Tag Archives: amendment

If Money Is Speech, the First Amendment Is a Billionaire’s Dream

by CarolBiddlecomb Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The argument for a union shop is pretty straightforward: even if you hate your union, they perform collective bargaining for everyone, including you. Since you benefit from that bargaining, you should be required to pay union dues. After all, if dues are optional, why would anyone pay? Why not just let all the other suckers pay while you reap the benefits free of charge?

There’s another version of this argument that’s even more straightforward: if union shops are illegal—as they are in so-called “right to work” states—it’s all but impossible to set up a union. This is why the Chamber of Commerce and pretty much all Republicans are great fans of the open shop. It basically destroys the ability of unions to operate.

But what about public employee unions? What if you object to your union’s political views and don’t want to sponsor them? The answer, in many states, is that you can partially opt out of union dues, paying only an “agency fee” specifically designated for collective bargaining activities.

Problem solved? Not quite. What if you think that even collective bargaining is inherently a political stance when you’re bargaining with the government? Should you be allowed to opt out of union dues entirely? Today the Supreme Court heard arguments on this, and it didn’t go well for union supporters:

The justices appeared divided along familiar lines during an extended argument over whether government workers who choose not to join unions may nonetheless be required to help pay for collective bargaining. The court’s conservative majority appeared ready to say that such compelled financial support violates the First Amendment.

Collective bargaining, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said, is inherently political when the government is the employer, and issues like merit pay, promotions and classroom size are subject to negotiation.

The best hope for a victory for the unions had rested with Justice Antonin Scalia, who has written and said things sympathetic to their position. But he was consistently hostileon Monday. “The problem is that everything that is bargained for with the government is within the political sphere,” he said.

In one sense, there’s nothing new to say about this. The liberal-conservative split on the Supreme Court has hardened over the past couple of decades, and we simply don’t see very much principled opposition to party lines anymore. Conservatives hate unions, so conservative Supreme Court justices are going to rule against unions whenever and wherever possible. They’ll make up the reasons afterward.

But there’s another sense in which this is interesting: it’s yet another step in the evolution of the conservative Supreme Court’s insistence that money is speech. In Citizens United and subsequent cases, they’ve all but wiped out any possible regulation of campaign finance on the grounds that campaign donations fund campaign speech. So if you can’t regulate political speech, you can’t regulate political money either.

Now they seem set to do the same for unions. If collective bargaining is inherently political speech, then you can’t force people to fund it. That’s a prima facie violation of the First Amendment.

I wonder how far this can go? After all, you can make a case that spending money is nearly always implicit speech: my purchase of a Snickers bar is a public declaration that Snickers bars are delicious, and my company’s dodgy advertising claims are a declaration of deeply held corporate emotions. So much for regulation of sugary snacks or false advertising.

Money is speech. Speech can’t be regulated. Therefore, money can’t be regulated. It’s a pretty simple syllogism. And, possibly, a pretty handy one.

Read More:  

If Money Is Speech, the First Amendment Is a Billionaire’s Dream

Posted in alo, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on If Money Is Speech, the First Amendment Is a Billionaire’s Dream

A Lot of People Are Telling Congress to Repeal Its Gag Order on Gun Violence Research

by KendraMussen Posted on December 2, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Even before today’s tragic shooting in San Bernardino, pressure was building in Washington to overturn an NRA-backed amendment that has barred federal research on gun violence for nearly 20 years. More than 2,000 physicians, dozens of Democratic lawmakers, and even the author of the amendment have all called on Congress to once again allow gun violence to be investigated as a public health issue.

On Wednesday, nine medical associations publicly urged Congress to overturn the so-called Dickey Amendment, which in 1996 effectively halted research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) into the causes of gun violence.

“Gun violence is a public health problem that kills 90 Americans a day,” Dr. Alice Chen, the executive director of Doctors for America, said in a statement. “Physicians believe it’s time to lift this effective ban and fund the research needed to save lives.”

