Madiba Dennie

Jan 16, 2025 | ballsandstrikes.org | Madiba Dennie

Last year, Black Louisianans successfully argued in federal court that the state’s Republican-led legislature unlawfully diluted their voting strength, by adopting a redistricting plan that packed the Black population into a few districts while fragmenting it across others. Judge Shelly Dick, an Obama appointee, found that Louisiana’s 2022 electoral maps did not “afford an equal opportunity for Black voters to elect preferred candidates” and, as such, violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Jan 15, 2025 | ballsandstrikes.org | Madiba Dennie

Chaos unsurprisingly ensued in the lower courts forced to apply the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen. Perhaps most notoriously, the Fifth Circuit held in 2023 that a law temporarily disarming domestic violence offenders was unconstitutional because the government didn’t try to protect women from domestic gun abuse in the 18th century. Pushed to attempt damage control, the Supreme Court took up an appeal in that case and issued a ruling last year in United States v. Rahimi.

Jan 10, 2025 | ballsandstrikes.org | Madiba Dennie

There are four million people with felony convictions in the United States who are legally prohibited from voting for president. One very famous person convicted of a felony will be president in little over a week. In May 2024, a New York jury found President-elect Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, associated with his efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election by paying adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their affair.

Jan 6, 2025 | ballsandstrikes.org | Madiba Dennie

This jaw-dropping assertion literally reads almost exactly like an excruciatingly ironic line from a 130-year-old novel: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” The inescapable conclusion of the Court’s ruling is that there is no constitutional problem with criminalizing homelessness.

Jan 3, 2025 | ballsandstrikes.org | Madiba Dennie

On Tuesday, as 2024 mercifully came to a close, Chief Justice John Roberts issued his year-end report on the federal judiciary. The report contained all of the meaningful self-reflection that Supreme Court watchers have come to expect from Roberts’s annual exercise—which is to say, none whatsoever. Roberts’s report provides little insight into the actual problems the judiciary faces.