2015 term per curiam opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States
Open-knowledge reference entry

The Supreme Court of the United States handed down eighteen per curiam opinions during its 2015 term, which began October 5, 2015 and concluded October 2, 2016.
Because per curiam decisions are issued from the Court as an institution, these opinions all lack the attribution of authorship or joining votes to specific justices. All justices on the Court at the time the decision was handed down are assumed to have participated and concurred unless otherwise noted.
Court membership
Chief Justice: John Roberts
Associate Justices: Antonin Scalia (died February 13, 2016), Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan
Maryland v. Kulbicki
577 U.S. 1 Decided October 5, 2015.
Court of Appeals of Maryland reversed.
The lower court misapplied the Strickland v. Washington test to determine if a criminal defendant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel is violated by that counsel's inadequate performance. James Kulbicki was arrested for murdering his 22-year old mistress. At the time of his initial trial, a comparative bullet-lead analysis (CBLA), a technique that was generally accepted at the time, was used as evidence against him.
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This entry incorporates text from “2015 term per curiam opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.