What To Watch Out For In The Supreme Court’s Big Remaining Cases

The Supreme Court is in the home stretch. There are just three days left in this term — Wednesday, Thursday and next Monday — when the justices are scheduled to hand down opinions. Until these cases are decided, however, the fate of women seeking reproductive care, workers and their unions, criminal suspects with cell phones and a president thwarted by a recalcitrant Senate remain uncertain. Here’s a few things to watch out for in seven of the biggest cases that are still pending before the Court:

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LAPD disconnect isn't good for police or the public

For 12 years, in the aftermath of the Rampart corruption scandal, the Los Angeles Police Department operated under a federal consent decree that forced major changes on the long-troubled, much-criticized department. The LAPD was overseen by outsiders, its decisions second-guessed by judges and monitors because it couldn't be trusted to govern itself. Only after a long list of wide-ranging reforms was instituted was the federal order finally lifted in 2013. Among the final requirements was the installation of in-car video cameras and voice-monitoring equipment to record encounters between police and the public.

So naturally it comes as a grave disappointment, if not exactly a shock, to learn just a year later that some LAPD officers tampered with many of those devices in an apparent effort to render them ineffective. The department needs to figure out how that was allowed to happen, and must take strong actions to ensure that nothing like it happens again. Officers must be made to understand that sabotage will not be tolerated, and that the department's leaders intend to continue on the road to enlightened, reformed policing.

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This is an LATimes editorial. Tom

DOJ Investigation Confirms: Albuquerque Police 'Executing' Citizens

Residents of Albuquerque, New Mexico are marching on the police department Saturday to demand retribution against the city's mayor and police chief for their role in the police force's documented "execution" of citizens.

The march comes after the Department of Justice slammed the Albuquerque Police Department for their frequent use of excessive and lethal force in a damning report released on Thursday.

Though, according to advocates, abuse by local law enforcement has been systemic for years, calls for increased scrutiny of the APD were amplified following the police shooting death of James Boyd, a homeless man suffering from mental illness, on March 16.

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How U.S. Law Enforcement Uses 50,000 Volts Of Electricity To Keep Defendants In Line

When Jonathan Keith Jackson was sentenced to death, he stood before the jury wearing an electronic shock device around his waist that could have thrown him writhing to the floor at any moment.

The California Supreme Court upheld the use of what is known as a stun belt during his sentencing Monday, reasoning that even if the trial judge were wrong to equip Jackson with the remote controlled shock belt, it was not critical to the jury’s sentencing decision.

But the ruling came over the strong objections of Justice Goodwin Liu, who noted findings entirely ignored by the majority that the fear imposed by the belt can change the defendant’s ability to function, communicate, and his demeanor during testimony.

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The GOP’s Attack on Basic Rights Continues

All those rights Americans cherish, those fundamental human and political freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution, Republicans contend those aren’t really inalienable rights or anything solid or permanent like that.

See, according to the GOP, some Americans are sub-citizens who don’t deserve rights equal to those enjoyed by, well, the right-wing. Republicans think they’re right, and anyone who disagrees doesn’t deserve rights.

Republicans managed to highlight that perverse plank in their political platform over the past several weeks as they proposed—and sometimes actually passed—legislation limiting the fundamental rights of specific groups of American citizens. That includes gay Americans, African-Americans, and Americans who are members of labor unions. Right-wingers sought to seize from these Americans their rights to vote, protest and live free from discrimination.

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College and university women sign open letter in support of Anne-Marie Roy: 'rape culture is pervasive'

International Women’s Day
We stand with Anne-Marie Roy. We’ve been there too.

As women who have held elected positions at our college or university students’ union, we write in solidarity with Anne-Marie Roy, the President of the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO). Anne-Marie was recently the target of sexually violent comments made by several men who held elected positions at the University of Ottawa. Several of these men initially threatened to sue Anne-Marie if she was not quiet about the disgusting comments.

Anne-Marie has bravely chosen to not be intimidated, to make the comments public and to speak out. As women who have held positions similar to Anne-Marie’s, and who have also dealt with sexism and misogyny while elected, we know that we must as well.

