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katyshannon

Texas Court Tosses Criminal Case Against Former Gov. Perry - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...rick-perry-2nd-felony-37160574

texas court criminal case former gov perry abc news politics US history

shared by katyshannon on 25 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The felony prosecution of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry ended Wednesday when the state's highest criminal court dismissed an abuse-of-power indictment that the Republican says hampered his short-lived 2016 presidential bid.
  • The 6-2 decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is dominated by elected Republican judges, frees Perry from a long-running criminal case that blemished the exit of one of the most powerful Texas governors in history and hung over his second failed run for the White House.
  • A grand jury in liberal Austin had indicted Perry in 2014 for vetoing funding for a public corruption unit that Republicans have long accused of wielding a partisan ax. The unit worked under Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, an elected Democrat. Perry wanted her to resign after she was convicted of drunken driving.
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  • Perry was accused of using his veto power to threaten a public official and overstepping his authority, but the judges ruled that courts can't undermine the veto power of a governor.
  • "Come at the king, you best not miss," Republican Judge David Newell wrote in his concurring opinion, quoting a popular line from the HBO series "The Wire."
  • Perry has been campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz since becoming the first major GOP candidate to drop out of the race last year.
  • "I've always known the actions I took were not only lawful and legal, they were right," said Perry, who spoke at the headquarters of an influential Texas conservative think tank, which has previously christened its balcony overlooking downtown as the "Gov. Rick Perry Liberty Balcony."
  • The court said veto power can't be restricted by the courts and the prosecution of a veto "violates separations of powers." A lower appeals court had dismissed the other charge, coercion by a public servant, in July.
  • Perry had rebuked the charges as a partisan attack from the start, calling it a "political witch hunt," but the dismissal brought accusations of Republican judges doing a favor for a party stalwart.
  • Texans for Public Justice, a left-leaning watchdog group that filed the original criminal complaint that led to the indictment, said Perry was handed a "gift" based on his stature.
  • Even a Republican judge who dissented in the ruling said the decision could leave the public with an uneasy perception that the system went out of its way to clear a famous politician with deep connections.
  • Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, made just one court appearance in the case and was defiant from the start — he went out for ice cream after turning himself in for booking at an Austin jail, and smiled wide for his mug shot.
  • Legal scholars across the political spectrum raised objections about the case. Still, the Republican judge overseeing it repeatedly refused to throw it out on constitutional grounds, prompting Perry's appeals.
  • Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who secured Perry's indictment, maintained that the matter was built on evidence — not politics — and deserved to go to trial. He can appeal, but that would be a lengthy process. Combined, the original charges carried a potential maximum of 109 years in prison.
  • Perry had formally announced he was running for president in June, hoping to convince GOP primary voters he deserved another chance after his 2012 bid was undone by a series of public gaffes. But his second campaign lasted barely three months, and he dropped out of the race in September.
  • The former governor spent more than $2 million on top defense lawyers. His latest White House campaign raised barely half that much in its first month, and Perry blamed the indictment for his sluggish fundraising. But polls showed he was badly trailing despite visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He was the first candidate to leave a GOP field jammed with 17 presidential hopefuls at the time.
katyshannon

Apple Fights Order to Unlock San Bernardino Gunman's iPhone - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-cook-fbi-san-bernardino.html

apple fights decryption order san bernardino iphone terrorism constitution privacy government politics history crisis policy obama new york times

shared by katyshannon on 18 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Last month, some of President Obama’s top intelligence advisers met in Silicon Valley with Apple’s chief, Timothy D. Cook, and other technology leaders in what seemed to be a public rapprochement in their long-running dispute over the encryption safeguards built into their devices.
  • But behind the scenes, relations were tense, as lawyers for the Obama administration and Apple held closely guarded discussions for over two months about one particularly urgent case: The F.B.I. wanted Apple to help “unlock” an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December, but Apple was resisting.
  • When the talks collapsed, a federal magistrate judge, at the Justice Department’s request, ordered Apple to bypass security functions on the phone.
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  • The order set off a furious public battle on Wednesday between the Obama administration and one of the world’s most valuable companies in a dispute with far-reaching legal implications.
  • This is not the first time a technology company has been ordered to effectively decrypt its own product. But industry experts say it is the most significant because of Apple’s global profile, the invasive steps it says are being demanded and the brutality of the San Bernardino attacks.
  • Law enforcement officials who support the F.B.I.’s position said that the impasse with Apple provided an ideal test case to move from an abstract debate over the balance between national security and privacy to a concrete one
  • The F.B.I. has been unable to get into the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who was killed by the police along with his wife after they attacked Mr. Farook’s co-workers at a holiday gathering.
  • Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California issued her order Tuesday afternoon, after the F.B.I. said it had been unable to get access to the data on its own and needed Apple’s technical assistance.
  • Mr. Cook, the chief executive at Apple, responded Wednesday morning with a blistering, 1,100-word letter to Apple customers, warning of the “chilling” breach of privacy posed by the government’s demands. He maintained that the order would effectively require it to create a “backdoor” to get around its own safeguards, and Apple vowed to appeal the ruling by next week.
  • Apple argues that the software the F.B.I. wants it to create does not exist. But technologists say the company can do it.
  • pple executives had hoped to resolve the impasse without having to rewrite their own encryption software. They were frustrated that the Justice Department had aired its demand in public, according to an industry executive with knowledge of the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions.
  • The dispute could initiate legislation in Congress, with Republicans and Democrats alike criticizing Apple’s stance on Wednesday and calling for tougher decryption requirements.
  • His vote of confidence was significant because James Comey, the F.B.I. director, has at times been at odds with the White House over his aggressive advocacy of tougher decryption requirements on technology companies. While Mr. Obama’s national security team was sympathetic to Mr. Comey’s position, others at the White House viewed legislation as potentially perilous. Late last year, Mr. Obama refused to back any legislation requiring decryption, leaving a court fight likely.
  • The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have the White House’s “full support,” the spokesman, Josh Earnest, said on Wednesday.
  • Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential contender, also attacked Apple on Fox News, asking, “Who do they think they are?”
  • But Apple had many defenders of its own among privacy and consumer advocates, who praised Mr. Cook for standing up to what they saw as government overreach.
  • Many of the company’s defenders argued that the types of government surveillance operations exposed in 2013 by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, have prompted technology companies to build tougher encryption safeguards in their products because of the privacy demands of their customers.
  • Privacy advocates and others said they worried that if the F.B.I. succeeded in getting access to the software overriding Apple’s encryption, it would create easy access for the government in many future investigations.
  • The Apple order is a flash point in a dispute that has been building for more than a decade. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • The F.B.I. began sounding alarms years ago about technology that allowed people to exchange private messages protected by encryption so strong that government agents could not break it. In fall 2010, at the behest of Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, the Obama administration began work on a law that required technology companies to provide unencrypted data to the government.
  • Lawyers at the F.B.I., Justice Department and Commerce Department drafted bills around the idea that technology companies in the Internet age should be bound by the same rules as phone companies, which were forced during the Clinton administration to build digital networks that government agents could tap.
  • The draft legislation would have covered app developers like WhatsApp and large companies like Google and Apple, according to current and former officials involved in the process.
  • There is no debate that, when armed with a court order, the government can get text messages and other data stored in plain text. Far less certain was whether the government could use a court order to force a company to write software or redesign its system to decode encrypted data. A federal law would make that authority clear, they said.
  • But the disclosures of government surveillance by Mr. Snowden changed the privacy debate, and the Obama administration decided not to move on the proposed legislation. It has not been revived.
  • The legal issues raised by the judge’s order are complicated. They involve statutory interpretation, rather than constitutional rights, and they could end up before the Supreme Court.
  • As Apple noted, the F.B.I., instead of asking Congress to pass legislation resolving the encryption fight, has proposed what appears to be a novel reading of the All Writs Act of 1789.
  • The law lets judges “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”
redavistinnell

