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Court questions obstruction charges brought against Jan. 6 rioters and Trump
Headline Legal News |
2024/04/17 15:50
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday questioned whether federal prosecutors went too far in bringing obstruction charges against hundreds of participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. But it wasn’t clear how the justices would rule in a case that also could affect the prosecution of former President Donald Trump, who faces the same charge for his efforts to overturn his election loss in 2020.
The justices heard arguments over the charge of obstruction of an official proceeding in the case of Joseph Fischer, a former Pennsylvania police officer who has been indicted for his role in disrupting Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory over Trump. Fischer is one of 330 people facing that charge, which stems from a law passed in the aftermath of the Enron financial scandal more than two decades ago to deal with the destruction of documents.
Trump is facing two charges in a separate case brought by special counsel Jack Smith in Washington that could be knocked out with a favorable ruling from the nation’s highest court. Next week, the justices will hear arguments over whether the former president and presumptive nominee for the 2024 Republican nomination has “absolute immunity” from prosecution in that case, a proposition that has so far been rejected by two lower courts.
Smith has argued separately in the immunity case that the obstruction charges against Trump are valid no matter how the court decides Fischer’s case. The first former U.S. president under indictment, Trump is on trial on hush money charges in New York and also has been charged with election interference in Georgia and with mishandling classified documents in Florida.
It was not clear after more than 90 minutes of arguments precisely where the court would land in Fischer’s case. Conservative justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch appeared most likely to side with Fischer, while liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor seemed more favorable to the Justice Department’s position.
Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former federal public defender, expressed interest in more of a middle-ground outcome that might make it harder, but not impossible, for prosecutors to use the obstruction charge.
Some of the conservative justices said the law was so broad that it could be used against even peaceful protests and also questioned why the Justice Department has not brought charges under the provision in other violent protests.
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Korean Air Pilot Benefits - Why Korean Air?
Opinions |
2024/04/15 05:49
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Korean Air Pilot Jobs - Total Aviation Service (TAS)
Our vision is to stand as a leading flight crew provider, offering a seamless journey from your initial application through the selection process, training, and the entirety of your assignment with Korean Air. Korean Air pilot jobs are highly sought-after and TAS provide a personal recruitment service to pilots.
The cornerstone of our success is founded in the wonderful communication we enjoy between TAS and our pilots. We endeavor every day to enable and maintain an open and transparent dialogue. Thanks to our experiences at Korean Air, TAS is also proud of the clear and expeditious communication we share with Korean Air’s management.
Korean Air Pilot Benefits - Apply to Captain and First Officer positions.
Tailored Commuting : Commute from home with the privilege of selecting your Home Base from Korean Air’s global network. What’s more, you can commute in Business Class, free of charge. No lines, no bid, you simply choose the days you want to be home.
Flexible Time Off : Enjoy a generous time-off policy that includes 11 consecutive days at home, in addition to 3 travel days each month, allowing you to select the days you wish to spend at home.
Sick Leave : Benefit from 14 days of paid sick leave per year (10 for First Officers) to ensure your well-being is a top priority.
Competitive Pay : We offer competitive compensation, including per-diems and overtime payments, ensuring your hard work is duly rewarded.
Renewable Contract : A renewable 5-year contract, with potential extensions to age 65, provides you with long-term stability. |
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What to know about abortion in Arizona under the near-total 1864 ban
Legal Business |
2024/04/12 15:55
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The Arizona Supreme Court gave the go-ahead Tuesday to prepare to enforce a long-dormant law that bans nearly all abortions, drastically altering the legal landscape for terminating pregnancies in a state likely to have a key role in the presidential election.
The law predating Arizona’s statehood provides no exceptions for rape or incest and allows abortions only if the mother’s life is in jeopardy. Arizona’s highest court suggested doctors can be prosecuted under the 1864 law, though the opinion written by the court’s majority didn’t explicitly say that.
The Tuesday decision threw out an earlier lower-court decision that concluded doctors couldn’t be charged for performing abortions in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The Civil War-era law, enacted long before Arizona became a state on Feb. 14, 1912, had been blocked since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing the constitutional right to an abortion nationwide.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, persuaded a state judge lift an injunction that blocked enforcement of the 1864 ban. Then the state Court of Appeals suspended the law as Brnovich’s Democratic successor, Attorney General Kris Mayes, urged the state’s high court to uphold the appellate court’s decision.
The court itself was expanded in 2016 from five justices to seven, all appointed by Republican governors.
The high court said enforcement won’t begin for at least two weeks. However, plaintiffs say it could be up to two months, based on an agreement in a related case to delay enforcement if the justices upheld the pre-statehood ban.
The law orders prosecution for “a person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life.”
The Arizona Supreme Court suggested in its ruling Tuesday that physicians can be prosecuted, though justices didn’t say that outright.
