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Court tosses black man's murder conviction over racial bias
Attorney News |
2019/06/23 18:31
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Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the court's majority opinion. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
In Flowers' sixth trial, the jury was made up of 11 whites and one African American. District Attorney Doug Evans struck five black prospective jurors.
In the earlier trials, three convictions were tossed out, including one when the prosecutor improperly excluded African Americans from the jury. In the second trial, the judge chided Evans for striking a juror based on race. Two other trials ended when jurors couldn't reach unanimous verdicts.
"The numbers speak loudly," Kavanaugh said in a summary of his opinion that he read in the courtroom, noting that Evans had removed 41 of the 42 prospective black jurors over the six trials. "We cannot ignore that history."
In dissent, Thomas called Kavanaugh's opinion "manifestly incorrect" and wrote that Flowers presented no evidence whatsoever of purposeful race discrimination."
Flowers has been in jail more than 22 years, since his arrest after four people were found shot to death in a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi, in July 1996.
Flowers was arrested several months later, described by prosecutors as a disgruntled former employee who sought revenge against the store's owner because she fired him and withheld most of his pay to cover the cost of merchandise he damaged. Nearly $300 was found missing after the killings. |
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Court: NFL's Bucs not entitled to damages from BP spill
Attorney News |
2019/05/27 01:26
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A federal appeals court has ruled that the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers is not entitled to damages from BP for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
At issue were the accounting practices the team used to argue that the 2010 spill caused the team's revenues to fall. The Bucs had sought $19.5 million in damages.
On Friday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court's decision against the team.
The court found that the Bucs' revenue in May-June 2010 was not significantly lower than its revenue during that same span a year later. In order to qualify for damages, it had needed to show that its revenues rebounded by at least 10% in 2011.
The team's stadium is about 360 miles (580 kilometers) southeast of the site of the spill.
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Russian court extends arrest for American accused of spying
Attorney News |
2019/05/22 04:43
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A Russian court on Friday extended the arrest for a former U.S. Marine charged with espionage, who complained in court about abuse in custody.
Paul Whelan was arrested at the end of December in a hotel room in the Russian capital of Moscow where he was attending a wedding. He was charged with espionage, which carries up to 20 years in prison in Russia.
Whelan denies the charges of spying for the U.S. that his lawyers said stem from a sting operation. Whelan’s lawyer has said his client was handed a flash drive that had classified information on it that he didn’t know about.
The court ruled Friday to keep the Michigan resident, who also holds British, Irish and Canadian citizenship, behind bars for three more months.
Whelan told reporters in court that he has been threatened and subjected to “abuses and harassment” in prison.
“I haven’t had a shower in two weeks. I can’t use a barber, I have to cut my own hair,” a visibly agitated Whelan said from the defendant’s dock. “This is typical prisoner of war isolation technique. They’re trying to run me down so that I will talk to them.”
Andrea Kalan, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, said Friday that they are disappointed with the ruling, arguing there is “no evidence of any wrongdoing.”
“The mature, civilized course would be to let Paul go home to his elderly parents, who are wondering if they’ll see their son alive again,” Kalan said.
Rights activist Eva Merkachova, who is authorized to visit Moscow prisons, told the RIA Novosti news agency on Friday that the prison administration at the Lefortovo detention center where Whelan is being kept did not let her speak to the American because they were speaking English.
She said she and another activist were told by a prison guard that they can only speak Russian on the premises and that Lefortovo refused to let in a certified translator. |
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News attorneys: Opioid distribution data should be public
Attorney News |
2019/05/05 00:07
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Attorneys for news organizations argued Thursday that the U.S. public should be allowed to see federal data about how prescription opioids were distributed as the nation’s overdose crisis was worsening.
They urged a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati to overturn a lower court judge’s denial of access to the information. The judges will rule later.
“The value of transparency here is great,” said Karen C. Lefton, an Akron, Ohio, attorney representing The Washington Post. The data concerns “a public health crisis” that affects many more people than a typical case, she said.
The data is a key piece of evidence in hundreds of lawsuits filed by state and local governments against companies that make and distribute the drugs. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration database details the flow of prescription painkillers to pharmacies, showing the number and doses of pills.
A Justice Department attorney told the judges releasing the data would compromise investigations.
“This is an issue of really critical importance to the United States and DEA,” said government attorney Sarah Carroll. Making the information public, she said, “would tip defendants off to the scope of DEA investigations.”
Cleveland-based U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, who is overseeing more than 1,500 of the lawsuits, had ruled in July 2018 that the information cannot be made public. He said that doing so would reveal trade secrets. The Post and the HD Media newspaper chain, which had asked the court for the data, then appealed to the federal circuit.
