General Motors got bad news from the Supreme Court today. With a full complement of nine justices in place, the court issued orders and herd or an argument a number of cases this morning. UH, and it issued an order rejecting GM's claims that it shouldn't have to face lawsuits over an ignition switch defect that arose before GM went into bankruptcy. With us to talk about what the Supreme Court did today, including this GM case. UH is Greg's store. Greg is our co host on Bloomberg Law and also
Bloomberg's Supreme Court reporter. So, Greg, you've had a busy morning at the court. Um. This case with GM could be billions of dollars in potential liability for them depending on what the courts end up finding, and they were pretty keen to get out from under it. What did the Court do today? Yeah, the Court rejected GM's appeal.
GM why the court to hear arguments and overturned this lower court order that said you have to face these lawsuits potentially involving millions of of car purchasers and and an estimate that GM highlighted potentially seven to ten billion dollars in claims, much of that by people who were involved in very serious accidents because of this ignition switched defect or allegedly because of that. Greg there were two art oral arguments today and both relating to capital punishment
or death penalty defendant. Tell us about the first one, which involved help from a psychiatrist or mental health of a capital punishment defendant. Yeah, this is a case involving a guy who in Alabama was convicted of a four murder and kind of the underlying question is whether he had a mental illness that should be a mitigating factor in his death sentencing proceeding. And the court there ordered or appointed a state employed psychologist to produce a report
about his mental health. And that report actually found that he had some as as the expert put an organic brain dysfunction. And what Mr McWilliams argues is that that that was not enough under an earlier Supreme Court decision. He says, I am entitled to an independent expert, somebody who's not state employed, and somebody who is essentially on my side of the case, because this report, had I been able to, you know, fully explore it and present it to the court, might have been enough to give
me grounds to avoid the death penalty. So how did the justices respond to the arguments today, Well, they seemed mixed. It seemed to be kind of an ideological divide that we've gotten used to. With Anthony Kennedy in the middle of the court, he was somewhat sympathetic. Um, maybe not giving the defense Mr McWilliams everything he was asking for, but uh he he did suggest that, uh that. And the part of this is that a lot of other states now have already given these sorts of right that
he's asking for. Kennedy did seem to suggest that he was inclined to give Mr McWilliams at least some of what he was asking for, which could mean a new sentencing hearing for him. So it seems as if Kennedy is still the swing vote. He does, he does seem that way. Let me just point out one other interesting aspect of this argument today. I've now seen it twice two justices to keep an eye on Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kagan, the two news justices on the court twice
now since Justice Corser has been on the court. Justice Kagan pushed back at him very hard on something that that he said today. She used the word shocking to describe a way he was proposing, uh, exploring this case before them. What was it, greg What did he say this? It's actually a pretty tactical point, but it had to do with how the court interpreted this decision. From that
is really the underlying precedent. And essentially what what the way Kagan described what Gorsuch was was saying is that he wasn't content just to look at what the court said. He wanted to go a little further back to look at what the parties were asking the court to do in and she said that would be a shocking way of reading court precedents. We shall see what happens with that. But now the court hasn't granted any new cases today, but there are still some interesting possibilities out there and
some time left. Yeah, and it seems like maybe they took it just a little bit of pause to let Neil Gorst come up, get up to speed. There's a case that seems highly likely to be granted would be a blockbuster. That is the North Carolina Voter i. D. Case. That's the one where a federal appeals court said the state with quote almost surgical precision, targeted blacks with these restrictions. UH. The court UH is already indicated that there are four
of them on the court. This was even before arrived. Are are inclined to want to hear North Carolina is appealing that this case that could be a really big one. One other, if I have a second to describe to you, there are a number of petitions that ask a really interesting question about digital privacy. Whether police need a warrant to get from a telecom company the location of your
mobile phone has arisen in a number of contexts. UH lower course generally have said no, they don't need to go to a judge and show probable cause and get a warrant in order to get that sort of information from a telecommunications company. Well, I'm sure we'll be talking about that. We talked about that subject all the time. It keeps coming up our thanks to Greg Store from Bloomberg new Supreme Court reporter and our co host on
Bloomberg Law. Coming up, we'll be talking about extensive litigation against the agribusiness giant Syngenta over whether it misled people about genetically modified corn getting approved