“In light of this Opinion, physicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman’s life, are illegal,” and additional criminal and regulatory sanctions may apply to abortions performed after 15 weeks of pregnancy, the ruling said.
The law carries a sentence of two to five years in prison upon conviction. Lawyers for Planned Parenthood Arizona said they believe criminal penalties will apply only to doctors. But the penalties also apply to providing abortion pills — the most common method in the United States.
In other places with abortion bans, some women have obtained pills both through underground networks and from telehealth from medical providers in states that have laws intended to protect prescribers from out-of-state prosecutions. This was already illegal in Arizona, the attorney general’s office said.
Dr. Maria Phillis, an Ohio OB-GYN with a law degree, said she believes women who obtain pills through those means could be prosecuted under the 1864 law. Across the country, new abortion bans have not been used to prosecute women in similar cases, and measures that have been introduced to punish those who obtain abortions have not been adopted.
Fourteen other states are now enforcing bans on abortion in all stages of pregnancy.
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Mexico breaks diplomatic ties with Ecuador after embassy raid
Legal Topics |
2024/04/08 18:29
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The Mexican president has quickly moved to break off diplomatic ties with Ecuador after police broke into the Mexican Embassy to arrest a former vice president who had sought political asylum there after being indicted on corruption charges.
In an extraordinarily unusual move, Ecuadorian police forced their way into the embassy in the capital, Quito, to arrest Jorge Glas, who had been residing there since December. Police broke through the external doors of the Mexican diplomatic headquarters in the Ecuadorian capital and entered the main patio to get Glas.
On Saturday, he was taken from the attorney general’s office to a detention facility in an armored vehicle followed by a convoy of military and police vehicles. People who had gathered outside the prosecutor’s office yelled “strength” as the vehicles began to move.
The raid prompted Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to announce the break of diplomatic relations with Ecuador Friday evening.
Glas has been convicted on bribery and corruption charges. Ecuadorian authorities are still investigating more allegations against him. “This is not possible. It cannot be. This is crazy,” Roberto Canseco, head of the Mexican consular section in Quito, told local press while standing outside the embassy. “I am very worried because they could kill him. There is no basis to do this. This is totally outside the norm.”
Defending its decision, Ecuador’s presidency said in a statement: “Ecuador is a sovereign nation and we are not going to allow any criminal to stay free.”
López Obrador fired back, calling Glas’ detention an “authoritarian act” and “a flagrant violation of international law and the sovereignty of Mexico.”
Alicia Bárcena, Mexico’s secretary of foreign relations, posted on the social platform X that a number of diplomats suffered injuries during the break-in, adding that it violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
Diplomatic premises are considered “inviolable” under the Vienna treaties and local law enforcement agencies are not allowed to enter without the permission of the ambassador. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lived inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years because British police could not enter to arrest him.
Bárcena said that Mexico would take the case to the International Court of Justice “to denounce Ecuador’s responsibility for violations of international law.” She also said Mexican diplomats were only waiting for the Ecuadorian government to offer the necessary guarantees for their return home.
Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry and Ecuador’s Ministry of the Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has memoir coming
Headline Legal News |
2024/04/04 19:50
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Retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has a two-volume memoir coming out this fall, tracking his life from growing up in California to his 30 years on the court, when he cast key votes on landmark cases ranging from abortion to gay marriage to campaign finance.
Simon & Schuster announced Tuesday that Kennedy’s “Life and Law: The Early Years” and “Life and Law: The Court Years” will be published Oct. 1, as a boxed set and in individual editions, each around 320 pages. Kennedy was widely regarded as a moderate conservative who wrote the majority opinion on such closely divided cases as Obergefell v. Hodges, which found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed corporations and other outside entities to spend unlimited money on election campaigns.
“In ‘Life and Law,’ he explains the why’s and how’s of judging,” Simon & Schuster’s announcement reads in part.
“The second volume is filled with moving portraits of Justices O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Ginsburg that go along with the account of how Kennedy decided his views in the landmark cases. But it is the first volume about his youth in Sacramento and his decade as a practicing lawyer that explains the judicial giant. Readers will see the child who turns into the man, who shaped America as much as any Washington figure in the 21st century.”
Kennedy, 87, noted in the preface to the first volume that his memoirs proved more expansive than originally planned.
“It was my intent (my right hand is raised to swear it so) to recount my earlier years in a summary way. But something happened on the way to the pencil,” he wrote. “More and more of my recollections turned to how our society and its mindset changed in fascinating ways from the ’40s and ’50s to the ’60s and then again in the ’70s. This seemed relevant to the dynamics that influenced me and our larger society.”
“As each day passes, we should strive to learn more about who we are and whom we should strive to become,” he added. “Writing a memoir is a formal way to do this.”
Kennedy was an associate justice from 1988-2018 and his arrival and departure proved equally newsworthy.
