WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court yesterday threw out an appeals court ruling ordering the disclosure of photographs of detainees being abused by their US captors.
In doing so, the high court cited a recent change in federal law that allows the pictures to be withheld.
The justices issued a brief order directing the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York to take another look at a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to obtain the photos of detainee abuse.
President Obama at first didn’t oppose the release, but he changed his mind, saying the photos could whip up anti-American sentiment overseas and endanger US troops.
The administration appealed the matter to the Supreme Court, but also worked with Congress to give Defense Secretary Robert Gates the power to keep from the public all pictures of foreign detainees being abused.
Gates invoked his new authority in mid-November, saying widespread distribution of the pictures would endanger American soldiers.
The ACLU has said it will continue fighting for the photos’ release.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who served on the 2d Circuit until August, did not take part in the court’s consideration of the case.
Also yesterday, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal from a California death-row inmate who was convicted in the gruesome murders of four people in 1983.
The justices said they would not review an appeals court ruling that upheld the murder conviction and death sentence of Kevin Cooper.
Cooper came within a few hours of execution in 2004 before the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals stepped in to order genetic testing on a hair and a bloody shirt found at the murder scene that Cooper said would prove he was not the killer.
The San Francisco-based appeals court later backed a district court judge’s ruling that the test results did not show Cooper’s innocence.
Cooper, who has long maintained his innocence, had escaped from a California state prison. He was convicted of the murders of Douglas and Peggy Ryen, both 41, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and Christopher Hughes, her friend. They were stabbed and hacked repeatedly with a hatchet and buck knife. Joshua Ryen, then 8, survived a slit throat.
Cooper claimed a trio of murderers committed the attacks and said the DNA tests would exonerate him.
In other action yesterday:
■ The court said it will not stop a lower court from releasing from prison a man who killed his wife just before Thanksgiving 1991, then shot himself in a failed suicide attempt. It refused to hear an appeal from Pennsylvania officials, who wanted to overturn an appeals court decision releasing Edward Hummel from prison.
■ The court said it won’t revive a student’s lawsuit against a school that punished her for talking about her religion during her high school graduation speech. It refused to hear an appeal from Erica Corder, who was punished for her 2006 speech at the Lewis-Palmer High School commencement in Monument, Colo.
■ The justices declined to hear an appeal from a woman who wants to sue the government because air-traffic controllers told the pilot of a homemade airplane to continue flying in a thunderstorm before it fatally crashed. The appeal was filed by Susan Hertz, whose husband Roger Hertz, was one of three people who died in the May 31, 2004 crash in Michigan.
