Robert Alvin Justus, Jr. v. United States

In a first-degree murder case, was the Ninth Circuit’s approval of the admission of social media posts and “likes” of posts, specifically intended to prejudice the jury by highlighting petitioner’s political beliefs, the kind of egregious error that brings the judicial system into disrepute and results in a miscarriage of justice, warranting this Court’s exercise of its institutional interest in ensuring that the legal proceeding was fair to all who observed it? Given a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to present testimony in his own words in his defense at trial, should the court be permitted to instruct the jury to ignore his state-of-mind defense if the words he chose could also describe an unavailable duress defense?