Petitioner Adele Pope is a former court- appointed fiduciary of the James Brown estate who for many years fought efforts by false claimants to divert funds that James Brown had intended to go to scholarships for underprivileged children but was ultimately replaced. In 2015 the South Carolina Supreme Court directed that Petitioner was “prohibited from filing any further motions or appeals in actions involving the Estate and Trust of James Brown in which she clearly has no standing” and warned that “continued attempts to involve herself in the resolution of the Estate and Trust may result in contempt charges.” Petitioner was recently held in criminal contempt by the South Carolina Supreme Court for sending a FOIA request for certain documents to the Attorney General of South Carolina, an act that any citizen of the State would have “standing” to perform. The Questions Presented are:

1. Whether the South Carolina Supreme Court’s interpretation and enforcement of its 2015 Order violates the First Amendment.

2. Whether the South Carolina Supreme Court’s 2015 Order is unconstitutionally vague, and/or the Court’s subsequent interpretation and enforcement of that Order violates Petitioner’s due process right to fair notice.

Whether, in a case involving a release of claims under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, a plan sponsor’s alleged breach of fiduciary duty may prevent the enforcement of an otherwise knowing and voluntary release, where the releasing parties were aware of the facts underlying the alleged breach when they signed the release.

(1)

In Skilling v. United States, 561 U.S. 358 (2010), this Court held that 18 U.S.C. § 1846 covered only bribery and kickback schemes, expressly excluding undisclosed self- dealing from the statute’s reach. In the decision below, the Ninth Circuit affirmed Petitioner’s honest-services fraud conviction under jury instructions that permitted conviction for receiving “a thing or things of value” in exchange for “services by a fiduciary’—language that encompasses both lawful self-dealing as well as bribes and kickbacks. The Eleventh Circuit, however, reversed a conviction under nearly identical instructions, holding that the failure to distinguish between kickbacks and self-dealing invited the jury to convict on conduct that Skilling placed outside § 1346’s reach. United States v. Aunspaugh, 792 F.3d 1302, 1309-10 (11th Cir. 2015).

The question presented, therefore, is whether honest- services fraud jury instructions must distinguish criminal kickbacks from lawful self-dealing, or whether they may permit conviction for receiving “a thing or things of value” in exchange for “services by a fiduciary” without requiring the jury to find that payments were made to induce favorable treatment rather than to compensate legitimate work.

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (““AEDPA”) prevents federal courts from granting habeas petitions for constitutional violations regard- ing state court criminal convictions unless the state’s adjudication of the claim “resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable applica- tion of, clearly established Federal law.” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). This Court has held that to overcome “AEDPA deference,” the application of the federal law must be unreasonable, a standard higher than that of “clear error.” Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 411 (2000); Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 68, 75 (2008). In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024), this Court held that “the ‘final interpretation of the laws” would be in “the proper and peculiar prov- ince of the courts.” Jd. at 385 (citation omitted). The first question presented 1s:

1. Whether AEDPA deference is unconstitutional

under Loper Bright.

Under the prejudice standard for a Sixth Amend- ment ineffective assistance of counsel claim and the materiality standard under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), a petitioner does not have to show that he would have been acquitted but for the constitu- tional violation; he only needs to show that there is a reasonable probability that the result of the trial would have been different, which is a probability suf- ficient to undermine confidence in the outcome. The Eleventh Circuit—like all of the courts to consider this issue before it—held Mr. Overton to a higher standard, one that requires him to completely undermine the re- hability of the DNA evidence offered against him even