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The modern return of Vagrancy Law

by Joe Hermer

The crime of 'being suspicious' seems to be making a return as the state seems ever more keen to police the poor and vulnerable. The recent case of 'stolen food' from Iceland is a perfect example.

The abandoned prosecution against three men for ‘skipping’ food from an Iceland grocery bin in North London last month caused public outrage and disbelief. A recurring feature of this story was that the men were charged under an ‘archaic’ and ‘obscure’ section of the Vagrancy Act 1824. The impression left by the media was that the current vagrancy law is a rarely used relic of Victorian times.

To present vagrancy law today to as ‘archaic’ and quaint statute makes invisible one of the most important but least understood police powers concerning poor people. In a series of complex maneuvers embedded within the leviathan like reforms to fight crime and disorder, the powers of the 1824 Vagrancy Act have been resuscitated in a way that has not been seen for more than a century. Indeed, the 1824 Vagrancy law has been re-purposed over the last decade as a truly modern tool to police poor, vulnerable and ‘suspicious’ people in public spaces.

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Memo to a Federal Judge on Civil Disobedience

We’ve reached a surreal mile marker on the road to Orwell Land. When a federal judge sentences an 84-year-old nun to prison, on behalf of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”, and then advises us to have more faith in the system, it’s time to get off that damn road.
Ralph Hutchison . . .

We’ve heard it from the bench in Oak Ridge city courtrooms and from state judges in Clinton, Tennessee. And on February 18 we heard it from a federal judge—there are two variations. The first: There are plenty of ways for you to protest and deliver your message without breaking the law. The second: If you people would just put this time and energy into working for the change you want in the political system, you might get the change you seek.
Both sentiments are either disingenuous or naïve.

But we’re expected to heed the advice of those judges and be grateful that they’ve shared their wisdom with us.
We should have more faith in the system, Judge Thapar?

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On the Detention of David Miranda

A lower U.K. court Wednesday upheld the legality of the nine-hour detention of NSA investigator Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, under the Terrorism Act of 2000, and refused permission to appeal the decision. Greenwald comments on the outcome at The Intercept.
Greenwald writes:

The UK Government expressly argued that the release of the Snowden documents (which the free world calls “award-winning journalism“) is actually tantamount to “terrorism”, the same theory now being used by the Egyptian military regime to prosecute Al Jazeera journalists as terrorists. Congratulations to the UK government on the illustrious company it is once again keeping. British officials have also repeatedly threatened criminal prosecution of everyone involved in this reporting, including Guardian journalists and editors.

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Stand Your Ground is simply an invitation to more killing, not less crime

Since first-degree murder is apparently legal in Florida as long as the victims are black, it's important to look at the overall impact of the ALEC-funded evil Stand Your Ground laws. The upshot is: more death, more shooting, huge racial disparities in who is killed, and no decrease in crime. Not only do they allow racist killers to get away with murder, they don't provide even the least bit of deterrent to crime. In fact, it's likely quite the opposite:

For any given case, these questions are impossible to answer, and you can make arguments either way. But it is possible to say something more definitive about whether these laws have led to a greater number of total homicides. That is the question my coauthor Cheng Cheng and I addressed in our recent study in the Journal of Human Resources. We asked what happened to homicide rates in states that passed these laws between 2000 and 2010, compared to other states over the same time period. We found that homicide rates in states with a version of the Stand Your Ground law increased by an average of 8 percent over states without it — which translates to roughly 600 additional homicides per year. These homicides are classified by police as criminal homicides, not as justifiable homicides.

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Jury Fails to Convict a Man for Shooting a Teen to Death over Loud Rap Music

 A jury has declared that it could not reach a decision on whether a Florida man, who shot dead a teenager in a dispute over loud music, was guilty of murder or had acted in self defence. 

The judge in Jacksonville declared a mistrial on the first-degree murder charge on Saturday, although the jury convicted Michael Dunn on three lesser counts of second-degree murder, and shooting into an occupied vehicle. Dunn could face a sentence of between 20 and 60 years. 

Dunn, 47, shot Jordan Davis, 17, during the altercation at a Jacksonville gas station in November 2012, sparked by the youth’s refusal to turn off the thumping music blaring from the vehicle he was in with a group of friends. 

