Wednesday's U.S. Supreme Court Decisions in two criminal cases are discussed in this piece by New York Times reporter Adam Liptak.  The Court's unanimous opinions In Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee and Pearson v. Callahan, authored by Justice Alito, are characterized as cases involving civil rights.  In Fitzgerald the Court upheld right of parents to  sue a school district over the alleged molestation of their daughter by another student. The Court's holding in Pearson upheld the immunity of Massachusetts police officers who searched a suspected drug dealer's home after he allowed an informant in to buy drugs.  Kent Scheidegger's post on the case is here.  The story also notes that the Court let stand a lower court ruling striking down the Child Online Protection Act, which had made it a crime for a commercial website to make sexually explicit materials available to children under 17. 

Another Criminal Case,  Waddington v. Sarausad is the subject of this story by Levi Pulkkinen in this morning's Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Kent's earlier post on the case is here. The Court's 6-3 decision overturned a Ninth Circuit ruling that had overturned the 1994 conviction of an accomplice to a fatal shooting, citing a flawed jury instruction on accomplice liability.