When Black Friday Comes

On a good day, I neither win or lose any cases. One a bad day, I lose one. Today, I lost 19. That's right - I lost 19 cases in one day. Today was the final day for the Supreme Court to release orders and shut down until October. The Court took the opportunity to clear out dozens (hundreds?) of cases that were held in abeyance pending last week's opinion in Rita.

Rita affirmed the appellate use of a presumption that sentences imposed within the Sentencing Guideline range was reasonable, which results in those sentences being affirmed. Since the Fourth Circuit employs the presumption (Rita, in fact, was a Fourth Circuit case), we lodged a lot of cert petitions with the Court on the hopes that the presumption would be rejected and those folks would get resentenced.

Unfortunately, it didn't work that way. So, while I knew these cases were lost, it's still a bit disheartening to leaf through page after page of the Court's order, highlighting each of the 19.