Tacked onto a 1996 appropriations bill, the Dickey Amendment was pushed through Congress by Republican legislators under substantial pressure from the National Rifle Association, as the amendment’s author, former Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.), admitted in a 2012 op-ed in The Washington Post that he co-authored. Dickey wrote that the lack of research by the NIH and CDC had resulted in a troubling information gap: “US scientists cannot answer the most basic question: What works to prevent firearm injuries? We don’t know whether having more citizens carry guns would decrease or increase firearm deaths; or whether firearm registration and licensing would make inner-city residents safer or expose them to greater harm.”

The doctors are not alone in calling for the amendment to be overturned: late last month, dozens of House Democrats made a similar plea to renew federal research on gun violence. “We dedicate $240 million a year on traffic safety research, more than $233 million a year on food safety, and $331 million a year on the effects of tobacco, but almost nothing on firearms that kill 33,000 Americans annually,” they wrote in a letter to senior representatives in charge of appropriations. A few weeks before that, Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) submitted a bill called the Gun Violence Research Act with the express purpose of “helping identify and treat those prone to committing mass shootings.”

Dickey himself has repeatedly urged Congress to overturn the provision that bears his name. In a letter published Wednesday by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, Dickey wrote, “Doing nothing is no longer an acceptable solution.”

“I commend Jay Dickey for taking this stand,” Thompson wrote in response. “As gun owners, we want to protect the Second Amendment. But at the same time, we recognize the fact that we can safeguard those rights while also allowing our expert scientists to conduct research on how to best prevent gun violence.”

A Mother Jones investigation published this summer found that gun violence costs the US a staggering $229 billion every year.

Jump to original:  

A Lot of People Are Telling Congress to Repeal Its Gag Order on Gun Violence Research

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Lot of People Are Telling Congress to Repeal Its Gag Order on Gun Violence Research

Trump: "This Isn’t a Gun Problem, This Is a Mental Problem."

by ThanhTorrence Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A day after two journalists in Virginia were fatally shot on live television, Donald Trump is rejecting calls to strengthen gun control laws. Instead, he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo today that mental health issues are to blame for gun violence in America. This isn’t a gun problem, this is a mental problem,” the presidential hopeful said.

“You’re not going to get rid of all guns,” Trump added. “I know one thing: If you try to do it, the bad guys would have them. And the good folks would abide by the laws but be hopeless.” The real state mogul defended the Second Amendment, which he said he was “very much into.”

Trump’s opposition to stricter gun legislation in favor of focusing on mental health problems is not new. But many experts argue such thinking is flawed. “Consider that between 2001 and 2010, there were nearly 120,000 gun-related homicides…Few were perpetrated by people with mental illness,” psychiatry professor Richard A. Friedman wrote in the New York Times after the Newtown shooting in 2012.

Trump is just one of the 2016 candidates to weigh in following the murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward on Wednesday morning. Speaking at a press conference in Iowa, Hillary Clinton told reporters that she was “stricken” by the shooting. “We have got to do something about gun violence in America,” Clinton said. “And I will take it on.”

Speaking to Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on Wednesday night, the father of one of the victims vowed to fight for increased gun control measures. “Whatever it takes to get gun legislation, to shame people, to shame legislators into doing something about closing loopholes and background checks and making sure crazy people don’t get guns,” Andy Parker said.

See the original post: 

Trump: "This Isn’t a Gun Problem, This Is a Mental Problem."

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump: "This Isn’t a Gun Problem, This Is a Mental Problem."

First Amendment Law is Facing Some Very Big Changes

by JanSpinksg Posted on August 17, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Adam Liptak says that Reed v. Town of Gilbert is the sleeper Supreme Court case of the past year. It unanimously struck down an ordinance that discriminated against signs announcing church service times, but only three justices ruled on the basis of existing law. The other six signed an opinion that went further, ruling that many other speech regulations are now subject to “strict scrutiny.” How far will this go?

