1. Whether threats of criminal prosecution and civil hability made to suppress protected speech on social media platforms may be discounted as a matter of law, notwithstanding the First Amendment and state anti-SLAPP laws protecting public expression.

2. Whether a court may grant summary judgment by disregarding record evidence and imposing novel, unrecognized legal burdens under state or federal law.

1. Whether the Double Jeopardy Clause permits a trial court to declare a mistrial based on juror unavailability without scrutinizing a_ prior, contested juror excusal that foreseeably created the juror shortage giving rise to the mistrial.

2. Whether a defendant’s refusal to waive his constitutional right to a twelve-person jury under Fed. R. Crim. P. 23(b)(2) may be used to justify a mistrial over his objection under the “manifest necessity” standard.

3. Whether U.S.8.G. 2C1.1(b)(2), cross- referencing § 2Bl1.1, permits sentencing courts to equate temporary deferral of payment obligations with permanent economic loss or benefit and to attribute subsequent nonpayment to a bribery offense absent rigorous proof of proximate causation, particularly where independent governmental decisions intervened.

Tony Von Carruthers’s untreated Schizoaffective Disorder, brain damage, and severe delusions distort his thinking such that he lacks a rational understanding of his conviction, pending execution, and the relationship between them. After the State of Tennessee issued an execution warrant, he sought to prove that he 1s incompetent to be executed. At the evidentiary hearing before the trial court, Mr. Carruthers’s counsel presented lay and expert testimony, and documentary and audiotaped evidence to show that Mr. Carruthers satisfies the standard for incompetence set forth in Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986), Panetti v. Quarterman, 551 U.S. 930 (2007), and Madison v. Alabama, 586 U.S. 265 (2019). The State presented a single witness, a psychologist, who did not evaluate or diagnose Mr. Carruthers or opine whether he was competent to be executed.

The trial court made no factual findings except its conclusion that Mr. Carruthers 1s competent and ignored the evidence of Mr. Carruthers’s delusional thinking as irrelevant. The Tennessee Supreme Court, 1n turn, held that the trial courts competency determination 1s presumed correct unless the evidence preponderates against that finding. Using this deferential standard, 1t endorsed the trial court’s analysis. As had the trial court, the Tennessee Supreme Court disregarded the evidence of Mr. Carruthers’s severe mental illness and decades of distorted thinking, concluding that such evidence was stale because Mr. Carruthers’s mental illness thwarted any contemporaneous, in-person evaluations.

1. Whether the Fifth Circuit’s expansion of the definition of a “controlled substance” to include drug proceeds, for purposes of U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(b)(12), is in contradiction with its plain meaning and this Court’s precedent?

PARTIES TO THE PROCEEDING Petitioner 1s Rodney Ignacio Castro. Respondent is the United States of America. No corporate parties are involved 1n this case. Castro Petition for Writ of Certiorari Page 11