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Contempt of cop, America's defiance revolution

Increasingly, and openly, ordinary Americans are committing a legal act that some police nonetheless regard as among the most heinous of all offences: it's called contempt of cop.
 
It's otherwise known as asserting your constitutional rights.

Citizens, feeling empowered, are pointing smartphones, rather than just an accusing finger, at abusive authorities.

Civil libertarians with hidden cameras are challenging the so-called "suspicion-less" roadblocks that police set up to catch lawbreakers. Motorists and others are fighting back in the courts and online against police shakedown rackets on U.S. highways and elsewhere.

Everywhere, it seems, Americans are openly challenging arbitrary behaviour by those in authority.

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Ten Travesties Of Justice In 2013

Every year, stories emerge that serve as a reminder that the American system of justice means injustice for too many, with some receiving little or no punishment for egregious offenses, while others receive harsh or faulty punishment for much less. Here are some of the worst injustices of 2013:

1. An Alabama blogger is still sitting in a jail cell for exercising his First Amendment rights

Blogger Roger Shuler drew the ire of the powers that be when he continued to write about the alleged extramarital affair of a prominent lawyer rumored to be running for Congress. The lawyer and son of former Alabama governor Bob Riley, Robert Riley, Jr., won a temporary restraining order that prohibited Shuler from writing anything about Riley’s alleged extramarital affair and other related stories. The order itself was almost certainly a violation of First Amendment law. But Alabama officials took the dispute a step further when they pursued him for a traffic stop and arrested him for contempt. In spite of advocacy from the ACLU and others, Shuler has now been in a jail cell for two months for his journalism.

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Police Threaten Children Singing Outside House Republican Leaders’ Offices With Arrest

More than 40 youths with the immigration advocacy group Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) have been busy chasing down Congressional members in Washington, D.C. this week, but very few House members have been willing to meet with them. On Thursday, when activists between the ages of six to 15, marched to the Congressional offices of House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), they were threatened with arrest by Capitol police officers for singing.
When activists filed into Cantor’s office, a Congressional aide called on police officers to remove more than a dozen youths who sang as a way to bring about immigration reform. In the video as children sang, “We want reform, we want it now,” an officer showed up to tell them to stop singing or to risk arrest if they did not leave the office.

OFFICER 1: Is anyone planning on getting arrested today or is this all peaceful demonstration? We have to ask you to leave … I appreciate what you’re doing. The congressman can’t meet you right now, so please set it up through email. Please don’t sing again. We have to ask you to leave. Do you guys want to stay in and be subject to arrest or go out? … Do you want to leave now or be subject to arrest if you stay in this room? … Everyone that stays in this room may be arrested.

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Why Do Brits Accept Surveillance?

Think of it as the ‘‘Skyfall’’ session. In a committee room of the House of Commons, the heads of the British secret services appeared on Thursday before a panel of M.P.’s in what might have been a re-enactment of that scene from the latest Bond movie — minus the shootout.

Even without gunfire, it was not short of drama. The mere sight of the heads of Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, along with the director of its listening post, G.C.H.Q., was spectacle enough. This was their first joint appearance in public, addressing a parliamentary intelligence and security committee whose hearings had, until now, always been held behind closed doors. (Indeed, little more than 20 years ago even the names of the intelligence chiefs were a state secret.) 

That fact alone guaranteed coverage on the evening news. Which meant a rare focus on the topic that provided the session’s most electrifying moments: the Edward Snowden affair. Rare because the dominant British reaction to the revelations provided by Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, has been a shrug of indifference. The Guardian helped break the story — that the N.S.A. and G.C.H.Q. (Government Communications Headquarters) have engaged in mass surveillance of American and British citizens online — and has covered it intensely, but the rest of the British media have largely steered clear. In Parliament, a few maverick individuals have raised concerns about civil liberties and privacy. When others have mentioned the subject, it’s mostly been to accuse The Guardian of damaging national security, rather than to ask whether the intelligence agencies have gone too far. 

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Jim Crow II

A history of the fight for voting rights and the movement to restrict them once again.

In 1962, Bernard Lafayette Jr., a slim, erudite, 21-year-old civil rights activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was looking for a new assignment. He’d just finished exams at Nashville’s Fisk University, where he was one of a pioneering group of students who had desegregated Nashville’s lunch counters during the sit-ins and integrated interstate bus travel with the Freedom Rides. During the latter mission, Lafayette was beaten in Birmingham and arrested in Jackson, and he narrowly escaped death when his bus was attacked by white supremacists in Montgomery.

