Do You Have the Right Not To Be Framed?
The Supreme Court hears oral argument today in Pottawattamie County v McGee, wherein they will have to decide if prosecutors have immunity from lawsuits even if they frame someone for murder. On one side of the case being argued are Iowa prosecutors who contend "there is no freestanding right not to be framed." They are backed by the Obama administration, 28 ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 4, 2009 12:59
Prosecutors Investigate Innocence Project Students
A rather bizarre case in Illinois -- even by the standards of that state. For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release of 11 inmates, the project’s director ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 26, 2009 08:51
McConnell: No Retalliation
Olympia Snowe and other wayward Republicans will be subject to strong persuasion but no punishment from the caucus, Senate Republican leaders tell Politico. [caption id="attachment_42848" align="alignright" width="297" caption="Mitch McConnell and his deputies in the Senate Republican leadership are responding very cautiously to Olympia Snowe's decision to become the first GOP vote for a Democratic health care reform bill. Photo: AP ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 15, 2009 07:49
77% Oklahoma High School Students Can’t Name 1st President?
A recent survey of Oklahoma public high school students found that the overwhelming majority can't answer even simple questions about U.S. government and history. A thousand students were given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens. About 92 percent of the people ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 18, 2009 07:19
Sotomayor: Overturn Corporate Personhood
It appears that Sonia Sotomayor will be an activist judge after all. During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled. But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 17, 2009 09:48
Supreme Court May Overturn Campaign Finance Laws
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could overturn two recent precedents allowing the restriction of political speech by corporations for the purpose of curbing the appearance of undue influence. There's an excellent chance they will do so. [caption id="attachment_41594" align="alignright" width="350" caption="Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., left, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. have backed challenges to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 8, 2009 08:50
Innocent Person’s Right Not to Be Executed
Though I follow a number of lawblogs, I missed a rather interesting Supreme Court decision until reading about it on the blog of entrepreneur Mark Cuban. For reasons understandable to those who follow Cuban, he has a Google alert for "prosecutorial misconduct," which yields more results than one would like. It led him to Michael Dorf's FindLaw essay "Did ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 28, 2009 10:12
Maryland Furloughs Unconstitutional
Apropos my previous post about the Chicago public employee furlough, Aaron Brazell tweets about a Maryland judge ruling that state furloughs violate the U.S. Constitution. He links to a WaPo recap: A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Prince George's County violated the U.S. Constitution when it furloughed 5,900 workers in the last fiscal year, a decision that could force the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 19, 2009 14:35
Bob Dylan Arrested for Walking
Bob Dylan was on the pavement, thinking about the government. And they arrested him. Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood. Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 16, 2009 08:34
Hal Turner and the Limits of Free Speech
How far does the 1st Amendment go? Hal Turner is about to find out. [caption id="attachment_40787" align="alignright" width="496" caption="Hal Turner, an Internet radio host and blogger, posted photos of the three judges who displeased him and a map of the courthouse where they work. (By Jessica Hill -- Associated Press) "][/caption] Internet radio host Hal Turner disliked how three federal judges rejected ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 16, 2009 06:44
Elections Don’t End Debate
While I share Michael Tomasky's disdain for people carrying signs about "the blood of tyrants" while protesting democratically elected leaders, he goes too far here: There was an election. One guy one, another guy lost. It wasn't disputed. It wasn't decided by an ideologically divided Supreme Court, which gave the win to the guy who won fewer votes. This election wasn't ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 13, 2009 09:19
Are Americans Stupid?
Bill Maher has a piece at HuffPo arguing that Americans are a bunch of idiots who should just shut up and let people who know what they're talking about make decisions on tough issues like health care reform. [T]ake the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 8, 2009 08:11
Is the Filibuster Unconstitutional?
Matt Yglesias cites a 15-year-old essay by Hendrick Hertzberg arguing that the filibuster is unconstitutional: It’s true that the framers did not specify that the Senate would do its normal business by simple majority vote, but that’s because it didn’t occur to them that they had to specify it, any more than it occurred to them to specify that senators should ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 6, 2009 11:58
Federalism and Democracy
Continuing a long-running theme at his blog, Matt Yglesias laments that Senators from small states wield so much power. The latest fuel is a NYT feature on six moderates who are supposedly the linchpins to putting together a bipartisan health care deal and who routinely hash out the details of same over snacks. [V]ast power is being wielded by people who, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 28, 2009 14:37
Sotomayor and Affirmative Action
Julian Sanchez argues that, while Sonia Sotomayor was given special consideration because she's a Latina at various stages in her life, her case is "pretty close to the ideal of how affirmative action is supposed to work." From a pool of highly qualified candidates, you let ethnicity act as a tiebreaker. It seems self-evident to me that John Smith with Sonia ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 18, 2009 07:54
