Supreme Court returning to work with Gitmo, death penalty cases lined up

? The Supreme Court is set to begin a term that could lead to enhanced rights for terrorism detainees, a ruling against part of a child pornography law and shorter prison terms for crack cocaine dealers.

Whatever happened to the court’s march to the right?

The answer, it seems safe to say, is that little has changed on the bench, where Justice Anthony Kennedy remains the decisive vote between four conservatives and four liberals.

The difference with the term that begins Monday is the mix of cases that are before the justices. Instead of last term’s defining cases – abortion, race and campaign finance – in which Kennedy’s views aligned him with the conservatives, the big issues are those on which Kennedy has more often sided with the liberals.

The court has become more conservative since Sandra Day O’Connor retired in 2006 and was replaced by Justice Samuel Alito.

Looking ahead to this term’s lineup of cases, “I can’t identify a significant win for conservatives,” said Thomas Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who writes about the court and argues before it.

The justices are set to tackle an array of big issues. They include the legal rights of Guantanamo detainees, the constitutionality of lethal injections for executions, photo identification cards for voters and investors’ struggle to find accountability in cases of fraud.

The court could add a blockbuster case to its calendar if the justices opt to take a Second Amendment case from Washington, D.C., that would test limits on the right to own guns.

The third year of Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure follows a contentious term that laid bare ideological divisions in a large number of cases decided by one vote. The frustrations of liberal justices bubbled up in dissents read aloud in the courtroom. Among them was one read on the final day by Justice Stephen Breyer, who said of his conservative colleagues: “So few have so quickly changed so much.”

Roberts, 52, suffered a health setback during the summer when he had a seizure on a dock in Maine, the second such episode in 14 years. He has resumed his public schedule and has said nothing more about his health, including whether he is taking medication to prevent another seizure.

The headline case so far involves the legal rights of Guantanamo detainees. The justices twice before have ruled that suspected terrorists held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba could pursue challenges to their indefinite confinement in U.S. civilian courts.

Each time, the Bush administration and Congress, then under Republican control, have changed the law to try to limit the detainees’ rights.

In their first week, the justices will hear arguments involving the disparate prison terms given people convicted of crimes involving crack versus powder cocaine.

At the end of the month, the government will ask the justices to overturn an appeals court ruling that struck down a provision of the main federal law against child pornography.

Another closely watched case is a challenge to Kentucky’s lethal injection procedures. The court blocked a Texas inmate’s lethal injection execution last week, indicating that the Kentucky case could produce a broad statement about a widely used method of execution.