Tag Archives: courts

Oklahoma’s Ban on Abortion Drugs Is Permanently Blocked, Following a New Supreme Court Ruling

by billytalley1169 Posted on November 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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The US Supreme Court has decided not to weigh in on the constitutionality of an Oklahoma law limiting access to abortion drugs.

This summer, the court tentatively agreed to hear a challenge to the 2011 statute, which bars doctors from prescribing abortion pills, except as outlined on the FDA label. Before proceeding, however, it asked the Oklahoma Supreme Court to clarify the breadth of the law. Last Tuesday, the state court ruled that the bill effectively bans all abortion drugs, including those used to treat life-threatening ectopic pregnancies, and found that it was unconstitutional.

The US Supreme Court subsequently dismissed the case as “improvidently granted,” meaning the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the law will stand. For more on the case, Cline v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice, see Mother Jones‘s recent in-depth story.

Oklahoma is not the only place that’s clamping down on abortion drugs. Here’s an overview of the other states that have restricted access:

A state-by-state LOOK AT abortion drug restrictions

Hover over a state to see a breakdown of restrictions in place there. Source: Guttmacher Institute.

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Oklahoma’s Ban on Abortion Drugs Is Permanently Blocked, Following a New Supreme Court Ruling

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Why Texting-While-Driving Bans Don’t Work

by CarrolHof Posted on November 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Lost in the clamor for stricter distracted-driving laws, a study from April 2013 found discouraging patterns in the relationship between texting bans and traffic fatalities.

As one might expect, single occupant vehicle crashes dip noticeably when a state legislature enacts a texting and driving ban. But the change is always short-lived, according to this study, which examined data from every state except Alaska from 2007 through 2010. Within months, the accident rate typically returned to pre-ban levels.

The researchers, Rahi Abouk and Scott Adams of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, attribute this pattern to the “announcement effect,” when drivers adjust their behavior to compensate for a perceived law enforcement threat—only to return to old habits when enforcement appears ineffectual. In other words, drivers might dial back their texting when they hear about a ban, but after they succumb to the urge once or twice and get away with it, they determine it’s okay and keep doing it.

“It’s different than drunk driving,” Adams said. Identifying intoxicated drivers is relatively easy, “you can give somebody a breathalyzer, you can have checkpoints.” But with texting, “it’s really hard for policemen to know” if someone’s been texting.

No one denies the dangers of texting while driving. In fact, 95 percent of AAA survey (PDF) respondents said texting behind the wheel was a “very” serious threat to their personal safety. But 35 percent of the same respondent group admitted to having read a text or email while driving in the last 30 days. Because Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 send and receive an average of 88 texts per day, and American drivers average nearly 40 miles a day, it makes sense that the Department of Transportation estimates that at any given daylight moment, approximately 660,000 people are “using cell phones or manipulating electronic devices” while driving.

State governments have attempted to curb the formation of this lethal habit. Forty-six states have enacted some kind of texting ban, with penalties ranging from a $20 ticket to a $10,000 fine and a year in prison (hey, Alaska!). Unfortunately, enforcement has seen limited success, in part because of how difficult detection is. Likewise, actual cell phone related fatality statistics are vastly underreported for a number of reasons, experts say. And, unless a driver involved in a crash admits to it, investigators may have no reason to suspect cell phone use.

The most effective bans, Adams said, were those enacted earliest. In Washington, where legislators took action in 2007, “people actually took it seriously,” at least for a time. Yet the efficacy of that ban decreased with each successive year. Likely, Adams said, because people heard “reports that these things weren’t being enforced.” In those states slower to legislate, any dip in fatalities evened out within several months.

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Why Texting-While-Driving Bans Don’t Work

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The New GOP Plan to Block Obama’s Judicial Nominees

by HaiThorpeekfj Posted on October 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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Second only to the Supreme Court, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is considered the most important federal court. It’s the body that hears the challenges to every unpopular regulation proposed by a federal agency. For instance, the court of appeals is currently hearing a spate of lawsuits from private companies arguing that they should be exempt from providing contraception coverage to workers because of their religious views. Right now, this key appellate court has more vacancies than it’s had in a decade—and congressional Republicans are hoping to keep it that way.

