Petitioners, a nonprofit corporation and one of its volunteers, wanted to train nonlawyers to offer narrow, specific advice to poor people facing specific legal problems—a program that turned out to be pro- hibited by New York’s prohibition on the “unauthor- ized practice of law,” which reaches even unpaid spo- ken advice about the law. In the case below, the Sec- ond Circuit held that this restriction on Petitioners’ speech is content-neutral because it 1s not aimed at the content of their speech (which 1s communicating legal advice and opinions to particular clients) but 1s instead aimed at the “purpose, focus, and circum- stance” of their speech, which is “the rendering of le- gal advice and opinions to particular clients.”

The question presented 1s:

Is a law whose application 1s triggered by com- municating about a particular topic nonetheless con- tent-neutral so long as the law can be described as aimed at the “purpose, focus, and circumstance’ of the speech rather than at its content?

THE MATIASIC FIRM, P.C. One Embarcadero Ctr. Ste. 1200

San Francisco, CA 94111 Counsel for Petitioners

I Did the Sixth Circuit err when it reversed the district courts grant of the writ based on ineffective assistance of counsel during cross-examination when an element of the charge could be proved only by the complaining witness, the witness had not established the element on direct examination, and defense counsel elicited hearsay that bolstered the state’s case on the same element?

II “(Wlhere testimonial evidence is at issue. . . the Sixth Amendment demands what the common law required: unavailability and a prior opportunity for cross-examination.” Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 68 (2004). “If a ‘particular guarantee’ of the Sixth Amendment is violated, no substitute procedure can cure the violation, and no additional showing of prejudice is required, to make the violation complete.” Bullcoming v. New Mexico, 564 U.S. 647, 663 (2011) quoting United States v. Gonzalez-Lopez, 548 U.S. 140, 146 (2006). At Petitioner’s trial, after identifying the analyst who did the testing on its witness list, the State without notice introduced DNA evidence through a substitute analyst who did not do the testing. Surprised defense counsel did not object. The state appellate court found the Confrontation Clause issue was not waived and conducted plain error review. Petitioner challenged

1

The Constitution vests Congress with exclusive legislative authority over the seat of the Nation’s government. Exercising that authority, when Con- cress established the modern courts of the District of Columbia through the 1970 District of Columbia Court Reform and Criminal Procedure Act, it required the Superior Court to conduct its business under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and it vested exclusive authority to modify those Rules in the District’s judiciary. In 1973, the District of Columbia Home Rule Act reaffirmed that mandate, requiring District courts to “continue as provided under” the 1970 Act and prohibiting the D.C. Council from legislating “with respect to any provision of Title 11” of the D.C. Code, which codifies the federal mandate.

The en banc decision below violates those Congres- sional commands. In upholding a Council-enacted anti-SLAPP regime that conflicts with the Federal Rules in multiple ways, the decision recast the plain language of the controlling federal statutes, including by narrowing Congress’s categorical prohibition against Council legislation “with respect to” Title 11. It creates a direct conflict with the D.C. Circuit’s conclusion that the D.C. Anti-SLAPP Act cannot operate in a Federal-Rules court, thereby replicating within the District the national split among circuits about whether anti-SLAPP procedures can live alongside the Federal Rules.

The questions presented are:

1. May the D.C. Council impose the D.C. Anti- SLAPP Act’s special-motion-to-dismiss procedures in Superior Court notwithstanding Congress’s command (codified in D.C. Code § 11-946) that the court conduct

This Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), brought about a sea change in Second Amendment jurisprudence. In Bruen’s wake, federal district courts and the courts of appeals have considered myriad constitutional challenges to the federal felon in possession statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), which has produced wildly divergent results.

The question presented 1s:

Does the lifetime criminalization of any convicted felon’s possession of a firearm under 18 U.S.C. § 922(¢g)(1) violate the Second Amendment?

Charles Don Flores was convicted and sentenced to death for the shooting death of Betty Black based on a mid-trial identification made by a witness who had been subjected to “investigative hypnosis” by police officers involved in the underlying investigation. This witness initially described perpetrators who looked nothing like Flores. Soon after the crime, the witness failed to pick a recent picture of him out of a photo lineup under circumstances that the current consensus in eyewitness-memory science views as highly probative of innocence.

The brazen manipulation of a key witness was just one component of a host of long- concealed misconduct by state actors, designed to push responsibility for a crime perpetrated by the son of a local police officer, heavily involved in narcotics, onto Flores, an unconnected drug- user living in a trailer. After Flores’s conviction, the police officer’s son confessed to being the shooter, obtained a secretly negotiated plea deal, served a fraction of his sentence, and was paroled the same year Flores was scheduled to be executed.

Flores has always maintained his innocence.

Well after his ineffectual initial appeals were exhausted, Flores obtained counsel who began unearthing copious evidence supporting claims for habeas relief under both federal constitutional and state law—of junk science, false testimony, official misconduct, and, most critically, actual innocence. To get back into court, he relied on state-created procedural vehicles expressly designed to permit development of the factual basis for such claims. See Tex. Code of Crim. Proc., art. 11.071 § 5(a)(2) & art. 11.073. Yet Texas’s highest criminal court, the sole arbiter of post-conviction relief in death-penalty cases, has dismissed those claims without considering the merits, an act that cannot be squared with the state law cited.

The unexplained, boilerplate invocation of a state procedural rule in a case of profound significance gives rise to the following Question Presented:

Where a state has created liberty interests that give death-sentenced prisoners with

credible claims of innocence vehicles for proving their innocence in subsequent

habeas proceedings, is the federal right to due process violated when the putatively innocent is arbitrarily denied permission to exercise the right to prove his innocence’?

Whether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g¢)(1), the federal statute that prohibits anyone who has been convicted of “a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year’ from possessing a firearm, violates the Second Amendment either facially or as applied to individuals with prior convictions for offenses that did not result in disarmament in the Founding era.