The Supreme Court just wrapped up its October argument session, hearing disputes on voting, the environment, copyright, and more.

The Legal Defense Fund’s Samuel Spital joins the latest Cases and Controversies to help hosts Kimberly Robinson and Jordan Rubin break down some of those cases.

Spital, LDF’s director of litigation, discusses two appeals that the civil-rights group worked on, involving voting rights and DNA testing, as well as an LDF death-penalty petition that the justices recently declined to hear over dissent.

Race issues are present in all three cases, even if it’s not squarely before the court in the DNA-testing appeal of Rodney Reed, a Black man convicted by a white jury of killing a white woman with whom he said he had an affair. Texas says Reed, who maintains his innocence, waited too long to bring a federal civil-rights suit challenging his state-court denial of testing.

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