|
|
|
Judge weighs Missouri GOP dispute over estimated cost of allowing abortions
Top Legal News |
2023/06/20 18:09
|
Two top Republican state officials argued Wednesday over how much it would cost Missouri to restore the right to abortion, with the state attorney general insisting that the figure should account for lost revenue that wouldn’t be collected from people who otherwise would be born.
The issue came up during a trial over a proposed ballot measure that would let voters decide in 2024 whether to amend the state constitution to guarantee abortion rights.
Abortions were almost completely banned in Missouri following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. There are exceptions for medical emergencies, but not for cases of rape or incest.
Supporters are trying to put a proposed amendment before voters next year that would protect abortion rights and pregnant women, as well as access to birth control.
But the effort stalled in April because of a spat between Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick and newly appointed Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who argues that the cost could be far greater than what his Republican peer estimated.
ACLU of Missouri lawyer Tony Rothert told Beetem on Wednesday that his clients at the abortion rights campaign are stuck in limbo because the two officeholders are at an impasse, and that the campaign can’t begin collecting voter signatures without an official fiscal note.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Federal court sides with lobster fishers in whale protection case
Top Legal News |
2023/06/16 03:29
|
A federal appeals court has sided with commercial fishermen who say proposed restrictions aimed at saving a vanishing species of whale could put them out of business.
The fishermen harvest lobsters and crabs off New England and oppose tough new restrictions on the way they fish that are intended to protect the North Atlantic right whale. The whale numbers only about 340 in the world and it’s vulnerable to lethal entanglement in fishing gear.
The fishermen and the state of Maine appealed their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit after losing in a lower court. The appeals court said Friday it disagreed with the lower court’s ruling.
The appeals court ruling could mean that the federal government must take another stab at crafting new rules to protect the whales. The restrictions would limit where lobster fishers can fish and what kind of gear they can use to try to prevent the whales from becoming entangled in fishing ropes.
The changes would represent a potential worst-case scenario for the lobster fishing industry, wrote Douglas H. Ginsburg, the senior judge of the appeals court, in Friday’s ruling.
“The result may be great physical and human capital destroyed, and thousands of jobs lost, with all the degradation that attends such dislocations,” Ginsburg wrote.
The fishers sued the National Marine Fisheries Service, an arm of the federal government. The service declined to comment on the lawsuit. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Biden and GOP rush to finalize debt ceiling deal, shore up support to prevent default
Top Legal News |
2023/06/02 19:21
|
A federal appeals court in a rare move overturned the death sentence of a man who was convicted of robbing and killing two people in Fresno in 1988, saying prosecutors knowingly presented false testimony from a key witness.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in its Wednesday ruling upheld Colin Dickey’s robbery conviction and said prosecutors could decide whether to retry him for murder. Dickey remains in prison.
“This is an exceptional case in which the prosecutor deliberately elicited, and then failed to correct, false and misleading testimony from the State’s star witness,” the court said in a ruling overturning Dickey’s 1991 death sentence.
The Fresno County prosecutor elicited the testimony from key witness Gene Buchanan, who told the jury he had not met with prosecutors or accepted any benefits from them. In fact, the court said, they had met a dozen times during the investigation, and the district attorney’s office had dismissed drug charges against him and helped him collect a $5,000 reward for implicating Dickey, one of his roommates.
Dickey was convicted in the murders of two neighbors, Marie Caton, 76, and Louis Freiri, 67, who were beaten and stabbed to death in November 1988 at Caton’s home in Fresno, where Freiri was a boarder, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Both Dickey and Buchanan lived with Caton’s grandson, Richard Cullumber, who according to witnesses was a drug user who frequently requested money from Caton. Five days after the attack, the court said, Cullumber fled police in a car, said he had “killed a woman,” was cornered after a high-speed chase and shot himself to death.
According to another roommate, Dickey said he had gone to Caton’s house with Cullumber to help him get the money but had nothing to do with the killings. But Buchanan testified that Dickey told him he was at the scene of the attacks, saw Freiri lying with his head slumped down, and decided that “if you kill one you might as well kill them both.”
Buchanan’s testimony “was the centerpiece of the state’s case” and without his dubious statements, “the state’s case against Dickey was weak” and lacked any direct evidence of intent to kill, Judge Morgan Christen said in the 3-0 ruling. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Supreme Court skeptical of man who offered adult adoptions
Top Legal News |
2023/03/28 21:43
|
The Supreme Court seemed inclined Monday to rule against a man convicted of violating immigration law for offering adult adoptions he falsely claimed would lead to citizenship.
Attorneys for Helaman Hansen told the justices during approximately 90 minutes of arguments that the law he was convicted of violating was too broad. But the court’s conservative majority in particular seemed willing to side with the government and conclude that it is not.
Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that the law “has been on the books for 70 years” without some of the issues Hansen’s lawyers worried about. He also expressed no sympathy for Hansen himself, who he said was “taking advantage of very vulnerable people.”
“He had every intent in the world to keep these people here to take their money with no prospect they’d ever” actually get citizenship, Gorsuch said.