Judge Declares Mistrial of Baltimore Cop in Freddie Gray Case - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...-cop-freddie-gray-case-n481296

judge baltimore cop freddie gray nbc case

shared by redavistinnell on 17 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Judge Declares Mistrial of Baltimore Cop in Freddie Gray Case
  • In what is a perceived legal blow for prosecutors, the jury was hung and the judge declared a mistrial in the trial of Baltimore police Officer William Porter in connection with Freddie Gray's death after he sustained injuries while in custody. Maryland circuit Judge Barry G. Williams indicated that he expected prosecutors to retry Porter.
  • Prosecutors considered Porter's case key to strengthening the case against Caesar Goodson Jr., who was driving the van. It was also seen as a signal of how the trials of the five other officers could go.
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  • The judge scheduled conferences Thursday to "discuss a new trial date," indicating that he expects prosecutors to try Porter again. Williams gave Porter the option to appear Thursday, but he declined.
  • During arguments, prosecutors focused on what they said was Porter's failure to take care of Gray while he was in custody by not getting him medical care or buckling his seatbelt.
  • "In the coming days, if some choose to demonstrate peacefully to express their opinion, that is their constitutional right," Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said. "In the case of any disturbance in the city, we are prepared to respond. We will protect our neighborhoods, our businesses and the people of our city."
  • Porter, who took the stand in his defense, said that Gray was "unable to give me a reason for a medical emergency" and that it was not his duty to fasten the seatbelts of people who have been arrested in the van.
  • And in the meantime, Baltimore worked to rebuild and remember.
  • "With the eyes of the world on Baltimore City, we must ensure that any protests that take place are peaceful, and we must ensure that the process of healing our community continues. We must continue to channel our emotions into strong, positive change, so that, as a city, we truly see our young men of color before it is too late," Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, said in a statement. "This is the road to more equal justice in our community."
  • "I think it went botched, I don't feel as if the prosecution was at tight as it needed to be by virtue of the fact that the jury still had a whole lot of unanswered questions," he said. "To be clear that they were deadlocked on all four charges and got no clarity or consensus on any of them. So I hope that in this retrial they'll be more clear about how it is they present the case."
  • ers should remain calm. He described the mistrial as "a bump on the road to justice."
Javier E

Roberts, Leader of Supreme Court's Conservative Majority, Fights Perception That It Is ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ohn-roberts-supreme-court.html