Strict scrutiny requires the government to prove that the challenged law is “narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests.” You can stare at those words as long as you like, but here is what you need to know: Strict scrutiny, like a Civil War stomach wound, is generally fatal.

“When a court applies strict scrutiny in determining whether a law is consistent with the First Amendment,” said Mr. Abrams, who has represented The New York Times, “only the rarest statute survives the examination.”

Laws based on the content of speech, the Supreme Court has long held, must face such scrutiny. The key move in Justice Thomas’s opinion was the vast expansion of what counts as content-based. The court used to say laws were content-based if they were adopted to suppress speech with which the government disagreed.

Justice Thomas took a different approach. Any law that singles out a topic for regulation, he said, discriminates based on content and is therefore presumptively unconstitutional.

Securities regulation is a topic. Drug labeling is a topic. Consumer protection is a topic.

This is obviously not news to people who follow this stuff carefully, but it was news to me. Apparently the reach of Reed is pretty spectacular: three laws have been struck down by lower courts in just the past two months based on the reasoning in the case. Any law that treats, say, medical records or political robocalls or commercial speech differently from any other kind of speech is in danger—and there are a lot of laws like this.

They say that hard cases make bad law. But Reed was an easy case. It failed “the laugh test” said Elena Kagan. And yet, it seems likely to have provided an excuse for an astonishingly broad change in how speech is regulated. So far it’s stayed mostly under the radar, but eventually something bigger than panhandling or ballot selfies will get struck down, and suddenly everyone will notice what happened. What then?

Professor Robert Post said the majority opinion, read literally, would so destabilize First Amendment law that courts might have to start looking for alternative approaches. Perhaps courts will rethink what counts as speech, he said, or perhaps they will water down the potency of strict scrutiny.

“One or the other will have to give,” he said, “or else the scope of Reed’s application would have to be limited.”

Stay tuned.

More: 

First Amendment Law is Facing Some Very Big Changes

Posted in Abrams, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on First Amendment Law is Facing Some Very Big Changes

Lawmaker Endorsed by NRA Aims to Make Schoolkids Study NRA Curriculum

by CarinEWPBavsc Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In August of last year, a 16-year-old high-schooler in Summerville, South Carolina, turned in a creative writing assignment about shooting his neighbor’s pet dinosaur. The school’s “zero tolerance” policy for guns prompted a search of the student’s belongings that turned up no weapons. Nonetheless, he was arrested and suspended for what he said was a joke, if one in questionable taste.

South Carolina state Rep. Alan Clemmons hopes to use that incident to force public schools to dedicate three weeks each year to teaching a gun-focused curriculum developed or recommended by the National Rifle Association. Traditionally, zero tolerance policies have applied to students bringing weapons to school or simulating their use with toys or hand gestures—not to academic discussion of guns. Still, in the bill Clemmons filed in the state legislature last month he states that these NRA-approved lessons are needed to combat an “intolerance for any discussion of guns or depiction of guns in writing or in assignments in public schools, which is an affront to First Amendment rights and harshly inhibits creative expression and academic freedom.”

“If anything comes up in a school setting that has to do with firearms, then it’s a suspendable offense and criminal charges could ensue,” Clemmons told WMBF News. “The second amendment should be freely debated in schools and instead the second amendment is being squelched in our schools.”

If passed, the Second Amendment Education Act would require that three consecutive weeks of each year in elementary, middle, and high school be spent studying the second amendment. As Ian Millhiser at Think Progress points out, that’s an enormous chunk of the school year, especially given that some South Carolina schools devote just two weeks to slavery and a week and a half to World War II.

The law would also require that every December 15—the day after the anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook school in Newtown—be designated “Second Amendment Awareness Day.” To celebrate the occasion, schools will be required to hold mandatory poster or essay contests at every grade level, with the theme “The Right To Bear Arms; One American Right Protecting All Others.” The South Carolina Legislative Sportsmen’s Caucus will be in charge of choosing first, second, and third place winners in both contests.