The case involves a section of federal immigration law that says a person such as Hansen who “encourages or induces” a non-citizen to come to or remain in the United States illegally can be punished by up to five years in prison. That’s increased to up to 10 years if the person doing the encouraging is doing so for their own financial gain.
The federal government says that from 2012 to 2016 Hansen — who lived in Elk Grove, California, near Sacramento — deceived hundreds of non-citizens into believing that he could guarantee them a path to citizenship through adult adoption.
Based on Hansen’s promises, officials say, people either came to or stayed in the United States in violation of the law, even though Hansen knew that the adult adoptions he was arranging would not lead to citizenship. The government says at least 471 people paid him between $550 and $10,000 and that in total he collected more than $1.8 million.
Hansen was ultimately convicted of encouragement charges as well as fraud charges. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the encouragement charges and another 20 years on the fraud charges. But a federal appeals court ruled that the law on encouragement is overbroad and violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment and overturned just those convictions.
The court’s three liberal justices seemed more concerned about the reach of the law. Justice Elena Kagan asked “what happens to all the cases” where a lawyer, doctor, neighbor, friend or teacher “says to a non-citizen: ‘I really think you should stay.’” Kagan wanted to know whether those people could or would be prosecuted under the law. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Egypt hands out life jail terms in trial over 2019 protests
Top Legal News |
2023/01/16 21:51
|
An Egyptian court on Sunday handed down life prison sentences to 38 people, including a self-exiled businessman whose social media posts helped to spark anti-government protests.
Public protests are rare in Egypt where President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi has overseen a wide-ranging crackdown on dissent. But a series of video and other social media posts by Egyptian businessman Mohamed Ali, who now lives in Spain, led to scattered street demonstrations in September 2019 over allegations of corruption and other issues.
Twenty-three of those who got life terms were tried in absentia, including Ali, according to an Egyptian criminal court handling terrorism-related cases.
The court also sentenced 44 others including children to terms ranging from five to 15 years in prison over the same charges. Twenty-one were acquitted, according to defense lawyer Ossama Badawi.
Those sentenced were convicted of a set of charges that included inciting violence against security forces and state institutions. The case stemmed from the 2019 protests in the port city of Suez that sits at the mouth of the Suez Canal.
Authorities arrested hundreds of people at the time in Cairo and across the country. Many were released but others were referred to trials.
Rights groups have repeatedly criticized such mass sentencings in Egypt and called on authorities to ensure fair trials.
Egypt’s government has in recent years jailed thousands of people, mainly Islamists, but also secular activists involved in the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Indiana Democrats pin legislative gains on abortion debate
Top Legal News |
2022/11/03 20:57
|
Even before Republican legislators this summer made Indiana the first state to pass an abortion ban since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats started urging angry voters to take their revenge at the ballot box.
Indiana Democrats haven’t let up on that push in the final days of this year’s elections, although a limited number of competitive races on the Nov. 8 ballot for the currently Republican-dominated Legislature leave them with slim chances of being able to do much about abortion access that is also being debated during campaigns across the country.
Indiana Republicans, meanwhile, argue that voters are more worried about other issues such as inflation and crime — concerns widely believed to favor the GOP.
Democratic candidate Joey Mayer said the abortion ban has remained a top issue as she’s talked with voters in a northern Indianapolis suburban district where she’s challenging a four-term Republican House member who voted in favor of the ban when it passed in August.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Court rejects appeal to give American Samoans citizenship
Top Legal News |
2022/10/17 19:04
|
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal seeking to give people born in American Samoa U.S. citizenship.
In leaving in place an appeals court decision, the court also passed up an invitation to overturn a series of decisions dating back to 1901 known as the Insular Cases, replete with racist and anti-foreign rhetoric. Justice Neil Gorsuch had called for the cases to be overturned in April.
But the justices refused to take up an appeal from people born in American Samoa, and living in Utah, who argued that a federal law declaring that they are “nationals, but not citizens, of the United States at birth” is unconstitutional.
A trial judge in Utah ruled in their favor, but the federal appeals court in Denver said Congress, not courts, should decide the citizenship issue. The appeals court also noted that American Samoa’s elected leaders opposed the lawsuit for fear that it might disrupt their cultural traditions.
American Samoa is the only unincorporated territory of the United States where the inhabitants are not American citizens at birth.
Instead, those born in the cluster of islands some 2,600 miles (4,184 kilometers) southwest of Hawaii are granted “U.S. national” status, meaning they can’t vote for U.S. president, run for office outside American Samoa or apply for certain jobs. The only federal election they can cast a vote in is the race for American Samoa’s nonvoting U.S. House seat.
The Insular Cases, which arose following the Spanish-American War, dealt with the administration of overseas territories.
In their conclusion that residents of territories had some, but not all, rights under the Constitution, justices wrote in stark racial and xenophobic terms. Citizenship could not be automatically given to “those absolutely unfit to receive it,” one justice wrote.
That history prompted Gorsuch to comment in a case involving benefits denied to people who live in Puerto Rico, decided in April. He wrote that the Insular Cases were wrongly decided because they deprived residents of U.S. territories of some constitutional rights.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Legal News RSS Feed