supreme court partisan

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • he has taken Justice Kennedy’s place as the swing vote at the court’s ideological center, making him the most powerful chief justice in 80 years.But all of that new power comes at a dangerous time for the court, whose legitimacy depends on the public perception that it is not a partisan institution
  • Controlling the pace of change on a court whose conservative wing is eager to move fast will be the central problem of the next phase of Chief Justice Roberts’s tenure, said Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
  • “If he’s smart, and he is, what he’s probably thinking is, ‘I do have a substantive agenda of things I want to accomplish. But it’s a lot easier to do that when the court retains its legitimacy. Let’s do as much as we can get away with, but maybe that’s a little less than some of my colleagues to my right think we can get away with,’” Professor Epps said
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  • “One of the greatest crises facing the Supreme Court since Marbury v. Madison was F.D.R.’s court-packing plan,” Chief Justice Roberts said in 2015 at New York University, “and it fell to Hughes to guide a very unpopular Supreme Court through that high-noon showdown against America’s most popular president since George Washington.”
  • “There are things to learn from it,” he said, and he has seemed to apply those lessons to a series of clashes with Mr. Trump, who has attacked the very idea of judicial independence.
  • . He insisted, against the weight of substantial evidence, that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges
  • Political science data refute that assertion, as do the fights over judicial confirmations. Indeed, the most recent battle, over Justice Kavanaugh, damaged the court’s reputation precisely because the court was portrayed as a political prize.
  • he must view the idea that judging is wholly separate from politics as a useful fiction, a worthy aspiration and, most important, crucial to the court’s standing.
  • The court’s other four Republican appointees — Justices Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — sent a different message not long after, all attending the annual gala dinner of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group
  • court watchers could not recall a show of force like the one by their conservative colleagues in 2018.
  • Enthusiasm among conservatives for the chief justice has tempered since President George W. Bush nominated him in 2005. They point to his two votes to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care law and a leftward drift documented by political scientists
  • In the term that ended in June, for instance, Chief Justice Roberts’s voting record was almost indistinguishable from that of Justice Kennedy.
  • There is no question, however, that Chief Justice Roberts’s voting record has been generally conservative. On issues of racial discrimination, religion, voting and campaign finance, his views are squarely in the mainstream of conservative legal thinking.
  • He voted with five-justice majorities in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Second Amendment decision that established an individual right to own guns; Citizens United, the 2010 campaign finance decision that amplified the role of money in politics; and Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 voting rights decision that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act.
  • But by casting the decisive vote to save Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, he transformed his reputation. Liberals hailed him as a statesman. Conservatives denounced him as a traitor.
  • Mr. Trump, years before he ran for president, was in the second group. “I guess @JusticeRoberts wanted to be a part of Georgetown society more than anyone knew,” he wrote on Twitter, citing a fake Twitter handle. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump called Chief Justice Roberts “an absolute disaster.”
  • “Moderation, not just in terms of ideological moderation but also humility, is kind of his thing,” he said. “He seems to write limited opinions. He doesn’t reach any further than he has to. He clearly distinguishes between what he is doing as a judge and what he might believe in terms of policy.”
  • The court will have to soon decide whether to hear two sets of cases concerning Trump administration initiatives to revoke protections for unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children and to bar transgender people from military service.
  • While Chief Justice Roberts may be inclined to avoid politically charged issues and quietly rebuild his court’s authority, it takes only four votes to add a case to its docket
saberal

Merrick Garland Is Confirmed as Attorney General - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rney-general-confirmation.html

us Politics Trump Biden

shared by saberal on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Senate voted to confirm Merrick B. Garland on Wednesday to serve as attorney general, giving the former prosecutor and widely respected federal judge the task of leading the Justice Department at a time when the nation faces domestic extremist threats and a reckoning over civil rights.
  • Judge Garland was confirmed 70 to 30, with 20 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in supporting him
  • At his confirmation hearing, Judge Garland, 68, said that becoming attorney general would “be the culmination of a career I have dedicated to ensuring that the laws of our country are fairly and faithfully enforced and the rights of all Americans are protected.”
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  • Department employees have said that Judge Garland’s performance at his confirmation hearing, a largely amicable affair, made them hopeful that he would restore honor to the agency and lift up its 115,000-person work force demoralized by the Trump-era rancor.
  • “I’m voting to confirm Judge Garland because of his long reputation as a straight shooter and legal expert,” Mr. McConnell said o
  • He was chosen by President Barack Obama in 2016 to join the Supreme Court only to see his nomination held up for eight months in an audacious political maneuver by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader at the time. The move ultimately allowed Mr. Trump to choose his own nominee to fill the seat.
  • His first briefings this week were expected to be with the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, to discuss the threat and with Michael R. Sherwin, the departing top prosecutor in Washington who has led the Justice Department inquiry.
  • “I supervised the prosecution of the perpetrators of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, who sought to spark a revolution that would topple the federal government,” he said. “I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”
  • The investigations helped cement Judge Garland’s reputation as a fair-minded centrist. After his appeals court confirmation, he did not make major headlines again until 2016, when Mr. Obama nominated him to serve on the Supreme Court, a choice that won bipartisan support, including from conservative stalwarts like the former Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr.
anniina03

A Hunger Strike in ICE Detention | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hunger-strike-in-ice-detention

