Youthful Sex Offenders
A posting at a blog called Classically Liberal, which apparently covers this topic with some regularity, draws attention to the criminalization of adolescent sex. Not long ago a curious adolescent or child, caught exploring, or playing doctor in the back yard, was given a talking-to, sent to bed early, and warned to not do it again—a warning most heeded for at ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 25, 2009 06:14
Census Worker Lynched in Kentucky
A census worker was found hanged in Kentucky in a bizarre and grisly case. When Bill Sparkman told retired trooper Gilbert Acciardo that he was going door-to-door collecting census data in rural Kentucky, the former cop drew on years of experience for a warning: "Be careful." The 51-year-old Sparkman was found this month hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 24, 2009 09:34
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
Obama: Violating Habeas Corpus Okay When It’s Not At Gitmo
This must be some of that "change" that Obama is always talking about: a change of names, anyway. The Obama administration is putting a new plan in place at Afghanistan’s Bagram air field detention facility to bring indefinite detentions there — a practice viewed as a replication of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility’s more noxious functions — to an end. What ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 15, 2009 10:07
Andrew Sullivan and the Rule of Law
Jonathan Last has somehow obtained a memorandum [PDF], dated yesterday, written by U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings in the matter of Andrew Sullivan, who was caught in a federal park with small amounts of a controlled substance but whom the U.S. Attorney declined to prosecute in the "interests of justice." To wit: Paying the $125 fine would make ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 11, 2009 14:06
Shouting ‘Liar’ in a Crowded Congress
The big news surrounding President Obama's latest heathcare speech is that South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" in response to the claim that illegal immigrants would not be covered under universal coverage: AP ("Obama heckled by GOP during speech to Congress"): The nastiness of August reached from the nation's town halls into the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday as President ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 10, 2009 08:02
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
Fire Chief Shot in Court Over Tickets
Yes, that headline is not an exaggeration. The Chief of the Jericho Fire Department went to court and was shot by the police for disputing two tickets requiring two trips to the court house. JERICHO, Ark. – It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 4, 2009 14:11
Google Patents Web Page Design
Google filed a patent five years ago for its home page design. Yesterday, it was approved. I'm with Valleywag's Ryan Tate: We always thought the page was brain-dead simple, but apparently it's an innovative "graphical user interface." [...] In other words, subject to how the patent is enforced, Google owns the idea of having a giant search box in the middle of the page, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 3, 2009 09:30
Legal Tip of the Day
"If your lawyer's e-mail address ends in hotmail.com, gmail.com, or yahoo.com, find a new lawyer." - Esquire Rule #1033Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 1, 2009 20:13
Jenna Bush and the Meritocracy
Adam Serwer is incensed because he has "a lot of friends who spent a great deal of money, and went into a lot of debt, to learn how to be professional broadcast journalists" who are "now struggling to find work" and yet Jenna Bush Hager now has a job on Today despite having only a few years' teaching experience. As Glenn ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 1, 2009 07:40
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
Texas Executed An Innocent Man
The Chicago Tribune reports that a fire science expert retained by the State of Texas has concluded that there was no evidence of Arson in the December 1991 fire that killed Cameron Todd Willingham's three children. Willingham was convicted of murder and was executed in 2004.In a withering critique, a nationally known fire scientist has told a state ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 26, 2009 12:30
Forcing Pirates to Walk the Plank
The British government has devised a novel solution to dealing with online piracy: Disable the Internet accounts of violators. Broadband providers could be forced to suspend their customers’ accounts under proposals announced on Tuesday by the UK government to tackle internet file-sharing. The proposals mark a hardening of the government’s stance against piracy since the Digital Britain report was published in June, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 25, 2009 11:40
Obama DOJ Investigating Bush CIA
The Obama Justice Department has appointed a criminal prosecutor to look into alleged abuses of the CIA under the Bush administration. [Attorney General Eric] Holder has named longtime prosecutor John H. Durham, who has parachuted into crisis situations for both political parties over three decades, to open an early review of nearly a dozen cases of alleged detainee mistreatment at the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 25, 2009 09:31
