Here come the lawsuits.  In the wake of the SCOTUS ruling in June striking down same-sex marriage bans and granting federal benefits to same-sex married couples, many couples are finding their way to court houses across the country.

Most states that have what could be called "gay-friendly" legislatures, something that we would expect changes over time, have already passed laws specifically granting gay couples the right to marry in a dozen states.  So the strategy among proponents of the notion of gay marriage has shifted from the state capitols to the county courthouses.

In Santa Fe County, NM, for example, a family court judge ordered the county clerk's office to issue marriage licenses to couples without regard to their gender or sexual orientation, ruling within a brief hearing that doing so was now unconstitutional.  At the time of this blog post, 7 counties in New Mexico have followed suit.

In neighboring Texas, the Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments for November in two cases where same-sex married couples were granted divorces from Texas county family courts.  The Texas Attorney General has intervened in the divorce proceedings, asserting the divorces issued by the family courts are invalid because they implicitly recognize same-sex marriage; something proscribed by Texas law.

Cases in Tennessee and Kentucky are also percolating through the state courts, testing state laws proscribing same-sex marriage.  In one of the several cases pending in Kentucky, one-half of a same-sex married couple is on trial for murder and the issue in the court is whether his "better-half" can be compelled to testify, or whether he should be granted spousal immunity.

In another high-profile case from Franklin County, Kentucky, a same-sex couple filed suit against the Governor on grounds that Kentucky's outright constitutional ban of same-sex marriages violates the Equal Protection clauses of the U.S. and Kentucky constitutions.  This is the same issue that was decided in California in the SCOTUS Windsor case.

Currently, there are too many same-sex marriage cases to track unless you are a law professor or law student writing a law review article on the subject.  Unlike the SCOTUS' 1973 Roe v Wade decision, considered the height of judicial activism, which created a sweeping constitutional ban on anti-abortion legislation, last term's same-sex marriage decision adopted a state-by-state approach.

While the momentum toward recognition of same-sex marriage as a civil right has gained steam since we here at the Law Blogger picked-up on the issue back in 2009, it will take at least a quarter century for the current dust to settle.  At least that is our prediction.

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By: Timothy P. Flynn

This post is straight from Texas, our most prolific death penalty state.  Texas has executed over 800 death row inmates since the SCOTUS ruled in 1976 that the death penalty was not cruel and unusual punishment after all.

A typical death house drill includes the condemned selecting and consuming one last meal and, just prior to execution, is provided an opportunity to make a statement.  In Texas, these statements have been posted to this Texas Department of Corrections link, along with a brief summary of the inmate's capital conviction.

Fascinating stuff, to be sure.  Some of the most hardened inmates decline comment.  Others make one last assertion of innocence.  Invocations of Allah and Jesus abound; saying goodbye to family and loved ones, promising to wait for them on the other side; exhortations to the system that crushed them and to the brothers they left behind on the row.

Charles Thomas O'Reilly, the recently retired warden of the Huntsville Unit, the prison that houses the death house, presided over 140 executions; the most in Texas history.

The death penalty is and has always been a divisive issue in America.  32 states have death penalty sentencing statutes to the 18 that have banned such punishment, including, most recently, New York, and New Jersey in 2007, and Illinois in 2009.

In the 1972 case of Furman v Georgia, the SCOTUS suspended capital punishment on the basis of the 8th Amendment bar against cruel and unusual punishment.  Then four years later, SCOTUS reinstated capital punishment for murder convictions, provided a trial was bifurcated into two segments: a guilt phase, and a punishment phase where the trier of fact gives separate and specific consideration to the punishment and the convicted defendant has the opportunity to present evidence on mitigation.

Last week, Kimberly McCarthy was executed in Texas.  She was the 500th person in Texas to be executed since it resumed executions in 1982, and the 13th woman to be executed in the United States since the 1976 resumption of the death penalty.

Back in 1998, Karla Faye Tucker was another infamous female death row inmate at the Huntsville Unit.  She was the subject of the book Crossed Over.

Truly, do not mess with Texas.  Texans are willing to walk the fine line between the fair and the harsh.

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We've been watching the gay-marriage case, Hollingsworth v Perry, for two years; here's a link to our first post detailing case.  Two well-funded homosexual couples from California, one gay, one lesbian, challenged California's proposition 8 in federal court back in 2008, and the case finally will be orally argued tomorrow at the SCOTUS.

Their lawyers, Ted Olson and David Boies of Bush v Gore fame, are well-suited to the task of bringing the couples' privacy-based arguments to the Supreme Court.  Olson was Solicitor General under President Bush; he appears to have changed his stripes for this one.

Since that original post, two other consolidated federal cases have made their way through the federal court system and will be argued before the SCOTUS on Wednesday.  United States v Windsor challenges the denial of federal benefits for gay couples under the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA].

As many as 17 states have filed amicus briefs in opposition to gay marriage.  Court watchers are bracing for a seminal ruling along the order of the High Court's Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion.

Others say, "not so fast."  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one such voice.  She has made a series of public comments lately critical of such sweeping decisions; they go too far too fast says Ginsburg.

A less judicially active approach in the Roe v Wade would have been to strike down the Texas anti-abortion law on an "as applied" basis, but leaving the broader constitutional questions to be determined on a state-by-state basis.  Of course, this is not what the Roe v Wade Court did; the political and cultural fall-out continues to this day.

Considering possible outcomes in the gay-marriage cases being argued today, the post-modern SCOTUS faces the choice of invalidating California's Proposition 8, and if they do, whether they do so in a broad or narrow fashion.  Expect concurring and dissenting opinions; perhaps even a plurality decision which, by its nature, has a less-binding effect on subsequent courts.

Either way, we will keep our readers posted when the decision is announced at some point in June like we did when New York legalized same-sex marriage in June of 2011.  The results from these cases will be important to Michigan which, like California, passed a constitutional amendment declaring marriage to be a status limited to heterosexual couples.

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