Although the Supreme Court issued the two most important opinions of the term last week, upending near 50-year-old precedent on abortion and expanding gun rights for the first time in a decade, this blockbuster term is not over.
Still to be decided are seven disputes, and new opinions will be announced Monday morning.
A look at what remains:
Continue reading “The remaining Supreme Court cases this term”
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem on Sunday said her state will prosecute doctors who perform abortions and will work to restrict women’s access to abortion pills.
South Dakota is among 10 states with “trigger laws” that declared abortion a criminal offense immediately upon the US Supreme Court’s decision Friday to strike down the 1973 Roe v. Wade case that established a women’s right to have the procedure.
Continue reading “South Dakota will prosecute abortion docs and restrict access to pills: Gov. Noem”
South Dakota’s Republican-controlled state senate voted to impeach Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg on Tuesday. The affirmative votes on the two articles of impeachment before the state’s upper chamber automatically remove the state’s embattled attorney general from office, according to The Associated Press.
The majority of Mount Rushmore State senators agreed that Ravnsborg caused a death, misled law enforcement, and abused the powers of his office, the AP continued.
The vote required a two-thirds majority.
Continue reading “South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg Removed from Office”
On June 17, 2021, President Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth, a Texas-based commemoration of the last group of slaves learning in 1865 that slavery had ended, a federal holiday. It was an ambivalent accomplishment, representing a tardy response to the racial-justice protests of 2020 and the payment of an overdue debt that Biden in particular, and Democrats generally, owed to Black voters. There were already signs that the “racial-justice summer” wave had crested, and the holiday’s embrace by corporations and the federal government would be a hollow gesture. The holiday’s “mix of low risk and low cost has made it an appealing virtue signal,” my colleague Zak Cheney-Rice argued at the time.
Continue reading “Juneteenth and America’s Racial-Justice Backslide”
The Drone Act of 2022 would set new federal penalties for drone operators who weaponize drones, disrupt emergency operations or use the technology to deliver contraband into prisons.
Continue reading “New Bill Sets Federal Penalties For Drone Misuse”
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that the Department of Justice’s investigation into the law enforcement response to the elementary school shooting in Uvalde won’t be criminal in nature.
Garland described the federal investigation as a “critical incident review,” which was done after other mass shootings such as in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando, Florida. The review will assess the law enforcement response and “give guidance for the future,” Garland said. The department will then produce a public report, which will include the investigation’s findings and recommendations.
Continue reading “Uvalde shooting: investigation into response won’t be criminal, DOJ says”
The North Shore Limited departed Manhattan at 4:50 each afternoon in 1891. A swirl of steam and soot enveloped the crowds on the platform. The cacophony and oppressive heat were the same for the woman who had packed her meager possessions in a tenement on the Lower East Side and the one who had directed her maid to prepare her trunks in the parlor of a Fifth Avenue mansion. But the well- to-do booked tickets for a Wagner Palace Car, a serene mahogany and brocade escape from the overflowing second-class and dismal third-class options. A woman of means traveling alone booked four seats across two upholstered benches, an expensive but necessary signal of her propriety.
Before sunset on the second day, the train arrived in Chicago. It was not unusual to see a lady disembark alone in Great Central Depot, a fire-scarred structure that could not rival its grand New York counterpart. But for a few, their destination was still farther west. After an overnight stay in Chicago, they boarded the Illinois Central, speeding across the prairie toward the setting sun. As the train approached its final destination in the early hours of the next day, those on board became watchful, casting sidelong glances at any unfamiliar woman not accompanied by a man. For her, there could be only one reason to undertake this 1,500-mile trip: She had come to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for a divorce.
Continue reading “Divorce: At the turn of the 20th century, the US had differing state laws.”
Throughout the U.S., judges, prosecutors, and parole boards are given algorithms to guide life-altering decisions about the liberty of the people before them, based mainly on perceived risks to “public safety.” At the same time, people accused and convicted of crimes are given little support. With underfunded public defense in most of these contexts, and no right to counsel in others (e.g., in parole decisions), the system is stacked against them. We wanted to find out what would happen if we flipped the script and used algorithms to benefit people entangled in the legal system, rather than those who wield power against them.
In a recent peer-reviewed study, the ACLU and collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pennsylvania asked a simple question: Can one predict the risk of the criminal justice system to the people accused by it, instead of the risks posed by the people themselves?
The answer seems to be yes, and the process of creating a tool like this helps lay bare broader issues in the logic of existing risk assessment tools. While traditional risk assessment tools consider risks to the public such as the likelihood of reoffending, the criminal legal system itself poses a host of risks to the people ensnared in it, many of which extend to their families and communities and have long-term repercussions. These include being denied pretrial release, receiving a sentence disproportionately lengthy for the given conviction, being wrongfully convicted, being saddled with a record that makes it impossible to obtain housing or employment, and more.
Read the full story at ACLU.
The First Step Act (FSA), which among other things, provided federal prisoners a way to effectively lower their prison terms through participation in programs and productive activities. The law, signed by President Donald Trump in December 2018, meant that some prisoners could reduce their prison terms by up to one year. However, the rollout of the program has resulted in men and women remaining in prison well beyond what their release dates would be under FSA.
When the Federal Register published the final FSA rule on January 19, 2022, it also included comments from congressmen who expressed the need for clarity of the law. One such comment was “The Bureau does not have the resources to implement the FSA Time Credits program appropriately.” Over four months since that statement, it has proven to be true.
According to insiders at the BOP, prisoners and former executive staff with connections to the current state of the BOP as it relates to the FSA, there is “mass confusion at every institution,” and that the Designation and Sentence Computation Center, the entity ultimately responsible for calculating sentence duration, is backed up and the programming is not in place for FSA. The result is that thousands of prisoners are incarcerated beyond their legal release date.
Read the full story at Forbes.
For all who gave their yesterdays, a thank you today – on this Memorial Day!