence offenses. The question before the Supreme Court is “whether reliance on valid uncounseled tribal-court misdemeanor convictions to prove Section 117(a)’s predicate-offense element violates the Constitution.” Michael Bryant, Jr., a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, had been convicted several times in tribal courts for misdemeanor domestic violence offenses but was not represented by a lawyer at those proceedings. He was later charged under §117(a), with prosecutors basing the charges on his tribal court convictions. Bryant argues that this violates his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. His argument was rejected by a federal judge and by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Also Monday the court issued a per curiam decision [opinion, PDF] in White v. Wheeler [docket; cert. petition, PDF], summarily reversing the decision below. The case dealt with the exclusion of a juror in a Kentucky capital case. The court concluded that, “[t]he Kentucky Supreme Court was not unreasonable in its application of clearly established federal law when it concluded that the exclusion of Juror 638 did not violate the Sixth Amendment.”