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Court seems reluctant to block state bans on medical treatments for minors
Legal News |
2024/12/04 12:02
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Hearing a high-profile culture-war clash, a majority of the Supreme Court seemed reluctant Wednesday to block Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
The justices’ decision, not expected for several months, could affect similar laws enacted by another 25 states and a range of other efforts to regulate the lives of transgender people, including which sports competitions they can join and which bathrooms they can use.
The case is coming before a conservative-dominated court after a presidential election in which Donald Trump and his allies promised to roll back protections for transgender people.
In arguments that passed the two-hour mark Wednesday, five conservative justices voiced varying degrees of skepticism of arguments made by the Biden administration and lawyers for Tennessee families challenging the ban.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted in the majority in a 2020 case in favor of transgender rights, questioned whether judges, rather than lawmakers, should be weighing in on a question of regulating medical procedures, an area usually left to the states.
”The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Roberts said in an exchange with ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio.
The court’s three liberal justices seem firmly on the side of the challengers. But it’s not clear that any of the court’s six conservatives will go along. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion in 2020, has yet to say anything.
Four years ago, the court ruled in favor of Aimee Stephens, who was fired by a Michigan funeral home after she informed its owner that she was a transgender woman. The court held that transgender people, as well as gay and lesbian people, are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace.
The Biden administration and the families and health care providers who challenged the Tennessee law are urging the justices to apply the same sort of analysis that the majority, made up of liberal and conservative justices, embraced in the case four years ago when it found that “sex plays an unmistakable role” in employers’ decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate.
The issue in the Tennessee case is whether the law violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same.
Tennessee’s law bans puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors, but not “across the board,” lawyers for the families wrote in their Supreme Court brief. The lead lawyer, Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union, is the first openly transgender person to argue in front of the justices. |
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Supreme Court grapples with governor’s 400-year veto, calling it ‘crazy’
Legal News |
2024/10/12 11:48
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Justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court said Wednesday that Gov. Tony Evers’ creative use of his expansive veto power in an attempt to lock in a school funding increase for 400 years appeared to be “extreme” and “crazy” but questioned whether and how it should be reined in.
“It does feel like the sky is the limit, the stratosphere is the limit,” Justice Jill Karofsky said during oral arguments, referring to the governor’s veto powers. “Perhaps today we are at the fork in the road ... I think we’re trying to think should we, today in 2024, start to look at this differently.”
The case, supported by the Republican-controlled Legislature, is the latest flashpoint in a decades-long fight over just how broad Wisconsin’s governor’s partial veto powers should be. The issue has crossed party lines, with Republicans and Democrats pushing for more limitations on the governor’s veto over the years.
In this case, Evers made the veto in question in 2023. His partial veto increased how much revenue K-12 public schools can raise per student by $325 a year until 2425. Evers took language that originally applied the $325 increase for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years and instead vetoed the “20” and the hyphen to make the end date 2425, more than four centuries from now.
“The veto here approaches the absurd and exceeds any reasonable understanding of legislative or voter intent in adopting the partial veto or subsequent limits,” attorneys for legal scholar Richard Briffault, of Columbia Law School, said in a filing with the court ahead of arguments.
That argument was cited throughout the oral arguments by justices and Scott Rosenow, attorney for Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce Litigation Center, which handles lawsuits for the state’s largest business lobbying group and brought the case.
The court should strike down Evers’ partial veto and declare that the state constitution forbids the governor from striking digits to create a new year or to remove language to create a longer duration than the one approved by the Legislature, Rosenow argued.
Finding otherwise would give governors unlimited power to alter numbers in a budget bill, Rosenow argued.
Justices appeared to agree that limits were needed, but they grappled with where to draw the line.
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Hearing in Karen Read case expected to focus on jury deliberations
Legal News |
2024/08/09 13:14
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nse attorneys for Karen Read are expected to argue Friday that two charges in the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend be dismissed, focusing on the jury deliberations that led to a mistrial.
Read is accused of ramming into John O’Keefe with her SUV and leaving him for dead in a snowstorm in January 2022. Her two-month trial ended when jurors declared they were hopelessly deadlocked and a judge declared a mistrial on the fifth day of deliberations. A new trial is set to begin Jan. 27.
