Months after the Supreme Court’s decision in 303 Creative, Jack Phillips is still being pursued by the Colorado legal system, this time by transgender attorney Autumn Scardina, who wanted Phillips to bake a cake that would celebrate Scardina’s gender transition. The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled against Phillips in January, and Scardina hasn’t given up — but the Colorado Supreme Court has just agreed to hear Phillips’s appeal.

Here is how NBC News, publishing an AP wire story in its NBC Out section, headlines that news:

Colorado high court to hear case against Christian baker who refused to make trans-themed cake
The baker previously won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court on a technicality in 2018, after refusing to make a gay couple’s wedding cake.

A technicality? A technicality? Seven members of the nation’s Supreme Court concluded that Phillips, when hauled up before an administrative tribunal, was discriminated against on the basis of his faith — given an open record of “official expressions of hostility to religion” — and therefore had his constitutional rights violated and did not receive a fair trial. Phillips “was entitled to a neutral decisionmaker” and was instead met with official animus. This is not a case where a statute of limitations expired, or there was a failure of administrative jurisdiction, or there was even a rule excluding some important evidence. Just imagine if the Supreme Court threw out a criminal conviction or a civil jury verdict because of race discrimination that so pervaded the proceeding that the Court found that the trial was unfair — would NBC describe the defendant as having been let off “on a technicality”?