The Supreme Court on Monday rejected appeals from four people convicted of illegally smuggling lobsters from Honduras into the United States. Three of the four received 8-year prison sentences, and critics argued that the punishments did not match the offenses.
Among the accusations were that the lobsters shipped into Alabama in 1999 were in plastic bags, in violation of Honduran rules requiring them to be in cardboard boxes.
The court also said it will not hear a challenge to government secrecy in the case of a former waiter who may have served some of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Lawyers for Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel asked the justices to consider whether lower federal courts acted improperly in keeping the government’s case against their client so secret that its existence was revealed only by accident.
Bellahouel came under FBI scrutiny because Sept. 11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi dined where he worked in South Florida in the weeks before the attacks.
Also Monday, the Sierra Club asked Justice Antonin Scalia to remove himself from a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney because of a hunting trip the two men took last month.
Scalia had no immediate response to the Sierra Club request.
