Press Release 2014/11/05 13:15 
"Today the Oklahoma Supreme Court handed the women of Oklahoma a crucial victory by protecting their constitutional rights and restoring critical options for those seeking safe and legal abortion services," said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is supporting efforts to fight the laws.
"Time and time again, courts are seeing that the true motive behind these underhanded and baseless restrictions is to push essential reproductive health care services out of reach for as many women as possible," she said.
A message seeking comment from Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was not immediately returned. A spokesman for Gov. Mary Fallin said the governor was on the road on Election Day and was unsure if she could be reached for comment.
The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit in October on behalf of an Oklahoma doctor who performs nearly half the state's abortions, seeking to block the law requiring admitting privileges law.
The physician, Dr. Larry Burns, said he had applied for admitting privileges at 16 nearby hospitals but had yet to get approval from any facility.
When Burns filed his lawsuit in October, Fallin — who signed the legislation into law in May— said she believed abortion was wrong and that she had been "proud to work with lawmakers in both parties to support legislation that protects the health and lives of both mothers and their unborn children."
Court Watch 2014/11/04 15:02
A conservative gadfly lawyer who has made a career of skewering Democratic administrations is taking his battle against the National Security Agency's telephone surveillance program to a federal appeals court.
Activist attorney Larry Klayman won the first round in December, when U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a Republican appointee, ruled that the NSA's surveillance program likely runs afoul of the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches. The government appealed.
In court filings in preparation for Tuesday's argument, the Justice Department told three Republican-nominated appeals judges that collecting the phone data is of overriding and compelling importance to the nation's security.
Former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden revealed the phone data collection effort a year and a half ago, triggering a debate over privacy rights and surveillance.
In New York, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit recently heard arguments in an appeal of a judge's opinion that found the surveillance program legal.
The three appeals judges in the Washington case have generally come down on the government's side on national security issues.
Court Watch 2014/10/30 10:07
The Marine Corps should not be retrying a sergeant whose murder conviction in a major Iraq war crime case was overturned by the military's highest court after he served half of his 11-year sentence, his defense attorneys say.
Civilian defense attorney Chris Oprison said he has filed nine motions that he will present during a two-day hearing for Lawrence Hutchins III that starts Thursday at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base, north of San Diego.
"We think all these charges should be dismissed," Oprison said. "What are they trying to get out of this Marine? He served seven years locked up, away from his wife and family. Why are they putting him through this again after he served that much time?"
The military prosecution declined to comment.
The Marine Corps ordered a retrial for Hutchins last year shortly after the ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces that found his rights were violated by interrogators in 2006 when he was detained in Iraq and held in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for a week.
The new defense team is asking the judge to let them go to Iraq to interview witnesses in the village of Hamdania, where Hutchins led an eight-man squad accused of kidnapping an Iraqi man from his home in April 2006, marching him to a ditch and shooting him to death. Hutchins has said he thought the man was an insurgent.
Before his release, the Marine, from Plymouth, Massachusetts, had served seven years in the brig for one of the biggest war crime cases against U.S. troops to emerge from the war. None of the other seven squad members served more than 18 months.
The military last summer re-charged Hutchins. Among the charges is conspiracy to commit murder, which Oprison said is double jeopardy. Hutchins was convicted of murder at his original trial and acquitted of murder with premeditation.
Hutchins' defense attorneys also say the military compromised his case when its investigators raided defense attorneys' offices at Camp Pendleton in May. Oprison said investigators rifled through privileged files that held "the crown jewels" of Hutchins' defense case.
Headline Legal News 2014/10/27 15:17
Virginia's practice of automatically holding death row inmates in solitary confinement will be reviewed by a federal appeals court in a case that experts say could have repercussions beyond the state's borders.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria ruled last year that around-the-clock isolation of condemned inmates is so onerous that the Virginia Department of Corrections must assess its necessity on a case-by-case basis. Failure to do so, she said, violates the inmates' due process rights.
The state appealed, arguing that the courts should defer to the judgment of prison officials on safety issues. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments Tuesday.
The lawsuit was filed by Alfredo Prieto, who was on California's death row for raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl when a DNA sample connected him to the 1988 slayings of George Washington University students Rachel Raver and Warren Fulton III in Reston. He also was sentenced to death in Virginia, where he has spent most of the last six years alone in a 71-square-foot cell at the Sussex I State Prison.
Some capital punishment experts say a victory by Prieto could prompt similar lawsuits by death row inmates elsewhere.
"It gives them a road map," said northern Virginia defense attorney Jonathan Sheldon, who noted that the due process claim succeeded where allegations of cruel and unusual punishment have routinely failed. "It's not that common to challenge conditions of confinement on due process grounds."
Attorney News 2014/10/22 13:40
The Supreme Court will consider reinstating the conviction and death sentence for a California man in a 29-year-old triple murder in San Diego.
The justices said Monday they will hear California's appeal of a federal appeals court ruling that overturned the conviction and sentence for Hector Ayala.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Ayala was denied a fair trial because prosecutors excused all seven black and Hispanic jurors who might have served.
The jury convicted Ayala of killing three people during a drug robbery at a San Diego garage in 1985. The case will be argued in the winter.
Headline Legal News 2014/10/13 16:48
In seemingly contradictory voting-rights actions just a month before November's elections, the Supreme Court has allowed new Republican-inspired restrictions to remain in force in North Carolina and Ohio while blocking Wisconsin's voter identification law.
But there's a thread of consistency: In each case, the court appears to be seeking a short-term outcome that is the least disruptive for the voting process.
Another test of the court's outlook on voter ID laws could come from Texas, where the state is promising to appeal a ruling that struck down its strict law as unconstitutional racial discrimination.
None of the orders issued by the high court in recent days is a final ruling on the constitutionality of the laws. The orders are all about timing — whether the laws can be used in this year's elections — while the justices defer consideration of their validity.
In some ways, these disputes over the mechanics of voting are like others that crop up frequently just before elections as part of last-minute struggles by partisans to influence who can vote.
Republican lawmakers say the measures are needed to reduce voter fraud. Democrats contend they are thinly veiled attempts to keep eligible voters, many of them minorities supportive of Democrats, away from the polls.
Court rulings at various levels have also revealed partisan divisions. Most judges who voted to uphold the restrictive laws or allow them to take effect while the legal fights play out are Republican appointees. Most of those voting to strike down the laws or prevent them from being enforced were appointed by Democratic presidents. That is true even at the Supreme Court.
The high court has laid out one area of agreement: a general rule discouraging courts in general from letting potentially disruptive changes take effect at the last minute.
"The idea that courts should not impose a new set of voting rules just before an election is not a new one," said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine law school.
This year, that idea appears to have led the Supreme Court to outcomes that on the surface appear to be inconsistent, Hasen said. One problem in reading too much into the orders is that they were issued with little explanation.
But in each case, the court took issue with lower court rulings that would have changed the rules too close to an election, Hasen said.
