In BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore, 517 U.S. 559 (1996), and State Farm Mutual Automobile Insur- ance Co. v. Campbell, 538 U.S. 408 (20038), this Court held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits arbitrary and excessive punl- tive damages awards. The Court set markers beyond which punitive awards cannot constitutionally go without special justification, warning that “few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between puni- tive and compensatory damages” comply with the Fourteenth Amendment; that a punitive damages award four times a compensatory award “might be close to the line of constitutional impropriety’; and that “[w]hen compensatory damages are substantial, then a lesser ratio, perhaps only equal to compensa- tory damages, can reach the outermost limit of the due process guarantee.” State Farm, 538 U.S. at 425.

In this otherwise unremarkable product lability case, a divided Missouri jury held petitioner Givaudan Flavors Corp. liable for selling food flavoring products that allegedly caused a factory worker’s lung disease. The jury awarded substantial compensatory dam- ages—$2 muillion—and $56 million more in punitive damages. The question presented 1s:

Whether an appellate court may affirm a punitive damages award that is 28 times a large compensatory award, without finding a compelling reason to depart from the presumption that punitive damages should not exceed the amount of a substantial compensatory award, or at least the historical limit of quadruple damages.

Petitioner Sligo Creek Center operates a Medicare- participating nursing home. Following an investiga- tion into positive tuberculosis tests, the Department of Health and Human Services concluded that Sligo Creek violated federal infection-control requirements and imposed almost $1.5 million in civil penalties. After nearly a decade of administrative proceedings, the Fourth Circuit concluded that the money penalty implicated the Seventh Amendment. But it neverthe- less held that Sligo Creek was not deprived of its right to a jury trial because the government here enforced novel statutory obligations unknown to the common law, placing the case within the public-rights pre- sumption articulated in Atlas Roofing Co. v. OSHA, 430 U.S. 442 (1977).

The Fourth Circuit’s decision exposes the tension between Atlas Roofing and this Court’s decision in SEC v. Jarkesy, 603 U.S. 109, 128, 131 (2024), which reaffirmed that the narrow public-rights exception is, “after all, an exception” to the rule that a legal claim— even a statutory legal claim—‘“presumptively con- cerns private rights” that must be adjudicated in an Article III court, by a jury when the Seventh Amend- ment applies. By contrast, Atlas Roofing presumes that novel statutory actions are public rights that may be assigned to the political branches for adjudication.

The questions presented are:

1. Whether, under a proper application of Jarkesy, Sligo Creek was entitled to have its case decided by a jury in an Article III court.

2. Whether the Court should overrule Atlas Roof- ing.

Whether public university professors have a spe- cial status under the First Amendment, such that the speech they express in the course of their official du- ties, unlike the official-duty speech of all other public employees, is protected by the First Amendment from regulation by their employer, the state.

Numerous provisions of federal law impose conse- quences based on prior state criminal convictions. To determine which state convictions constitute valid predicates, the Court has long used the categorical ap- proach, comparing the elements of the state statute of conviction with the relevant federal standard. If the state offense is identical to (or narrower than) the fed- eral standard, there is a categorical match, and the state offense can serve as a valid predicate. But if the state offense criminalizes conduct that falls outside the federal standard, the prior conviction is not a valid predicate under the categorical approach.

Ten circuits hold that the statutory text itself can establish that a state offense is categorically broader than the relevant federal definition. The Fifth Circuit alone requires a defendant to identify an actual case in which the State prosecuted the broader conduct, statutory text notwithstanding.

The question presented is:

Whether, under the categorical approach, a de- fendant must always produce an actual case to demonstrate a state statute’s overbreadth, even when the state statute is facially broader than the federal standard.

The Confrontation Clause protects a defendant’s right of cross-examination by limiting the prosecution’s ability to introduce statements made by people not in the courtroom. Crawford ». Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004). At Petitioner Xavier Brown’s capital trial, the State called three witnesses who relayed testimonial statements concerning forensics from absent, unidentified witnesses whom Brown never had the opportunity to confront. Since Crawford, which was handed down while Brown’s case was still on direct appeal, this Court has clarified Crawford’s premise and applied it to forensic scientific testimony. See Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305 (2009); Bullcoming v. New Mexico, 564 U.S. 647 (2011); Smith v. Arizona, 602 U.S. 779 (2024). Brown was never afforded the benefit of Crawford or its application in Melendez-Diaz, Bullcoming, and Smith, even though state law permitted him to seek post-conviction relief pursuant to those intervening decisions.

The questions presented are:

1. Whether the Mississippi Supreme Court’s application of the Confrontation Clause concerning how forensic scientific testimony must be treated contravenes this Court’s precedent and the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments?

2. Whether the Mississippi Supreme Court’s decision to avoid reaching the merits of the confrontation issue conflicts with Cruz v. Anzona, 598 U.S. 17 (2023) and disregards the supremacy of federal law by denying Brown the benefit of this Court’s application of Crawford to forensic scientific testimony?

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Whether 18 U.S.C § 922(g)(1) prohibiting all felons from possessing firearms violates the Second Amendment either on its face or based on an as applied challenge’?

LIST OF ALL PARTIES TO PROCEEDINGS Damion Kent Hallmon - Petitioner, Defendant in district court proceedings United States of America - Respondent, Plaintiff in district court proceedings 11

I. In Erlinger v. United States, 602 U.S. 821 (2024), this Court held that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments require the government to prove the Armed Career Criminal Act’s (“ACCA”) complex different- occasions requirement to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Is Erlinger error structural?

II. The Eleventh Circuit determined Erlinger error was harmless in Petitioner Jamaal Hameen’s case by relying on contested facts from the Presentence Investigation Report (“PSR”) that were not admitted at trial and were not adopted by the district court at sentencing. Did the appellate court err by conducting harmless-error review based on these facts?

III. To determine whether a prior state conviction qualifies as an ACCA predicate, federal courts take a categorical approach and consider the elements of the state offense. When Mr. Hameen was convicted of aggravated assault, Florida appellate courts affirmed such convictions for reckless conduct. Decades after Mr. Hameen’s conviction, the Florida Supreme Court decided this offense required at least knowing conduct. Did the Eleventh Circuit err in relying on a Florida Supreme

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In Duren v. Missouri, this Court described three showings a criminal defendant must make to establish a prima facie violation of the Sixth Amendment’s fair cross-section requirement: “(1) that the group alleged to be excluded is a ‘distinctive’ group in the community; (2) that the representation of this group 1n venires from which juries are selected is not fair and reasonable in relation to the number of such persons in the community; and (3) that this underrepresentation is due to systematic exclusion of the group in the jury- selection process.” 439 U.S. 357, 364 (1979).

In the opinion below, the Eleventh Circuit determined that the only relevant consideration for Duren’s second prong was whether Mr. Roseboro could show that the absolute disparity between the percentage of black people among the population eligible for jury service and the percentage of black people in the qualified jury pool was more than ten percent.

The question presented is: does the 10% absolute disparity rule serve as the sole metric for examining the second prong of Duren in the context of a fair cross-section argument?

Or as an increasing number of Circuit Courts of Appeals have determined, should rigid adherence to the 10% absolute disparity rule be jettisoned in favor of a multi-modal analysis which considers absolute disparity in conjunction with comparative disparity and standard deviation theory?

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