In the summer of 1962, Lafayette visited SNCC’s headquarters in Atlanta. SNCC executive secretary James Forman showed him a large map with tacks in places where the group was active. One place—Selma, Alabama—had a large X over it. SNCC had abandoned the city, Forman told Lafayette, because the organizing work was “too hard.” Only 156 of its 15,000 eligible black residents were registered to vote. “During the past decade,” writes Gary May in Bending Toward Justice, the first history of the Voting Rights Act’s passage in 1965, “only seventy-five blacks—twenty-eight of them college graduates—had tried to register, and all had failed.” Lafayette, one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement, departed for Selma that fall.

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15 years after Matthew Shepard's murder, his mother looks ahead

Every year, the day sneaks on up Judy Shepard to deliver its sucker punch from the past: The 12th of October. The day Matthew died.

"It hits you and you say to yourself: Oh, this is the day," she says. "This is why I feel so terrible."
Fifteen years ago this week, gay college student Matthew Shepard was pistol-whipped and left for dead: unconscious, barely alive, lashed to a jagged wooden fence outside this small prairie city by two men disgusted by his homosexuality. A passerby mistook the diminutive, 105-pound Shepard for a scarecrow — a forlorn and unthinkable image that still haunts a generation of Americans.

Judy Shepard refuses to associate her son with that image or with the date that he died, six days after the attack. Instead, she summons memories of her eldest boy on Dec. 1, his birthday, celebrating his love for politics, languages and the spectacle of the musical "The Phantom of the Opera."

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Matt Gurney: Edmonton’s police owe the public far better than this

Two months ago, an Edmonton Police Services constable, Jack Redlick, was handed a one-year demotion (effectively a $15,000 penalty) for beating a suspect, George Petropolous, he had arrested. Petropolous, a middle-aged man, had been accused of striking his mother during a dispute about money. Redlick and his partner arrested him, and while heading to the police station, pulled off into a high school parking lot. Redlick took Petropolous out of the cruiser, walked him to an isolated part of the schoolground, out of sight of the cruiser, and beat him. During the assault, Petropolous claims that Redlick boasted that this wasn’t the first time he’d administered a little street justice on his own initiative. The charges against Petropolous were later stayed.

None of the above is disputed. Redlick and his partner at first denied the whole thing, but Redlick later recanted and pleaded guilty to discreditable conduct under the Police Act. That included his admission to this conduct in an agreed statement of facts. (His partner is now facing discipline for the attempted coverup.) When handing down the sentence of the one-year demotion, the presiding officer noted that the incident was “extremely serious,” but that there were also several mitigating factors, including the fact that Redlick was suffering from depression (relating to a suspect he shot and killed, but more on that later) and that he had an exemplary service record.

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Noam Chomsky: 'The Foundations of Liberty Are Ripped to Shreds'

The U.S. openly brags about boom times for its drone wars, while casually abandoning our 800 year-old system of due process.

Just driving in this morning I was listening to NPR news. The program opened by announcing, very excitedly, that the drone industry is exploding so fast that colleges are trying to catch up and opening new programs in the engineering schools and so on, and teaching drone technology because that’s what students are dying to study because of the fantastic number of jobs going on.
 
And it’s true. If you look at the public reports, you can imagine what the secret reports are. It’s been known for a couple of years, but we learn more and more that drones, for one thing, are already being given to police departments for surveillance. And they are being designed for every possible purpose. I mean, theoretically, maybe practically, you could have a drone the size of a fly which could be buzzing around over there [points to window] listening to what we’re talking about. And I’d suspect that it won’t be too long before that becomes realistic.

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Academics Join Opposition to Petraeus Professorship, Violent Arrest of Students

Hundreds of professors at the City University of New York and elsewhere are admirably calling for charges to be dropped against six students arrested Tuesday during a protest against former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus. The academics are also calling for Petraeus to resign from his teaching post at CUNY.

A video of an arrest shows a man detained by the NYPD being punched in the back by what appears to be a plainclothes officer:

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