Both chambers of South Carolina’s legislature are Republican-controlled, and Gov. Nikki Halley has an A+ rating from the NRA. Still, this bill may be too extreme to pass:

“Even amongst a conservative constituency in South Carolina, I think they can rate that they have more abiding problems than this,” says Dr. Dave Woodard, a political science professor at Clemson University who’s long served as a political consultant to Republican candidates in South Carolina.

“Most people are more concerned with math and science, and the fact that historically, South Carolina’s rankings in education have been abysmal. Nobody, I think, would say ‘The best way to improve education is to have a three-week segment on the Second Amendment. Boy, that’ll move us up in the national rankings!'” says Woodard.

The bill includes a list of gun-related topics that must be worked into the curriculum. Several—including the individual right to bear arms—are straight out of the revisionist interpretation of the Second Amendment that the NRA and its supporters have helped popularize since the 1970s.

The curriculum would require students from first grade and up to get into the weeds of constitutional scholarship on the Second Amendment. Students will be asked to study Supreme Court cases “including the United States v. Cruikshank, the United States v. Miller, the District of Columbia v. Heller, and McDonald v. Chicago.” (The majority arguments in Heller and McDonald grew out of the push by pro-gun researchers to redefine the Second Amendment.) The bill also mandates that students learn about “the constitutionality of gun control laws,” the causes of mass shootings, and “the impact of legislative reactions to gun violence on Constitutional rights and the impact on reducing gun violence, if any.”

Clemmons identifies as a Second Amendment advocate. He has repeatedly received an A rating from the NRA, and has taken part in events with the group in his state. In 2013, he was featured on the NRA’s website after taking a trip to Connecticut to convince gun manufacturers, put off by tightening gun control legislation in the state post-Newtown, to move their operations to South Carolina.

It’s unclear if Rep. Clemmons or his cosponsors have hashed out the logistics of the NRA’s involvement in developing or approving a curriculum: Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the NRA, tells Mother Jones that the NRA has not made any recommendations on the syllabus envisioned by the bill, nor have South Carolina legislators made plans with the NRA about the group’s future role. Attempts by Mother Jones to contact Rep. Clemmons have not been answered, but we will update this story if we receive a response.

Original link:

Lawmaker Endorsed by NRA Aims to Make Schoolkids Study NRA Curriculum

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lawmaker Endorsed by NRA Aims to Make Schoolkids Study NRA Curriculum

Five Times The Supreme Court Tried To Understand Pop Culture

by CasiePressley Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s fans might refer to her as The Notorious RBG, but when it comes to understanding rap culture, the Supreme Court has some catching up to do. That was clear on Monday, when the justices heard arguments in Elonis v. United States, a case about whether gory, rap-style rhymes posted on Facebook by a Pennsylvania man constituted a real threat to his estranged wife.

Lawyers for Anthony Elonis asserted that his posts should be read as creative self-expression. (Some sample lyrics: “There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts.”) Justice Samuel Alito didn’t seem convinced that these lines weren’t menacing. “This sounds like a road map for threatening a spouse and getting away with it,” he said. “So you put it in a rhyme…and you say, ‘I’m an aspiring rap artist,’ and so then you are free from prosecution.” Those comments are consistent with how judges and jurors tend to think about rap lyrics—they’re likely to see them as autobiographical and literally true, even though many rappers assume fictional personas.

The Elonis case isn’t the first time the Supreme Court has grappled with what constitutes legitimate artistic expression. From declaring that movies can be broadly censored because they could be “used for evil” to deciding that G-strings don’t limit nude dancers’ freedom of expression, the past results have been decidedly mixed. Here’s are the justices’ most offbeat efforts to play art critic:

1. Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 1915

The facts: An Ohio law required anyone who wanted to show a film to get permission from a board of censors, who charged for approval. Mutual Film Corporation, a motion picture company best known for producing Charlie Chaplin comedies, didn’t want to pay. It argued that its movies were protected by the First Amendment because of their power to enlighten and entertain.