He was appointed to the court by President Ronald Reagan, but only after the Senate had voted down Reagan’s first choice, Robert Bork, and after the second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew amid reports he had smoked marijuana. When Kennedy announced in 2018 that he was stepping down, President Donald Trump nominated a former Kennedy law clerk, Brett Kavanaugh, who was narrowly approved by the Senate after contentious confirmation hearings that included allegations Kavanaugh had assaulted a high school acquaintance, Christine Blasey Ford.
Kennedy’s book will arrive soon after Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir “Lovely One,” which comes out Sept. 3.
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Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot dating rule is legal under civil rights law
Legal Topics |
2024/03/31 03:49
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A requirement for Pennsylvania voters to put accurate handwritten dates on the outside envelopes of their mail-in ballots does not run afoul of a civil rights law, a federal appeals court panel said Wednesday, overturning a lower court ruling.
A divided 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to uphold enforcement of the required date on return envelopes, a technical mandate that caused thousands of votes to be declared invalid in the 2022 election.
The total number is a small fraction of the large state’s electorate, but the court’s ruling puts additional attention on Pennsylvania’s election procedures ahead of a presidential election in which its Electoral College votes are up for grabs.
A lower court judge had ruled in November that even without the proper dates, mail-in ballots should be counted if they are received in time. U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter said the envelope date is irrelevant in helping elections officials decide whether a ballot was received in time or if a voter is qualified.
In the court’s opinion, Judge Thomas Ambro said the section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that the lower court relied upon does not pertain to ballot-casting rules broadly, such as dates on envelopes, but “is concerned only with the process of determining a voter’s eligibility to cast a ballot.”
“The Pennsylvania General Assembly has decided that mail-in voters must date the declaration on the return envelope of their ballot to make their vote effective,” Ambro wrote. “The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania unanimously held this ballot-casting rule is mandatory; thus, failure to comply renders a ballot invalid under Pennsylvania law.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which helped represent groups and voters who challenged the date mandate, said the ruling could mean thousands of votes won’t be counted over what it called a meaningless error.
“We strongly disagree with the panel majority’s conclusion that voters may be disenfranchised for a minor paperwork error like forgetting to write an irrelevant date on the return envelope of their mail ballot,” Ari Savitzky, a lawyer with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project who argued the appeal, said in a statement. “We are considering all of our options at this time.”
State and national Republican groups defended the date requirement, and the Republican National Committee called the decision a “crucial victory for election integrity and voter confidence.”
In Pennsylvania, Democrats have been far more likely to vote by mail than Republicans under an expansion of mail-in ballots enacted in 2019.
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Former Georgia insurance commissioner John Oxendine pleads guilty
Legal Topics |
2024/03/26 08:50
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A former Georgia insurance commissioner who made a failed Republican run for governor has pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit health care fraud.
John W. Oxendine of Johns Creek entered the guilty plea Friday in federal court in Atlanta. The 61-year-old had been indicted in May 2022 on charges of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The crime is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, but Oxendine is likely to be sentenced to less. Federal sentencing guidelines discussed in the plea agreement suggest prosecutors will recommend Oxendine be imprisoned between 4 years, 3 months, and 5 years, 3 months, depending on what U.S. District Judge Steve Jones decides at a sentencing hearing set for July 12. Jones could also fine Oxendine and order him to serve supervised release.
Oxendine also agreed to pay nearly $700,000 in restitution to health insurers who lost money in the scheme, the plea document states. Prosecutors agreed to dismiss the money laundering charge as part of the plea.
“John Oxendine, as the former statewide insurance commissioner, knew the importance of honest dealings between doctors and insurance companies,” U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan said in a statement. “But for personal profit he willfully conspired with a physician to order hundreds of unnecessary lab tests, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Prosecutors say Oxendine conspired with Dr. Jeffrey Gallups to pressure other physicians who practiced with Gallups to order unnecessary medical tests from Next Health, a lab in Texas. Prosecutors said Oxendine pushed the plan in a September 2015 presentation to doctors who worked for Gallups’ practice.
The lab company, Oxendine and Gallups agreed the company would pay Gallups a kickback of 50% of the profit on the tests, Oxendine’s indictment said. Next Health paid $260,000 in kickbacks through Oxendine’s insurance consulting company, prosecutors said. Oxendine paid a $150,000 charitable contribution and $70,000 in attorney’s fees on Gallups,’ behalf, prosecutors said, keeping $40,000 for himself. Some patients were also charged, getting bills of up to $18,000 for the tests, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Oxendine told Gallups to lie and say the payments from Oxendine were loans when a compliance officer at Gallups’ company asked about them. Oxendine told Gallups to repeat the same lie when questioned by federal agents, prosecutors said. And they said Oxendine falsely said he didn’t work with the lab company or get money from Next Health when interviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. |
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