politics US history Crisis

shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.
  • Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.
  • Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.
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  • Over the past several months, the U.S. has been trying to stop Indian migrants before they even reach the border. Last week, Mexico deported more than three hundred Indian migrants who were waiting to cross into the U.S., under a deal with the Trump Administration to avoid tariffs on Mexican exports. In 2016, two anonymous ICE officials described to Buzzfeed the agency’s unofficial policy toward Indian asylum seekers: “Keep them out. If you catch them, detain them.”
  • When Kumar reached California, he spent a few days in a packed cell, and then he and other asylum seekers were put on buses and planes—with chains around their hands, feet, and stomach, “as if we were some criminals,” Kumar recalled
  • Kumar ended up in the Otero County Processing Center, an ICE facility managed by a private contractor, where he says his treatment worsened. The officers spoke to Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers in English and Spanish, and refused to provide translators (except when they filled out medical questionnaires), despite the fact that the migrants spoke only Punjabi and Hindi.
  • Force-feeding is painful and potentially harmful to patients, and organizations including the Red Cross, the American Medical Association, and the World Medical Association consider it medically unethical
  • But what made Kumar most upset was that he and the other migrants were subjected to “animal-like treatment”—foul language, aggression, and punitive responses to minor violations of the rules. “When they cursed at the Indians and treated them badly, I couldn’t stand seeing it, so I would speak out against them,” Kumar told me. “If I said something, they would put me in the SHU”—the Special Housing Unit, a euphemism for solitary confinement—“for fifteen days, ten days, by myself in a small room.” (ICE did not respond to my request for comment.)
  • Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers were vegetarian because of their religious beliefs, and the staff sometimes taunted them and made them wait until everyone else got food before they could eat.
  • In July, Kumar went on a hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention and looming deportation. “I decided if I am going to die, I’ll die here,” he told me. When the officers at Otero saw that Kumar had stopped eating and drinking, they sent him to solitary. A few days later, he could hear the officers putting others in SHU rooms near his. He couldn’t see or talk to them and only later learned that five other Indian men had also gone on hunger strike. He did not know what had sparked their protest, though the Otero staff considered him their ringleader, nonetheless. “I had one demand from the beginning,” he told me. “I just want my freedom. I didn’t ask for anything else.”
  • n mid-July, Kumar and three other hunger strikers were transferred to the El Paso Service Processing Center’s medical unit, in Texas, where Kumar was at times isolated from the others. ICE obtained a court authorization to force-feed them, a procedure that involves pushing a tube through a patient’s nose and down the esophagus. One of the migrants had just been treated for a nose infection, and, as ICE doctors placed the tube in his nostril, he began spitting blood and lost consciousness. According to Corchado, who also represented this detainee, the doctor administering the tubes told him, “End your hunger strike and we’ll stop this.” He ended the strike that night.
  • In March of this year, Kumar learned that an immigration judge had rejected his application for asylum, finding the evidence of persecution he had presented not credible, and had ordered his deportation. Kumar filed an appeal. While he waited, he requested to be released on bond, something he had been asking for since he was apprehended, but ICE refused. Though ICE uses punitive measures against detainees, people in immigration detention are officially being held for an administrative violation rather than for a criminal offense, which means that, except in special circumstances, there is no legal limit on how long they can be held.
  • In January, a group of Indian asylum seekers dubbed the “El Paso Nine” banded together in a collective hunger strike. A court gave authorization for them to be force-fed, but the feeding was stopped after two or three weeks in the face of mounting pressure from politicians, activists, and lawyers. Seven of the strikers were eventually deported, and two were released to await rulings on their cases. But forty-nine members of Congress signed a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding an investigation into the use of force-feeding by ICE.
  • Kumar was taken off the feeding tube after nearly a month and then persisted in his strike. His weight dropped, as did his blood pressure and heart rate. He started getting severe abdominal pains. “I was literally seeing him die in front of me,” Corchado told me.
  • On September 12th, the court allowed ICE to resume force-feeding Kumar. The judge wrote in his opinion that he couldn’t order ICE to release Kumar, but he scolded the government for not having given Kumar an independent doctor’s evaluation and for what the judge called its “penological” treatment of him.
  • At the end of his hunger strike, Kumar weighed a hundred and seven pounds. He left the El Paso facility on September 26th and is now staying with an immigration activist in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is eating solid foods again, and gardening, and he recently enrolled in E.S.L. classes. But he can’t run like he used to, and he’s still regaining his vision after going partially blind from starvation. “I’m not fully recovered,” he told me, two weeks after his release. “There are some mental issues—I can’t remember everything. But I’m better than before.”
  • In September, the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed to remand Kumar’s asylum case back to the immigration judge, concluding that the initial ruling, which judged Kumar’s testimony to be not credible, was “clearly erroneous.” Kumar’s case will be heard again, in December, by the same judge. His odds are not great—more than forty-one per cent of Indian asylum seekers were ordered to be deported from the United States last year, and the percentage is likely to be even higher this year.
clairemann

Opinion | Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court Could Take Us Backward - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coney-barrett-health-care.html

shared by clairemann on 19 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • pretending that she has never had an interesting thought in her life.
  • She didn’t want to weigh in. A president postponing an election? Hmm. She’d have to think about that.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      While the people want to know her thoughts on this, she is closely following her Judicial code of conduct as well as the "Ginsburg" rule, so I can't fault her for not wanting to rule on an hypothetical set of facts on the Senate floor.
  • “I have read things about the Earth being round. I would not say I have firm views on it.”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      This article feels a little too skewed for me...
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • A) is very bright; and B) would solidify a conservative Supreme Court majority whose judicial philosophy has been on the wrong side of many of the great issues of my lifetime.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      I am glad they acknowledge this, however her jurisprudence is firmly cemented in history, and while it may be controversial now, originalism was the favored method for many years.
  • that this path toward social progress would ideally have been blazed by legislators, not judges.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      This is so important!
  • Forward-thinking justices struck down such laws — and that wasn’t about “activist judges” but about decency, humanity and the 14th Amendment.
  • Perhaps the divide instead is between forward-thinking judges and backward-thinking judges.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      Well, as Barrett said, even Originalists of progressive Judges can disagree, because it has nothing to do with "wanting to go back in time" it is about the interpretation of a document.
  • Three backward-thinking justices, including Antonin Scalia, Barrett’s mentor, would have allowed Taliban-style prosecutions of gay people for intimacy in the bedroom. (Barrett refused in the hearing Wednesday to say whether the case was rightly decided.)
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      Weather the case was rightly decided or not has nothing to do with if she agrees with the outcome. Just because someone thinks there was no grounds for the argument doesn't mean the disagree with the principal. Thats the role of a judge.
  • That’s one reason next month’s election is such a milestone, for one political party in America is trying to join the rest of the civilized world and provide universal health care, and the other is doing its best to take away what we have.
  • My take is that Democrats are exaggerating that risk; the Republican argument in the case, to be heard next month, is such a legal stretch that it’s unlikely to succeed fully, even if Barrett is on the court.
  • Yet she’s working with a gang of Republican senators to steal a seat on the Supreme Court.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      its not stealing, NYT grow up! She will get a vote just like every other Justice...
  • Will voters reward the party that is working to provide more health care, or the party that has painstakingly robbed one million children of insurance? Will voters help tug the United States forward, or will they support the backward thinkers who have been on the side of discrimination, racism, bigotry and voter suppression?
  • which side of history will you stand on?
clairemann