The appellate judges raised a number of questions about Polster’s orders keeping the data secret and hundreds of filings in the case that are under seal.
Judge Eric Clay said it seemed that the secrecy in the case had “just gone overboard.” He told Carroll, of the Justice Department, that “just saying” cases would be compromised seems inadequate. |
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Canada privacy watchdog taking Facebook to court
Attorney News |
2019/04/25 23:00
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Canada's privacy czar said Thursday that he is taking Facebook to court after finding that lax practices at the social media giant allowed personal information to be used for political purposes.
A joint report from privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien and his British Columbia counterpart said major shortcomings were uncovered in Facebook's procedures. It called for stronger laws to protect Canadians.
The commissioners expressed dismay that Facebook had rebuffed their findings and recommendations. Facebook insisted it took the investigation seriously. The company said it offered to enter into a compliance agreement.
The Canadian report comes as Ireland's privacy regulator is investigating Facebook over the company's recent revelation that it had left hundreds of millions of user passwords exposed.
The Canadian probe followed reports that Facebook let an outside organization use an app to access users' personal information and that some of the data was then passed to others. Recipients of the information included the firm Cambridge Analytica.
The app, at one point known as "This is Your Digital Life," encouraged users to complete a personality quiz but collected much more information about those who installed the app as well as data about their Facebook friends, the commissioners said.
About 300,000 Facebook users worldwide added the app, leading to the potential disclosure of the personal information of approximately 87 million others, including more than 600,000 Canadians, the report said. |
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Supreme Court asked to void Louisiana abortion clinic law
Attorney News |
2019/04/18 17:31
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A Louisiana abortion clinic is asking the Supreme Court to strike down regulations that could leave the state with just one clinic.
A divided high court had previously agreed to block the law pending a full review of the case.
An appeal being filed with the court Wednesday says the justices should now take the next step and declare the law an unconstitutional burden on the rights of women seeking an abortion. The Louisiana provision is similar to a Texas law the court struck down in 2016.
If the justices agree to hear the Louisiana case, as seems likely, it could lead to a decision on the high-profile abortion issue in spring 2020, in the midst of the presidential election campaign.
The case presents a swirling mix of the changed court’s views on abortion rights and its respect for earlier high court decisions.
Louisiana’s law requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. The justices said in 2016 that a Texas law provided “few, if any, health benefits for women.”
But the composition of the court has changed since then. President Donald Trump has put two justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, on the court. Kavanaugh replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy, who voted to strike down the Texas law. Trump had pledged during the campaign to appoint “pro-life” justices, and abortion opponents are hoping the more conservative bench will be more open to upholding abortion restrictions.
Louisiana abortion providers and a district judge who initially heard the case said one or maybe two of the state’s three abortion clinics would have to close under the new law. There would be at most two doctors who could meet its requirements, they said.
But the appeals court in New Orleans rejected those claims, doubting that any clinics would have to close and saying the doctors had not tried hard enough to establish relationships with local hospitals.
In January, the full appeals court voted 9-6 not to get involved in the case, setting up the Supreme Court appeal.
In February, the justices split 5-4 to keep the law on hold. Chief Justice John Roberts, a dissenter in the 2016 case from Texas, joined with the court’s four liberal justices to temporarily block the Louisiana measure. |
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South Korean court orders easing of decades-old abortion ban
Attorney News |
2019/04/10 22:50
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In a major reversal, South Korea's Constitutional Court on Thursday ordered the easing of the country's decades-old ban on most abortions, one of the strictest in the developed world.
Abortions have been largely illegal in South Korea since 1953, though convictions for violating the restrictions are rare. Still, the illegality of abortions forces women to seek out unauthorized and often expensive procedures to end their pregnancies, creating a social stigma that makes them feel like criminals.
The court's nine-justice panel said that the parliament must revise legislation to ease the current regulations by the end of 2020. It said the current abortion law was incompatible with the constitution and would be repealed if parliament fails to come up with new legislation by then.
The ruling is final and cannot be appealed, court officials said, but current regulations will remain in effect until they are replaced or repealed.
An easing of the law could open up the door to more abortions for social and economic reasons. Current exceptions to the law only allow abortions when a woman is pregnant through rape or incest, when a pregnancy seriously jeopardizes her health, or when she or her male partner has certain diseases.
A woman in South Korea can be punished with up to one year in prison for having an illegal abortion, and a doctor can get up to two years in prison for performing an unauthorized abortion.
Thursday's verdict was a response to an appeal filed in February 2017 by an obstetrician charged with carrying out about 70 unauthorized abortions from 2013-2017 at the request or approval of pregnant women. |
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