The outcome: The justices unanimously sided with the state on the grounds that movies were a business, not an art form—and that they could corrupt the hearts and minds of innocent children. “They, indeed, may be mediums of thought, but so are many things,” wrote Justice Joseph McKenna. “They may be used for evil, and against that possibility the statute was enacted. Their powers of amusement…make them the more insidious.” It took until 1952 for the court to decide that film had proved itself “a significant medium for the communication of ideas.”

2. United States v. Thirty-seven Photographs, 1971

The facts: Customs agents at the Los Angeles airport stopped Milton Luros on his way home from Europe and confiscated 37 photos of couples having sex, based on a 1930 law banning the importation of obscene material. Luros claimed that the photos, which he’d planned to use to illustrate a copy of the Kama Sutra, shouldn’t have been confiscated because they were for private use.

The outcome: The court concluded that Luros’ right to privately possess obscene material didn’t extend to the airport. “A port of entry is not a traveler’s home,” Justice Byron White wrote. But Justice Hugo Black, a First Amendment absolutist, penned a scathing dissent. “I can imagine no more distasteful, useless, and time-consuming task for the members of this Court than perusing this material to determine whether it has ‘redeeming social value,'” he seethed.

(What’s with the weird name: Cases in which a federal court seizes property are traditionally named after the item seized, not the item’s owner—hence the epic-sounding 2011 case U.S. v. One White Crystal-Covered ‘Bad Tour’ Glove and other Michael Jackson Memorabilia.)

3. Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., 1991

The facts: Two exotic dance clubs in South Bend, Indiana, wanted to add completely naked dancers to their lineup. State law required that the dancers wear at least pasties and a G-string. The clubs sued, arguing that the law infringed on the dancers’ freedom of expression.

The outcome: No redress for the would-be strippers. The fact that the nakedness would have been consensual didn’t matter to Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote, “The purpose of Indiana’s nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd.”

4. National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, 1998

The facts: After a scandal over artists receiving federal funding—including Andres Serrano, whose 1987 photo Piss Christ depicted a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine—Congress added “taking into consideration general standards of decency” to the NEA’s grant requirements. Performance artist Karen Finley, whose work involved covering her naked body with chocolate, sued the government after her grant application was denied. She argued that the new grant requirements suppressed unorthodox ideas.

The outcome: Congress wasn’t regulating speech, just setting funding priorities, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the majority. She noted that the amendment didn’t preclude “indecent” art from receiving grants; it “simply adds ‘considerations’ to the grant-making process.”

5. Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 2011

The facts: EMA, a trade association for the home entertainment industry, challenged California’s ban on the sale of violent video games to minors. Before the justices heard the case, they had copies of Medal of Honor and Resident Evil 4 delivered to the court so they could figure out what playing a video game was like.

The outcome: The gaming experience must have won the justices over. They ruled that video games deserved First Amendment protection, overturning California’s law. “Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices… and through features distinctive to the medium,” Scalia wrote in his pro-gamer majority opinion.

Link:  

Five Times The Supreme Court Tried To Understand Pop Culture

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Five Times The Supreme Court Tried To Understand Pop Culture

This Is What Happens When You Like Everything on Facebook

by AngieMcKeddie Posted on August 11, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Fun fact about Facebook that people like me who study it a lot can tell you: You should be discerning with the Like button because the News Feed algorithm is pretty sensitive. This can be a struggle because logging onto Facebook is a bit like hiking up a very tall mountain with Satan. It shows you the world and says, “all these things I will give you if you fall down and Like them.” Facebook gives you an unending slew of opportunities to Like things because the more you Like, the more accurate the algorithm gets at predicting what you want to see in your News Feed. In general, it’s pretty good at this. However, it makes a few assumptions about your Like. The assumptions are (1) that you actually Like the posts you Like—you may not like some bad breaking-news alert, but you like that you received it, you like that you received it from the page that posted it; and (2) you are somewhat picky about what you Like. Maybe not too picky! But picky. If you Like everything, you Like nothing and it’s all meaningless.