What to Watch For in the Final Day of Amy Coney Barrett's Hearing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...amy-coney-barrett-hearing.html

shared by clairemann on 19 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • as the panel debates approving her nomination and two panels of witnesses testify for and against it.
  • The session will begin with senators taking turns stating their views of Judge Barrett and a move by Republicans to advance her nomination to the full chamber.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      Do the senators really need any more airtime on this...
  • Democrats may request that the vote be delayed a week,
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  • Republicans frequently accused Democrats of maligning Judge Barrett because of her personal values and religion, even though Democrats determinedly avoided discussion of either topic.
  • Others have minimal legal experience, but were selected to share personal stories that committee members believe relate to cases currently being litigated that Judge Barrett, if confirmed, could eventually rule on.
  • Judge Barrett’s nomination on Oct. 22. A vote on confirmation by the full Senate is expected the following week, as early as Oct. 26.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      mere days out from the election...
  • Given that Democrats have few, if any, means to push the confirmation schedule back,
  • two members of the American Bar Association’
  • as “well qualified” and has historically been supportive of the vast majority of nominees.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      I agree, she is "well qualified" not the most qualified, and was nominated to fit an agenda, but she is qualified
  • nominees, rating 10 as “not qualified”
  • The second panel will feature a more diverse selection of experts whose stories will be far more personal and pointed.
  • Crystal Good, who is expected to speak about her experience having an abortion after being granted a judicial bypass, which allows minors to have the procedure without seeking consent from parents or guardians.
  • Republicans have called one of her former clerks and a former student at Notre Dame. They have also called a retired federal judge who recently wrote an opinion article arguing that Judge Barrett’s Catholic faith would not color her opinions as a justice.
rerobinson03

Garland, at Confirmation Hearing, Vows to Fight Domestic Extremism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...land-confirmation-hearing.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 23 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • udge Garland, who led the Justice Department’s prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombing, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on the first day of his confirmation hearings that the early stages of the current inquiry into the “white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol” seemed to be aggressive and “perfectly appropriate.”
  • “Communities of color and other minorities still face discrimination in housing, education, employment and the criminal justice system,” Judge Garland said in his opening statement. But he said he did not support the call from some on the left that grew out of this summer’s civil rights protests to defund the police.
  • In addition to an immediate briefing on the investigation, he said he would “give the career prosecutors who are working on this manner 24/7 all the resources they could possibly require.”Battling extremism is “central” to the Justice Department’s mission, and has often overlapped with its mission to combat systemic racism, as with its fight against the Ku Klux Klan, Judge Garland said.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Republicans focused primarily on two politically charged investigations from the Trump era: a federal tax investigation into Mr. Biden’s son Hunter Biden, and the work of a special counsel, John H. Durham, to determine whether Obama-era officials erred in 2016 when they investigated Trump campaign officials and their ties to Russia.
  • Judge Garland has sterling legal credentials, a reputation as a moderate and a long history of service at the Justice Department. After clerking for Justice William J. Brennan Jr., he worked as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington under President George H.W. Bush and was chosen by Jamie Gorelick, the deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, to serve as her top deputy.
  • Judge Garland was for the most part measured and even-tempered, but he became emotional when he described his family’s flight from anti-Semitism and persecution in Eastern Europe and asylum in America.
Javier E

BOOM: Google Loses Antitrust Case - BIG by Matt Stoller - 0 views

www.thebignewsletter.com/...om-google-loses-antitrust-case

Big Tech trial antitrust jury case google

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • It’s a long and winding road for Epic. The firm lost the Apple case, which is on appeal, but got the Google case to a jury, along with several other plaintiffs. Nearly every other firm challenging Google gradually dropped out of the case, getting special deals from the search giant in return for abandoning their claims. But Sweeney was righteous, and believed that Google helped ruined the internet. He didn’t ask for money or a special deal, instead seeking to have Judge James Donato force Google to make good on its “broken promise,” which he characterized as “an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants.”
  • Specifically, Sweeney asked for the right for firms to have their own app stores, and the ability to use their own billing systems. Basically, he wants to crush Google’s control over the Android phone system. And I suspect he just did. You can read the verdict here.
  • Google is likely to be in trouble now, because it is facing multiple antitrust cases, and these kinds of decisions have a bandwagon effect. The precedent is set, in every case going forward the firm will now be seen as presumed guilty, since a jury found Google has violated antitrust laws. Judges are cautious, and are generally afraid of being the first to make a precedent-setting decision. Now they won’t have to. In fact, judges and juries will now have to find a reason to rule for Google. If, say, Judge Amit Mehta in D.C., facing a very similar fact-pattern, chooses to let Google off the hook, well, he’ll look pretty bad.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • There are a few important take-aways. First, this one didn’t come from the government, it was a private case by a video game maker that sued Google over its terms for getting access to the Google Play app store for Android, decided not by a fancy judge with an Ivy League degree but by a jury of ordinary people in San Francisco. In other words, private litigation, the ‘ambulance-chasing’ lawyers, are vital parts of our justice system.
  • Second, juries matter, even if they are riskier for everyone involved. It’s kind of like a mini poll, and the culture is ahead of the cautious legal profession. This quick decision is a sharp contrast with the 6-month delay to an opinion in the search case that Judge Mehta sought in the D.C. trial.
  • Third, tying claims, which is a specific antitrust violation, are good law. Tying means forcing someone to buy an unrelated product in order to access the actual product they want to buy. The specific legal claim here was about how Google forced firms relying on its Google Play app store to also use its Google Play billing service, which charges an inflated price of 30% of the price of an app. Tying is pervasive throughout the economy, so you can expect more suits along these lines.
  • And finally, big tech is not above the law. This loss isn’t just the first antitrust failure for Google, it’s the first antitrust loss for any big tech firm. I hear a lot from skeptics that the fix is in, that the powerful will always win, that justice in our system is a mirage. But that just isn’t true. A jury of our peers just made that clear.
lilyrashkind

