The 9th Circuit rebuffed environmentalists who challenged a logging project in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest, saying it is not the court's job to act as a panel of scientists and order the government to "explain every possible scientific uncertainty."

The full appellate court overturned an injunction granted to the Lands Council and the Wild West Institute, clearing the way for selective logging of 3,829 acres of land as part of the "Mission Brush Project."

Lands Council argued that the U.S. Forest Service violated federal environmental law by failing to explain its scientific analysis of the project's effect on wildlife, especially the flammulated owl, and by not maintaining at least 10 percent old growth throughout the forest.

The court said it took the case en banc "to clarify some of our environmental jurisprudence with respect to our review of the actions of the United States Forest Service."

Judge Smith said Lands Council's arguments "illustrate how, in recent years, our environmental jurisprudence has, at times, shifted away from the appropriate standard of review."

It is not the role of federal courts to tell the Forest Service how to validate its hypotheses on wildlife viability, choose which scientific studies should be used for determining compliance with federal law, and order the agency to explain each scientific uncertainty, Smith said.

The court, concluding that the government has complied with federal law, reversed the halt on selective logging.

The thinning project had been proposed, in part to restore the forests to their historic composition, and to decrease the risks of fires, insects and disease.
 

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) filed papers in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida Monday asking the court to force a Swiss bank to hand over the names of American clients suspected of hiding funds from tax collectors. The DOJ is requesting permission for the Internal Revenue Service to issue "John Doe" summons against UBS to obtain information about unidentified American bank patrons accused of tax fraud. A former UBS banker pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the IRS last month, after he admitted that UBS employees assisted US citizens in hiding approximately $20 billion in taxable assets. IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said:
Today's action sends a strong, unequivocal signal to anyone thinking of short-changing the nation and their fellow citizens by evading the tax laws.

Offshore accounts harbor billions of dollars, and people should take notice that the secrecy surrounding these deals is rapidly fading. The information we would gather from this action would help us detect wealthy individuals who don't pay their taxes as well as provide details about how advisors facilitate this abuse.

Owners of Swiss bank accounts have traditionally enjoyed great privacy, but Swiss banks have recently released information on certain clients. In 2006, the Swiss Justice Ministry granted US investigators access to information about bank accounts of terrorism suspects. Prosecutors in the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia requested the information in a four-year old investigation into money laundering to support terrorist activities. The same year, the Swiss Supreme Court denied a Russian request for the transfer of bank documents to Russia which were relevant to an ongoing investigation into Russian oil giant Yukos.

Immigrants who claimed they were illegally detained at the U.S. border because they wrongfully appeared on the Department of Homeland Security's watch list should pursue their constitutional claims against the government individually and not as a class, the 7th Circuit ruled.

Judge Easterbrook reversed class certification for a group of immigrants whose re-entry into the United States was delayed because they showed up on the watch lists as potential terrorists or otherwise dangerous individuals and were carefully screened. Some of the plaintiffs said they never belonged on the list in the first place, because they posed no threat of terrorism or other violent behavior. Others said they are not actually on the list, but have been mistaken for a listed person with a similar or identical name.

All claimed the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security need to find a better system of classifying potentially threatening individuals and removing those who do not belong on the list.

They sued for damages, claiming government agents violated their rights by delaying their re-entry and by pointing weapons at them.

Easterbrook called the latter claim "questionable" and pointed out that the nation has an inherent authority to protect its borders. Even so, he rejected plaintiffs' request for an injunction covering "just about every aspect of entry procedure," including the degree of suspicion required for inquiry, the way officials confirm a person's identity, and how the FBI closes its investigations. They sought to strip the executive branch of its role in reshaping the system and to make the necessary reforms through an injunction covering larges classes: one for detained travelers and another for the relatives and travel companions of detained travelers.

"It isn't hard to see problems with these class definitions," Easterbrook said, launching a list of bulleted issues, including that the classes "grow or shrink with the plaintiffs' contentions as the case progresses," and that the word "detention" could mean "anything from 'stopped for 60 seconds to present a passport' to 'held incommunicado for more than a day.'"

The court concluded that the plaintiffs' claims are "best handled by individual suits for damages."

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the Second Amendment protects individuals' right to own a gun, not just the right of states to arm their militias. Ruling in the closely watched District of Columbia v. Heller, the 5-4 majority struck down a Washington, D.C. law making it difficult for residents to own a handgun.

In the 157-page opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the Constitution does not allow "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home."

The D.C. law bans handguns by making it a crime to carry an unregistered firearm and barring residents from keeping unregistered handguns in their homes. Registered guns must be "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock or similar device," regulations that make the guns useless for self defense, according to gun-rights advocates.

Dick Heller, a D.C. special police officer, challenged the law after the city refused to let him register a handgun for home use. The district court dismissed his case, but the D.C. Circuit reversed, holding that he had a constitutional right to keep a gun in his home.

The nation's high court echoed the D.C. Circuit's decision.

The Second Amendment establishes that, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Scalia said the amendment could be rephrased: "Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

He further dissected the language to conclude that it applied to private citizens.

"Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation," Scalia wrote.

Justice Stephen Breyer dissented, arguing that the amendment "protects militia-related, not self-defense-related, interests." He was joined by Justices Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg. They also argued that the protections of the Second Amendment are not absolute. The D.C. gun regulations were adopted in 2001 to reduce the 25,000 guns deaths per year in the nation, 3,000 of which were accidental. Breyer cited a 2001 committee report stating that "for every intruder stopped by a homeowner with a firearm, there are four gun-related accidents within the home."

Relying heavily on statistics, Breyer determined that "the District's decision represents the kind of empirically based judgment that legislatures, not courts, are best suited to make."

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices' first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court's 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia's 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The amendment reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

The basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual's right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that an individual right to bear arms is supported by "the historical narrative" both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

The Constitution does not permit "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home," Scalia said. The court also struck down Washington's requirement that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled, but left intact the licensing of guns.

In a dissent he summarized from the bench, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority "would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons."

He said such evidence "is nowhere to be found."

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a separate dissent in which he said, "In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas."

Joining Scalia were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. The other dissenters were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter.

Gun rights supporters hailed the decision. "I consider this the opening salvo in a step-by-step process of providing relief for law-abiding Americans everywhere that have been deprived of this freedom," said Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association.

The NRA will file lawsuits in San Francisco, Chicago and several of its suburbs challenging handgun restrictions there based on Thursday's outcome.

The capital's gun law was among the nation's strictest.

A police officer exceeded the limits of his qualified immunity when he repeatedly stomped a prone man in the groin, the D.C. Circuit ruled.

The victim of Officer Jeffrey Bruce's attack was fellow Officer Juan Johnson.

Johnson's "off-duty act of kindness to a stranger in distress landed him in the middle of a drug bust in which he was repeatedly kicked in the groin by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal," Judge Griffith explained.

Johnson unwittingly helped a stranger escape from "stick-up guys," who turned out to be police officers.

The stranger was Andre Clinton, who was running from police after selling drugs to an undercover officer.

When the police arrived, Johnson was unable to convince the officers that he was one of them, so he lay down on the ground. Bruce then put the boots to Johnson before realizing his mistake.

"A reasonable officer would not have kicked the surrendering suspect in the groin," Judge Griffith wrote. "Johnson ... spread his arms and legs in a manner announcing submission."

Griffith also wrote that Bruce should not have attacked Johnson's groin.

"Striking the groin is the classic example of fighting dirty," Griffith wrote. "From the schoolyard scrapper to the champion prizefighter, no pugilist takes lightly the threat of a hit below the belt."

Johnson reported passing blood in his urine after the incident.