SCOTUS takes up three new criminal cases

Conveniently, as everyone is talking about about the Supreme Court's spartan docket, SCOTUS announced five new cert grants today.  All the details at here at SCOTUSblog, and this is Lyle Denniston's account of the three habeas cases new to the Court's docket:

In one of the criminal appeals the Court accepted for review, the Court will rule on a federal appeals court's authority to overturn a death sentence in a habeas case, based on a finding that the prosecutor's closing argument in the penalty phase was unfairly inflammatory (Roper v. Weaver, 06-313).

The question at issue in Fry v. Pliler (06-5247) is whether a trial judge's order to exclude evidence that a third party was guilty of the crime can ever be excused as "harmless error."

The fifth case the Court granted is Bowles v. Russell (06-5306), testing whether a federal appeals court may dismiss as too late an appeal that a District Court had authorized, out of the usual time limits but after the District Court had reopened the appeal time.

Helpfully, Kent Scheidegger provides links to the circuit rulings being reviewed here.

Some recent related posts:

• Solving the SCOTUS docket mystery
• What SCOTUS should be doing
• Slow-poke SCOTUS: a sign of division?