For the second week in a row, Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a statement regarding the denial of review that was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. Sotomayor’s opinion in O’Donnell v. City of Chicago, a challenge to the city’s policy of seizing and selling (without any compensation to the owners) cars owned by drivers with as few as two unpaid parking tickets, was part of a list of orders from the Supreme Court’s Oct. 16 conference released on Monday morning. (The two cases in which the justices granted review are covered in separate stories.)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit rejected the challenge to the policy, calling it “an exercise of the City’s police power to enforce its traffic code.” Ryan O’Donnell and Michael Goree, two motorists whose cars the city sold, then came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to weigh in.
In a brief order, the court denied review. In her statement, Sotomayor expressed “serious concerns about” the 7th Circuit’s decision, but she emphasized that the court should not take up the question until more courts of appeals have had a chance to consider it. Moreover, she suggested, O’Donnell and Goree’s case was not necessarily an appropriate one in which to consider the constitutionality of such a scheme, because they had challenged the entire ordinance, “which might require this Court to invalidate even those features of the law that have nothing to do with vehicle forfeiture.”
The justices turned down, without comment, petitions for review in several high-profile cases, including two – Mohammad v. United States and bin ‘Atash v. United States – filed by (among others) Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who is considered to be the “mastermind” behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and others involved in the planning of those attacks. As Kelsey Dallas explained last month, the men had sought to reinstate plea agreements that they entered into more than two years ago, after spending nearly two decades in Guantanamo Bay, that would allow them to plead guilty but avoid the death penalty in exchange for life sentences. Following this, however, Lloyd Austin, then the Secretary of Defense, announced that he had the ultimate power to decide whether such agreements were appropriate, and sought to withdraw the government’s consent. When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the government that it could do so, and that the agreements were not binding, the men came to the Supreme Court, which on Monday denied their requests to weigh in.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh did not participate in Mohammad’s case.
The court also denied a petition for review filed by Gwynne Wilcox, who served on the National Labor Relations Board until President Donald Trump attempted to fire her shortly after his second inauguration. Under the federal law governing the removal of NLRB members, Trump could only fire her for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” – neither of which Trump alleged had occurred. The lower courts initially ordered the Trump administration to reinstate Wilcox, but in May 2025, the Supreme Court paused those rulings and cleared the way for Wilcox’s removal while litigation continued.
In December 2025, the D.C. Circuit held that the for-cause removal provision violates the Constitution’s separation of powers. “Congress,” Judge Gregory Katsas wrote for the majority, “cannot restrict the President’s ability to remove NLRB … members” because they “wield substantial executive power.”
Wilcox came to the Supreme Court in June, asking the justices to take up her case, but on Monday they declined to do so.
Citing the lack of a quorum – that is, the minimum number of members required to vote – the justices left in place a ruling in a copyright dispute between several major music companies and a songwriter. Four justices – Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson – recused themselves from the dispute, presumably because one of the companies involved is owned by the parent company of Penguin Random House, which has published books by each of those justices.
The Supreme Court sought the views of the U.S. solicitor general in Bird v. Iowa Migrant Movement for Justice, in which that state’s attorney general has asked the justices to weigh in on a challenge to the constitutionality of an Iowa law that makes it a crime to be present in the state after having illegally reentered the United States. There is no deadline for the solicitor general to file his brief, although he is likely to do so sometime next year.
The justices did not act on a group of redistricting cases out of Alabama; they also did not rule on a petition for review asking them to decide whether a car is always a tool of interstate commerce, so that its use in a kidnapping automatically makes the crime a federal one.