Judge Jackson takes empathetic approach to impartiality: ANALYSIS - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story

jackson politics us

shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson never uttered the word 'empathy' in nearly 19 hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, but she effectively made clear it's a hallmark of her style and an asset to judicial credibility
  • Jackson also insisted it has no influence on her legal decisions."I am not importing my personal views or policy preferences," she told the committee. "The entire exercise is about trying to understand what those who created this policy or this law intended."
  • What Judge Jackson and her supporters tout as a selling point, Republican critics call a major liability.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told her, "it seems as though you're a very kind person and there's at least a level of empathy that enters into your treatment of a defendant.""Maybe beyond what some of us would be comfortable with with respect to administering justice," Tillis added.
  • The partisan clash over empathy -- which some have dubbed the "Empathy Wars" -- has its roots in a campaign promise by Barack Obama more than 15 years ago, when the then presidential candidate made the quality a key criteria for a high court nominee.
  • "My attempts to communicate directly with defendants is about public safety," Jackson told Tillis, who scrutinized her treatment of child porn offenders, "because most of the people who are incarcerated via the federal system, and even via the state system, will come out, will be a part of our communities again."
  • "I just don't understand why after saying this and believing this, you could give this guy three months in prison," said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, who spent the entirety of his time questioning Jackson's below-guidelines sentence in a child porn case involving an 18-year-old offender. "Do you have anything to add?""No, senator," Jackson shot back.
  • Having empathy on the high court was once widely considered a vaunted quality. Justice Stephen Breyer, whom Jackson would succeed, called empathy "a crucial quality [to have] in a judge."Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said in 2013 that empathy requires "caution" but that cases are "stories about real people" and that judges must understand "real people are going to be bound by what you do."
  • But other jurists take a broader view."Wisdom, as opposed to the more narrow empathy, is a foundational requirement throughout our legal system," said Sarah Isgur, a former Justice Department lawyer and ABC News legal analyst."A judicial philosophy may have empathy as one element of it, but it strives to treat similar situations alike by creating a framework to determine which cases are similar and which aren't," Isgur said. "Judge Jackson was never able to articulate a judicial philosophy and without one, empathy can actually be the antithesis of justice."
  • "In my capacity as a justice, I would do what I've done for the past decade, which is to rule from a position of neutrality, to look carefully at the facts and the circumstances of every case, without any agendas, without any attempt to push the law in one direction or the other," Jackson said, "and to render rulings that I believe and that I hope that people would have
redavistinnell

Donald Trump's most bone-chilling tweet (opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

donald donald trump trump tweet opinion

shared by redavistinnell on 06 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump's most bone-chilling tweet
  • On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump may have unleashed his most bone-chilling tweet -- at least to those who believe the United States should not become a Trump-led dictatorship
  • Here is Trump's truly jaw-dropping tweet from Saturday morning: "The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!"
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But Trump is apparently attempting to delegitimize our federal judiciary by calling Judge James Robart, a George W. Bush-appointed judge, a "so-called" judge while arguing that his decision is "ridiculous."
  • The President truly appears to be leading a master class in transforming the United States into a dictatorship. Trump -- and it's fair to assume it is by design -- has sought to undermine anyone or anything that tries to counter him.
  • The practical result is that when the media calls out Trump's lies and presents objective facts to counter him, his followers will likely dismiss the media reports and instead side with Trump.
  • hen Trump went after our intelligence agencies because he didn't agree with their views on Russia's involvement in our recent election. Trump lashed out, calling these agencies, charged with gathering information for our national security, "disgraceful" and accusing them of leaking information, comparing it to "something that Nazi Germany would have done."
  • But this time it's far more disturbing given Trump is not a candidate, but president of the United States. The rationale must be assumed to be the same, namely that Trump wants to delegitimize the judiciary so that court decisions Trump disagrees with will be viewed by his followers as at the least horribly partisan, or at worst invalid.
  • Would
  • Trump do the same if he had passionately disagreed with the Court's decision or would he simply ignore it while attacking the legitimacy of our judiciary, sparking a constitutional crisis? And would certain Trump-supporting federal agency heads, or even federal officers, refuse to follow court orders (or at least do it very slowly) because Trump has convinced them the federal judiciary's decisions cannot be trusted?
  • And according to a CNN/ORC poll, while Trump has only a 44% approval rating overall, 90% of Republicans think he's doing a good job.
  • Trump's concerted attacks to delegitimize our media, our intelligence community and now our federal judiciary would have no doubt alarmed them. And it should be terrifying to every American who truly believes in our Constitution and in the promise of America.
johnsonma23

Alabama chief justice orders halt to same-sex marriage | MSNBC - 0 views

www.msnbc.com/...-orders-halt-same-sex-marriage

politics culture msnbc justice

shared by johnsonma23 on 07 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Alabama chief justice orders halt to same-sex marriage
  • The chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered probate judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, defying a six-month-old Supreme Court decision that made marriage equality the law of the land.
  • U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision only struck down the four same-sex marriage bans that were specifically challenged in the landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges. That lawsuit was a consolidated challenge to bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee — not Alabama.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Alabama probate judges have a ministerial duty not to issue any marriage license contrary to the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Amendment or the Alabama Marriage Protection Act remain in full force and effect,”
  • U.S. Supreme Court denied the state’s request for a longer stay, which should have cleared the way for gay and lesbian couples to begin marrying in the state. But Moore sent out a letter ordering probate judges to continue denying same-sex couples marriage licenses.
  • rdered all probate judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
  • Granade issued yet another order requiring all probate judges to no longer enforce the state’s same-sex marriage ban
  • Given those two federal orders, Stoll said, there’s no way the Alabama Supreme Court’s March order still stands, regardless of Moore’s belief that it would need to be “reversed by orderly and proper proceedings
annabelteague02

Judges postpone emergency meeting to discuss Trump/Barr concerns - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by annabelteague02 on 20 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A group of federal judges hastily postponed an emergency meeting that was scheduled to take place Wednesday to discuss concerns about President Donald Trump and the Justice Department's intervention in politically charged cases.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 20 Feb 20
       
      why!
  • The fact that the little known independent group -- originally established in the 1980s to respond to issues concerning judicial compensation -- was having the meeting in the first place drew the attention in Washington on Tuesday and Trump made it the subject of one of his tweets.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 20 Feb 20
       
      were they inspecting him? or trying to help? i'm confused
  • General William Barr had considered resigning over Trump's tweets discussing ongoing controversies and attacking the judge hearing the case.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 20 Feb 20
       
      people are scared of him! it prevents people from being objective in any sense of the word
anonymous