In several motions since the mistrial, the defense contends four jurors have said the jury unanimously reached a not guilty verdict on second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a deadly accident and were deadlocked on the remaining manslaughter charge. Trying her again on those two charges would be unconstitutional double jeopardy, they said.
They also reported that one juror told them “no one thought she hit him on purpose or even thought she hit him on purpose.”
The defense also argues Judge Beverly Cannone abruptly announced the mistrial without questioning jurors about where they stood on each of the three charges Read faced and without giving lawyers for either side a chance to comment.
Prosecutors described the defense’s request to drop charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a deadly accident as an “unsubstantiated but sensational post-trial claim” based on “hearsay, conjecture and legally inappropriate reliance as to the substance of jury deliberations.”
But in another motion, prosecutors acknowledged they received a voicemail from someone who identified themselves as a juror and confirmed the jury had reached a unanimous decision on the two charges. Subsequently, they received emails from three individuals who also identified themselves as jurors and wanted to speak to them anonymously.
Prosecutors said they responded by telling the trio that they welcomed discussing the state’s evidence in the case but were “ethically prohibited from inquiring as to the substance of your jury deliberations.” They also said they could not promise confidentiality.
As they push against a retrial, the defense wants the judge to hold a “post-verdict inquiry” and question all 12 jurors if necessary to establish the record they say should have been created before the mistrial was declared, showing jurors “unanimously acquitted the defendant of two of the three charges against her.”
Prosecutors argued the defense was given a chance to respond and, after one note from the jury indicating it was deadlocked, told the court there had been sufficient time and advocated for the jury to be declared deadlocked. Prosecutors wanted deliberations to continue, which they did before a mistrial was declared the following day.
“Contrary to the representation made in the defendant’s motion and supporting affidavits, the defendant advocated for and consented to a mistrial, as she had adequate opportunities to object and instead remained silent which removes any double jeopardy bar to retrial,” prosecutors wrote in their motion.
Read, a former adjunct professor at Bentley College, had been out drinking with O’Keefe, a 16-year member of the Boston police who was found outside the Canton, Massachusetts, home of another Boston police officer. An autopsy found O’Keefe died of hypothermia and blunt force trauma.
The defense contended O’Keefe was killed inside the home after Read dropped him off and that those involved chose to frame her because she was a “convenient outsider.” |
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Court filings provide additional details of the US’ first nitrogen gas execution
Legal News |
2024/08/01 21:57
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A corrections officer who helped carry out the nation’s first nitrogen gas execution said in a court document that the inmate had normal blood oxygen levels for longer than he expected before the numbers suddenly plummeted.
Another court document indicated that the nitrogen gas was flowing for at least 10 minutes during the execution. The documents filed last month in ongoing litigation provided additional details of the execution of Kenneth Smith, who was the first person put to death using nitrogen gas.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office maintains the high oxygen readings indicate that Smith held his breath as the nitrogen gas flowed, causing the execution to take longer than expected. But attorneys for another inmate said the state has no proof to back up that claim and is trying to “explain away” an execution that went horribly awry.
As the state of Alabama plans additional nitrogen gas executions, questions and disagreements continue over what happened at the first one. A federal judge on Tuesday will hear arguments in a request to block the state from executing Alan Miller by nitrogen gas in September in what would be the nation’s second nitrogen execution.
Media witnesses to Smith’s execution, including The Associated Press, said that Smith shook on the gurney for several minutes before taking a series of gasping breaths. Alabama had assured a federal judge before the execution that the new execution method would quickly cause unconsciousness and death.
A pulse oximeter showed that Smith had oxygen levels of 97% to 98% for a “period of time that was longer than I had expected,” the corrections captain said in a sworn statement. The corrections captain said he did not observe Smith make any violent or convulsive movements, but he did tense up and raise his body off the gurney. After “he released a deep breath,” the oxygen levels began dropping, the corrections captain said.
“The best explanation of the testimony is that Smith held his breath and lost consciousness when he breathed nitrogen gas — not that the mask did not fit or that the nitrogen was impure,” the Alabama attorney general’s office wrote in a court filing.
Attorneys for Miller responded that the state has no evidence to back up that claim and said it would be impossible for someone to hold their breath for as long as the execution took. Instead, they suggested other problems with the mask accounted for the delay.
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