Authorized for 11 judgeships, the court presently has only eight judges. Republicans claim that the court is “evenly divided” among judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats. But the court also has six semi-retired senior judges who still hear cases. When they’re included, Republicans have a 9-5 majority. Many of those GOP nominees are also hardcore conservative ideologues. Among them: Janice Rogers Brown, who almost didn’t get confirmed during the George W. Bush administration because of her extreme libertarian views. An Ayn Rand fan, Brown considered Supreme Court decisions upholding minimum-wage laws “the triumph of our socialist revolution.”

The Republican majority on this court has been able to advance aspects of the GOP’s anti-regulatory agenda that the party has failed to accomplish legislatively. Last year, for instance, the DC Circuit struck down a set of environmental rules 20 years in the making that would have held states responsible for pollution that leaked across their borders. The DC Circuit’s conservative majority would shrink considerably should Obama succeed in getting all of his nominees confirmed. That’s why Republicans have been blocking Obama from filling those three slots. (Overall, Obama’s judicial nominees have waited an average of 277 days before getting a confirmation vote, compared with 175 during the George W. Bush administration.)

Along with trying to filibuster Obama’s nominees, the GOP has come up with a clever scheme to shrink the number of judges on the appeals court to deny Obama vacancies to fill. Congressional Republicans have claimed that the DC appeals court is under-worked and thus the shrinkage is justified. And they have repeatedly accused Obama of “court packing” simply for trying to fill the existing vacancies on the DC Circuit, comparing the president unfavorably to F.D.R., who attempted to expand the number of Supreme Court seats to shift the balance of power. The talking point is a nifty dodge for Republicans who can’t really come up with a good reason why they won’t confirm Obama’s otherwise uncontroversial and qualified nominees. It allows them to say to the nominees whose judgeships they’re holding up, “Hey, we really think you’re great. The court just doesn’t need any more judges.”

With Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) leading the charge, the Senate took up a bill, the Court Efficiency Act, to downsize the DC Circuit earlier this year. (Kevin Drum has covered this extensively here.) That legislation has been co-sponsored by the party’s newest stars, Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), along with other tea party Republicans including Utah’s Mike Lee. The House held a hearing on Tuesday to consider its version of this bill, introduced by Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), which is called the Stop Court-Packing Act. The idea that nominating judges for ordinary federal vacancies is a form of court-packing is a disingenuous claim that has been dismissed even by conservatives. Fox News contributor Byron York, author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, tweeted in May, “It doesn’t strike me as ‘packing’ to nominate candidates for available seats.”

One of the co-sponsors of Grassley’s bill is Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). While Hatch and his fellow Republicans are now trying to shrink the appeals court, in 2003 he gave a speech decrying the number of DC Circuit vacancies. Hatch noted then that the court was down to only eight judges (which at that time hadn’t happened since 1980), and he called the judicial vacancies “a crisis situation” because of the court’s workload.

As the House and Senate versions of the appeals-court-shrinking legislation wind their way to a vote, Senate Republicans are resorting to more tried and true methods for obstructing the president’s nominees. On Monday night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) moved to bring the nomination of Patricia Millet to the DC Circuit to the floor for a vote, a move Senate Republicans are vowing to filibuster. (South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham even promised to hold up every judicial nomination until Democrats present Benghazi survivors for congressional questioning.) Millet’s prospects don’t look particularly good, though even Ted Cruz has acknowledged her “fine professional qualifications.” The last woman Obama nominated to the DC Circuit, Caitlin Halligan, finally withdrew her name in March after waiting almost two and a half years for the Senate to confirm her.

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The New GOP Plan to Block Obama’s Judicial Nominees

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Judicial Races Now Look Like Regular Old Political Campaigns. Thanks, Citizens United!

by juan59nylon Posted on October 24, 2013

Mother Jones

Justice is blind, except when it’s backed by millions in political spending. In the wake of Citizens United, the Supreme Court case allowing unlimited spending on elections by outside groups, judicial races in the thirty-eight states that conduct elections for their high courts have become indistinguishable from ordinary political campaigns, according to a new report released Thursday by the Brennan Center for Justice, which analyzed the 2011-2012 judicial election cycle. Check it out:

The last election cycle saw record spending: Special interest groups and political parties spent an unprecedented $24.1 million on state court races in the last election period, a jump of more than $11 million since 2007-08. The most expensive high court elections were in the four states where courts most closely divided by either judicial philosophy or political party: Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and North Carolina.

Top funders were mostly conservative: Business and conservative groups accounted for 7 of the top 10 spenders in 2011–2012.

Special interest group donations escalated: The independent groups empowered by Citizens United spent a record $15.4 million to persuade voters in high court races in the last election period, accounting for more than 27 percent of total spending on high court races. The previous record was $11.8 million in 2003–2004.

