Kentucky Attorney General files pension brief with top court

Court Watch 2018/09/08 11:53   Bookmark and Share
Kentucky Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear has filed a brief with the state Supreme Court about why he thinks a law changing the public pension system is unconstitutional.

The state legislature passed SB 151 in April. It would require all new teacher hires to be moved into a hybrid pension system. It would also restrict how teachers use sick days to calculate their retirement benefits.

The bill was unpopular with public workers. Beshear, who is running for governor in 2019, sued to block the bill. He says lawmakers did not follow the state Constitution when they passed the bill too quickly.

Republican Gov. Matt Bevin says the law does not violate the state Constitution. The court is scheduled to hear the case on Sept. 20.
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State Supreme Court returns stalking case to lower court

Court Watch 2018/07/21 23:23   Bookmark and Share
The South Dakota Supreme Court says a judge did not adequately explain why a Rapid City woman's Facebook complaints against her neighbor constituted stalking.

The Rapid City Journal reports that a judge in 2016 granted Sarah Thompson's request for a protection order against Wambli Bear Runner over Bear Runner's frequent antagonistic updates against Thompson. The two women had been dating the same man.

One of the posts read, "I'll forever be watching #your enemy unless I get an apology!"

The high court ruled that the circuit court did not show why Bear Runner's comments qualified as stalking. The case has been returned to the lower court.

South Dakota's law against stalking notes harassment can come through verbal, digital, electronic or even telegraphic communication.
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Kavanaugh: Watergate tapes decision may have been wrong

Court Watch 2018/07/20 23:23   Bookmark and Share
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh suggested several years ago that the unanimous high court ruling in 1974 that forced President Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes, leading to the end of his presidency, may have been wrongly decided.

Kavanaugh was taking part in a roundtable discussion with other lawyers when he said at three different points that the decision in U.S. v. Nixon, which marked limits on a president's ability to withhold information needed for a criminal prosecution, may have come out the wrong way.

A 1999 magazine article about the roundtable was part of thousands of pages of documents that Kavanaugh has provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of the confirmation process. The committee released the documents on Saturday.

Kavanaugh's belief in robust executive authority already is front and center in his nomination by President Donald Trump to replace the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. The issue could assume even greater importance if special counsel Robert Mueller seeks to force Trump to testify in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

"But maybe Nixon was wrongly decided — heresy though it is to say so. Nixon took away the power of the president to control information in the executive branch by holding that the courts had power and jurisdiction to order the president to disclose information in response to a subpoena sought by a subordinate executive branch official. That was a huge step with implications to this day that most people do not appreciate sufficiently...Maybe the tension of the time led to an erroneous decision," Kavanaugh said in a transcript of the discussion that was published in the January-February 1999 issue of the Washington Lawyer.

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Georgia officer charged in fatal shooting to appear in court

Court Watch 2018/07/17 15:07   Bookmark and Share
A Georgia police officer charged with voluntary manslaughter in a fatal shooting is scheduled to appear in court.

A pretrial hearing is scheduled Tuesday morning for Zechariah Presley in Camden County Magistrate Court. Presley worked as a police officer in the small city of Kingsland when he was charged in the June 20 shooting of 33-year-old Tony Green.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said Green was fleeing when Presley shot him following a brief altercation. The bureau said Presley had been following Green's vehicle when Green got out and ran on foot, but it has not said what prompted the pursuit.

Kingsland city officials fired 27-year-old Presley from his police job following his arrest a week after the shooting. The city is located near the Georgia-Florida state line.
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Courts finds suspect in neo-Nazi trial guilty of 10 killings

Court Watch 2018/07/14 15:05   Bookmark and Share
A German court on Wednesday found the main defendant in a high-profile neo-Nazi trial guilty over the killing of 10 people - most of them migrants - who were gunned down between 2000 and 2007 in a case that shocked Germany and prompted accusations of institutional racism in the country's security agencies.

Judges sentenced Beate Zschaepe to life in prison for murder, membership of a terrorist organization, bomb attacks that injured dozens and several lesser crimes including a string of robberies. Four men were found guilty of supporting the group in various ways and sentenced to prison terms of between 2½ and 10 years.

Presiding judge Manfred Goetzl told a packed Munich courtroom that Zschaepe's guilt weighed particularly heavily, meaning she is likely to serve at least a 15-year sentence. Her lawyers plan to appeal the verdict.

The 43-year-old showed no emotion as Goetzl read out her sentence. A number of far-right activists attending the trial clapped when one the co-accused, Andre Eminger, received a lower sentence than expected.

Zschaepe was arrested in 2011, shortly after her two accomplices were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. Together with the men, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, she had formed the National Socialist Underground, a group that pursued an ideology of white racial supremacy by targeting migrants, mostly of Turkish origin.

Goetzl said the trio agreed in late 1998 to kill people "for anti-Semitic or other racist motivations" in order to intimidate ethnic minorities and portray the state as impotent.

They planned to wait until they had committed a series of killings before revealing their responsibility, in order to increase the public impact of their crimes.
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Trump admin. asks high court to halt sanctuary cities ruling

Court Watch 2018/06/19 10:23   Bookmark and Share
The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow it to largely implement a policy of withholding public safety grants from "sanctuary cities" that refuse to cooperate with President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement policies.

The Trump administration filed a brief Monday asking Justice Elena Kagan to limit a lower court ruling against the administration to Chicago, which sued. A three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the government in April, keeping in place a lower court's nationwide ruling preventing the Trump administration from implementing its grant requirements.

The administration wants the ruling narrowed to Chicago as the case proceeds before the entire appeals court and possibly to the Supreme Court. Nationwide rulings by individual federal judges have been a recurring frustration for the administration.

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