Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, came to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, asking the justices to block a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit from going into effect while he appeals that decision. If the lower court’s decision is not put on hold but he ultimately prevails, Moore told the justices, he may not be able to recover the $8.2 million that the jury awarded him.
Moore was twice removed from his position as chief justice – once in 2003, when he disregarded a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument that he had placed in the building where the Alabama Supreme Court sits, and again in 2016, for refusing to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The dispute in which he is asking the justices to intervene, however, stems from his 2017 campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate, during a special election to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Sen. Jeff Sessions to serve as attorney general during the first Trump administration.
Moore, who lost the special election to Democrat Doug Jones, filed a lawsuit in federal court against Senate Majority PAC, whose website describes the group’s mission as to “[p]rotect and expand the number of Democrats in the U.S. Senate.” Moore contended that the PAC created “a campaign advertisement that falsely portrayed Roy S. Moore as a man who solicited sex from a fourteen-year-old girl”—something, Moore says, that “was not true.”
A jury agreed with Moore that the PAC had defamed him – specifically, that the group had “published that falsehood with actual malice,” the standard for proving defamation under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan.
The PAC appealed to the 11th Circuit, which threw out the jury’s verdict, prompting Moore to come to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. He emphasized that if the mandate – the formal document allowing the 11th Circuit’s ruling to go into effect – is issued and the $8.2 million bond that guarantees payment of the jury’s verdict is released before he can ask the Supreme Court to review the lower court’s ruling, “the judgment he obtained after trial will be lost as a practical matter before this Court can determine whether review is warranted.”
The court of appeals, Moore wrote, is scheduled to issue the mandate “on or about” June 15. Justice Clarence Thomas, who initially fields emergency appeals from the 11th Circuit, has not yet instructed the PAC to respond to Moore’s filing.
Recommended Citation: Amy Howe, Roy Moore files emergency application with Supreme Court on $8.2 million jury award, SCOTUSblog (Jun. 17, 2026, 3:25 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/roy-moore-files-emergency-application-with-supreme-court-on-jury-award/