California gun ruling: A federal judge, who compares an AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife, ov... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by anonymous on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • a federal judge overturned California's longtime ban on assault weapons on Friday, ruling it violates the Second Amendment's right to bear arms.
  • Assault weapons have been banned in California since 1989, according to the ruling. The law has been updated several times since it was originally passed.
  • According to the ruling by U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego, the assault weapons ban deprives Californians from owning assault-style weapons commonly allowed in other states.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In his ruling, the judge also criticized the news media, writing, "One is to be forgiven if one is persuaded by news media and others that the nation is awash with murderous AR-15 assault rifles. The facts, however, do not support this hyperbole, and facts matter."
  • However, as CNN has previously reported, AR-15 style rifles have been the weapon of choice for numerous mass shooters,
  • Last year, Benitez ruled California's ban on high-capacity magazines was unconstitutional. He also struck down the state's restriction on remote purchases of gun ammunition. California Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized the ruling Friday, calling AR-15's a "weapon of war."
  • He said in a statement that the comparison made by the judge between a Swiss Army Knife and the AR-15 "completely undermines the credibility of this decision and is a slap in the face to the families who've lost loved ones to this weapon."
  • The ruling and injunction are stayed for 30 days, during which time the Attorney General may appeal and seek a stay from the Court of Appeals.
  • California Attorney General Rob Bonta said he will be appealing the ruling. "Today's decision is fundamentally flawed, and we will be appealing it," Bonta said in a news release.
saberal

Opinion | Will the Supreme Court Write Guantánamo's Final Chapter? - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...supreme-court-guantanamo.html

US Prison Biden

shared by saberal on 06 May 21 - No Cached
  • The Guantánamo story may finally be coming to an end, and as the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, the question is who will write the last chapter, the White House or the Supreme Court?
  • President Biden has vowed to close the island detention center, through which nearly 800 detainees have passed since it opened in early 2002 to house some of the “worst of the worst,” in the words of the Pentagon at the time
  • President Barack Obama also wanted to close Guantánamo but couldn’t manage to do it. Circumstances are different now
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • One of the court’s newest judges, Gregory Katsas, is recused, presumably because he worked on Guantánamo matters while serving as deputy White House counsel in the Trump administration. The two other Trump-appointed judges are Neomi Rao, who wrote the panel opinion, and Justin Walker, who was not yet on the court when the case was first heard. The appeals court’s longest serving judge still in active service is Karen LeCraft Henderson, appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990
  • “The majority reads our precedent as foreclosing any argument that substantive due process extends to Guantánamo Bay. But we have never made such a far-reaching statement about the clause’s extraterritorial application. If we had, we would not have repeatedly assumed without deciding that detainees could bring substantive due process claims.”
  • especially the 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush that gave the detainees a constitutional right of access to a federal court, enabling them to seek release by means of petitions for habeas corpus. In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2010, Judge Randolph compared the five justices in the Boumediene majority to the characters in “The Great Gatsby,” Tom and Daisy Buchanan, “careless people who smashed things up” and “let other people clean up the mess they made.”
  • The case in which Judge Randolph forcefully presented his argument against due process on Guantánamo, now titled Ali v. Biden, has already reached the Supreme Court in an appeal filed by the detainee, Abdul Razak Ali, in January. The justices are scheduled to consider whether to grant the petition later this month, but last week, Mr. Ali’s lawyers asked the justices to defer acting on the petition until the appeals court decides the al-Hela case. Clearly, the lawyers’ calculation is that a favorable opinion by the full United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would put the issue in a better light.
  • It’s a safe bet that there are not five justices on the court today who would have joined the Boumediene majority. The only member of that majority still serving is Justice Stephen Breyer. Three of the four dissenters, all but Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016 (Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito), are still there.
anonymous

Derek Chauvin Trial: 14 Jurors Are Seated To Hear Case Of George Floyd Killing : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...r-case-of-george-floyd-killing

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A 14th juror was selected in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin's murder trial on Monday, one week before opening arguments are scheduled to begin on March 29. The court initially called for 12 jurors and at least two alternates; it could now add additional jurors to the panel, in case anyone drops out.
  • Chauvin, who is white, is charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd, who was Black. Video recordings showed that Floyd was held facedown on the asphalt — and that Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes.The jury reflects a range of ethnicities, although slightly over half of the jurors have been described in court as white.
  • The trial is expected to last at least four weeks. The two alternate jurors won't know of their status until the panel heads to the deliberation phase. Jury selection in the case has often moved more quickly than was predicted: when it began on March 9, the process was expected to last several weeks, as the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys quizzed dozens of potential jurors about their lives and any opinions they held about Floyd's death in police custody last Memorial Day.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The relatively fast pace endured despite the loss last week of two jurors who were struck from the panel after they said that because of Minneapolis' recent $27 million settlement with Floyd's family, they could no longer promise to be impartial.
  • The jury reached 14 members days after Cahill denied the defense's motions to move the case to another venue or delay the proceedings – steps that Chauvin's attorney, Eric Nelson, called for because of the potential impact of the settlement news on the jury pool.
  • The initial jury pool included 326 people; as of late last week, Cahill said that the court had questioned around 60 of them. The selection process continued on Monday, as the judge and the two sides of the case sought to ensure the jury is fair and impartial. As of around midday Monday, the defense had used 14 of its 18 challenges and the prosecutors had used 8 of their 10 challenges, Cahill said.
  • In another ruling from Friday, Cahill ruled that only a portion of the evidence and details from an earlier police stop of Floyd would be allowed in the trial.Cahill noted similarities between Floyd's interaction with police on May 25, 2020, and the earlier police stop on May 6, 2019. In both instances, the judge said, there were signs that Floyd had ingested drugs after being approached by police officers. In the two cases, Cahill said, Floyd's physical behavior is "remarkably similar."
  • But the judge also said Floyd's "emotional behavior" from that earlier encounter was not admissible. And he restricted how much of a police video recording from the 2019 arrest could be used in court.The only recordings from the 2019 incident that are relevant to the current case, he added, are segments that could be linked to the cause of Floyd's death and his medical condition.The case is being closely watched, with Floyd's death having inflamed widespread protests against racial inequality and police brutality.
mattrenz16

