Supreme Court Audition Watch: Andrew Oldham Has Some Conspiracy Theories to Run By You - Jay Willis

[In It to Win It]

Balls and Strikes Substack

Earlier this week, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued its opinion in the appeal of Thomas Sanders, whom a jury found guilty of murdering a 12-year-old girl in 2010. The jury originally found Sanders guilty on two counts and imposed death sentences for each. Last December, President Joe Biden commuted this sentence, along with those of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The opinion in United States v. Sanders is, to use a technical term, pretty boring: Of the dozen-ish legal challenges Sanders raises, the panel rejects all but one, which is that the imposition of two death sentences violated his rights under the Double Jeopardy Clause. The panel thus vacated one of Sanders’s sentences, but practically speaking, serving only one sentence of life without the possibility of parole is not different from serving two of them.

Merely joining this opinion, however, would deprive Judge Andrew Oldham, a Trump appointee whose name frequently appears on Supreme Court shortlists, of a critical opportunity to audition for this promotion. Thus, he took the time to write a concurrence in which he suggests that Biden could not exercise his clemency powers because he was senile at the time—and that whatever Biden’s mental state, an examination of this country’s “history and tradition” reveals that grants of clemency to people convicted of murder are illegitimate, and have been all along.

I want to stress that nothing in Oldham’s opinion has anything to do with Sanders’s legal claims, let alone the actual opinion with which he is ostensibly concurring. The entire thing is more or less a Breitbart blog post that Oldham really, really hopes Stephen Miller will notice and retweet.

[karynnj]

1. The more famous Andrew Oldham managed the Rolling Stones