What happens though if you Like everything? Every Candy Crush request? Every political post? Every bad joke? Every marriage announcement? Wired‘s Mat Honan gave it a shot and the answer is, well, things get crazy:

My News Feed took on an entirely new character in a surprisingly short amount of time. After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore…Nearly my entire feed was given over to Upworthy and the Huffington Post…As I went to bed, I remember thinking “Ah, crap. I have to like something about Gaza,” as I hit the Like button on a post with a pro-Israel message.

By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. I’m offered the chance to like the 2nd Amendment and some sort of anti-immigrant page. I like them both. I like Ted Cruz. I like Rick Perry. The Conservative Tribune comes up again, and again, and again in my News Feed. I get to learn its very particular syntax.

The syntax he identifies will look familiar to anyone has spent any time on Facebook lately. The whole article is pretty interesting. Go read the whole thing.

Link to article:

This Is What Happens When You Like Everything on Facebook

Posted in Anchor, Badger, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is What Happens When You Like Everything on Facebook

News Organizations Sue Missouri to Reveal the Contents of Its Execution Drugs

by ChristoSlama Posted on May 15, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Guardian, AP, and three local newspapers are wading into the death penalty fray with a lawsuit challenging the secrecy surrounding lethal injections in Missouri—one of more than a dozen states that have begun hiding information about their execution drugs. In a complaint filed Wednesday morning with the Cole County circuit court, the news organizations argue that the secrecy violates the public’s First Amendment right to know how the condemned are being killed. The document specifically references the case of Clayton Lockett, the death row inmate who writhed and moaned in apparent pain after being injected with a secretly acquired drug combinations last month.

Prior to the execution, Lockett—who took a record 43 minutes to die—had argued that withholding the source and contents of execution drugs was unconstitutional because the untested combination could create a level of suffering that violates the Fifth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Other death row prisoners have sued to block their executions on similar grounds, but the new lawsuit appears to be the first to challenge the lack of transparency based on the First Amendment right of access. Below is a snippet from the Guardian‘s story on the case:

A Guardian survey has identified at least 13 states that have changed their rules to withhold from the public all information relating to how they get hold of lethal drugs. They include several of the most active death penalty states including Texas, which has executed seven prisoners so far this year, Florida (five), Missouri (four) and Oklahoma (three).

Attention has been drawn to the secrecy issue by the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma on 29 April….Lockett’s lawyers had argued in advance that he might be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment as a result of the lack of information surrounding the drugs, but the state supreme court allowed the procedure to go ahead having come under intense pressure from local politicians, some of whom threatened to impeach judges.

In the wake of the events in Oklahoma, in which the prisoner writhed and groaned over a prolonged period, the state has agreed to pause for six months before carrying out any further judicial killings to give time for an internal investigation to be completed. President Obama described the Lockett execution “deeply troubling” and has asked US attorney general Eric Holder to review the way the death penalty is conducted.

Until last year, Missouri which is now executing prisoners at a rate of one a month, was open about where it obtained its lethal injection chemicals. But like many death penalty states, its drug supplies have dwindled as a result of a European-led pharmaceutical boycott, and in a desperate move to try to find new suppliers it has shrouded their identity in secrecy.

In October, the state changed its so-called “black hood law” that had historically been used to guard the identity of those directly involved in the death process. The department of corrections expanded the definition of its execution team to include pharmacies and “individuals who prescribe, compound, prepare, or otherwise supply the chemicals for use in the lethal injection procedure.”

Since the law was changed, Missouri has put six prisoners to death using drugs from a mystery source. Deborah Denno, an expert in executions at Fordham University law school, told the Guardian that the secrecy seems designed to cover up shortcomings in the system. “If states were doing things properly they wouldn’t have a problem releasing information,” she said. “They are imposing a veil of secrecy to hide incompetence.”

Follow this link: 

News Organizations Sue Missouri to Reveal the Contents of Its Execution Drugs

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on News Organizations Sue Missouri to Reveal the Contents of Its Execution Drugs