Voters Are Motivated To Keep Protections For Preexisting Conditions : Shots - Health Ne... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...t-to-halt-mail-in-ballot-count

shared by mattrenz16 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • A Nevada judge has rejected a lawsuit by President Trump's reelection campaign and state Republican officials seeking to halt mail-in ballot counting in Clark County.
  • In the lawsuit, Trump's campaign and the Nevada GOP alleged that they could not observe all aspects of the ballot-counting process closely enough, and wanted to install cameras to record the process.
  • There is no evidence that any vote that should lawfully be counted has or will not be counted. There is no evidence that any vote that lawfully should not be counted has or will be counted. There is no evidence that any election worker did anything outside of the law, policy, or procedures
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Nevada's Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, told legislators earlier this year that there were no cases of fraud during the state's primary election in June, which was conducted almost entirely by mail.
  • The lawsuit had also asked for an immediate halt to counting and verification of mail ballots, but Wilson rejected that request shortly after the suit was filed last month.
  • The GOP lawsuit was filed on Oct. 23, just 11 days before the general election.
  • Slovakia undertook a massive effort over the weekend: to test nearly all adults in the country for the coronavirus.
  • Amid a steep spike in cases, more than 3.6 million Slovaks were tested for the virus, according to Prime Minister Igor Matovic – that's about two-thirds of the population.
  • The tests were free, and conducted at some 5,000 testing sites around the country, with assistance from Slovakia's military.
  • For all others, the test is optional – but a strict 10-day quarantine is required for those who choose to not get tested, The Lancet reports.
  • One goal of the program is to keep the nation's hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.
  • Matovič said that the government's scientific advisory team had recommended a three-week lockdown for all, rather than the testing program, but he said a lockdown would cause too much economic pain, according to The Lancet.
  • Some have been critical of the government's plan.
  • Wilson wrote that there was no evidence of improper vote counting.
  • Carson City District Court Judge James Wilson denied their request, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to bring the case and had failed to provide evidence of "debasement or dilution of a citizen's vote."
  • In the lawsuit, Trump's campaign and the Nevada GOP alleged that they could not observe all aspects of the ballot-counting process closely enough, and wanted to install cameras to record the process.
  • The ruling was released on Monday, just a day before Election Day.
  • "There is no evidence that any vote that should lawfully be counted has or will not be counted.
  • But the plaintiffs failed to show any error or flaw in the Agilis results or any other reason for such a mandate, Wilson wrote.
  • "There is only one 'result,' and that comes after every lawful vote is counted," Ford tweeted.
  • The lawsuit had also asked for an immediate halt to counting and verification of mail ballots, but Wilson rejected that request shortly after the suit was filed last month.
  • "Clark County is a blue county, and this is a numbers game. And quite frankly they would like to exclude as many ballots in Clark County as they can. They want a high rejection rate," Zunino said, according to the Review-Journal. "They are not challenging the process in Elko County or Humboldt County or Carson City because those are red counties."
  • Nevada's Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, told legislators earlier this year that there were no cases of fraud during the state's primary election in June, which was conducted almost entirely by mail.
mattrenz16

President Biden: Live Updates on Stimulus and Merrick Garland - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...joe-biden-news

shared by mattrenz16 on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Judge Merrick B. Garland said on Monday that the United States faces “a more dangerous period” from domestic extremists than it faced at the time of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and praised the early stages of the investigation into the “white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol” on Jan. 6 as appropriately aggressive.
  • “I do not plan to be interfered with by anyone,” Judge Garland said. Should he be confirmed, he said he would uphold the principle that “the attorney general represents the public interest.”
  • Judge Garland said he also was not aware of the details of a preliminary Justice Department investigation into how Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration handled New York nursing homes during the pandemic.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “I think the policy was shameful,” Judge Garland said. “I can’t imagine anything worse than separating parents from their children. And we will provide all of the cooperation that we possibly can.”
  • Progressives have pushed local governments to “defund” their police departments after killings and assaults on Black people by officers. Judge Garland said that, like President Biden, he does not “support defunding the police.”
clairemann

2020 Election Live Updates: Republicans Confirm Barrett to Supreme Court, Cementing Con... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-biden-election

SCOTUS trump Democrats Republicans

shared by clairemann on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • A divided Senate voted Monday night to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, capping a lightning-fast Senate approval that handed President Trump a victory only days before the election and promised to tip the court to the right for years to come.
  • A divided Senate voted Monday night to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, capping a lightning-fast Senate approval that handed President Trump a victory only days before the election and promised to tip the court to the right for years to come.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 27 Oct 20
       
      Wow. Inevitable, but still upsetting
  • Republicans overcame unanimous opposition by Democrats to make Judge Barrett the 115th justice of the Supreme Court and the fifth woman ever to sit on its bench.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • all but one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, who herself is battling for re-election
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 27 Oct 20
       
      at least there is one republican in the senate who isn't a hypocrite
  • With Judge Barrett’s elevation in place of Justice Ginsburg, a liberal icon, the court is expected to tilt decisively to the right.
  • It was the first time in 151 years that a justice was confirmed without a single vote from the minority party, a sign of how bitter Washington’s decades-old war over judicial nominations has become.
  • Democrats called it a hypocritical power grab by Republicans, who they said should have waited for voters to have their say on Election Day — the stance Republicans had taken four years ago when they declined even to hold hearings for one of former President Barack Obama’s nominees to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.
  • 52-to-48
  • including abortion rights, gay rights, business regulation and the environment.
  • Her impact could be felt right away. There are major election disputes awaiting immediate action by the Supreme Court from the battleground states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Both concern the date by which absentee ballots may be accepted
  • Judge Barrett will quickly confront a docket studded with major cases on Mr. Trump’s programs and policies
  • Justices can begin work as soon as they are sworn in, meaning she could be at work on Tuesday.
  • Yes. The court will soon act on cases from North Carolina and Pennsylvania concerning whether deadlines for receiving mailed ballots may be extended.
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