Koch-type national groups invaded judicial races: Big spenders in judicial races in the last election cycle included the Koch brothers group Americans for Prosperity in Florida and North Carolina, the NRA-affiliated group Law Enforcement Alliance of America in Mississippi, the Republican State Leadership Committee in North Carolina, and the progressive advocacy group America Votes in Florida.

Super spenders dominated: Thirty-five percent of all funds spent on state high court races, or $19.6 million, came from only 10 special-interest groups and political parties. That’s compared with 21 percent in 2007-2008.

TV ad spending jumped: During the 2011-2012 cycle, a record $33.7 million was spent on television ads for state high court races, far more than the previous record of $28.5 million in 2007-2008. Negative advertisements aired in at least ten states. The Ohio Republican party said that Ohio supreme court justice candidate Bill O’Neill “expressed sympathy for rapists.” in Wisconsin, an incumbent justice was accused of protecting a priest accused of molestation. And in Michigan, one candidate was described as having “volunteered to help free a terrorist.”

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Judicial Races Now Look Like Regular Old Political Campaigns. Thanks, Citizens United!

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Supreme Court to Take Up Greenhouse Gas Limits

by Finley Kay Posted on October 15, 2013

Mother Jones

The Supreme Court announced today that it will take up the question of whether the Environmental Protection Agency can include greenhouse gas emission limits in permits it issues for new or expanding large polluters like refineries and power plants.

But perhaps even more significant was what the court chose not to consider: a challenge to the EPA’s broader authority to regulate greenhouse gases as dangerous pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and a challenge to its authority to issue emission limits for cars, both of which have been upheld by lower courts and remained untouched today.

For now, the justices chose to leave intact the legal basis for greenhouse gas emissions limits on new and existing power plants the EPA is expected to roll out over the next several years. Those limits could shutter many of the nation’s coal plants and discourage others from opening. Today’s announcement also preserves the Obama administration’s plan to slash climate change-causing pollutants from cars.

The justices’ decision “means that EPA’s legal and scientific findings that greenhouse gases harm health and the climate remains the law of the land,” said Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney John Walke.

The question the court will consider is whether the EPA can use greenhouse gas emissions as a criteria, like it does with smog and soot limits, to determine whether large industrial polluters receive permits to build new facilities or expand existing ones. But even if the justices disallow such a permitting criteria, the EPA would still retain the authority to set greenhouse gas emissions limits for these polluters—just not written into the permits, per se.

The petition behind the permitting issue was brought by a coalition of industry groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers, which in a statement today said “stringent permitting requirements” would “impact every aspect of our economy.”

But Walke stressed that the permitting program “is not necessary to establish or enforce” greenhouse gas emission standards for power plants, like those proposed in September that are a signature product of new EPA administrator Gina McCarthy.

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Supreme Court to Take Up Greenhouse Gas Limits

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How Tens of Thousands of Americans Got Cheated Out of Their Mineral Rights

by jatadamod8 Posted on October 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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What if a gas company wanted to set up a fracking rig on your property? What if you found out that you couldn’t say no? A new report from Reuters explains how tens of thousands of homeowners across America suddenly found themselves vulnerable to this nightmare scenario, as they discovered that their deeds cover their surface land but not the rights to the minerals beneath it. And as the American energy boom opens new land to extraction, homeowners from Florida to California to Washington to North Carolina have discovered that they unknowingly signed away the rights to what’s under their property. And they might not be able to do anything about it.

Mineral rights—the right to extract and profit from whatever is under the ground—are more and more commonly being separated from land deeds, and in many cases, sellers aren’t legally required to disclose that the estates have been split. After reviewing property records in 25 states, Reuters found that D.R. Horton, the biggest home-builder in the US, “has separated the mineral rights from tens of thousands of homes in states where shale plays are either well under way or possible, including North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Oklahoma, Utah, Idaho, Texas, Colorado, Washington, and California.” When the rights are split from the property deed, homeowners not only have no say, they also don’t see royalties from the drilling, which paid out more than $20 billion nationally in 2012.

The impacts can go way beyond potentially having a well pad show up on your doorstep. According to Reuters:

Loss of mineral rights isn’t the only hit homeowners take. Property-tax assessments don’t take into account severed mineral rights. And “lenders may not be willing to extend mortgage loans on property that is subject to intensive gas extraction activities,” according to a report last year by the North Carolina Department of Justice.

Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest home lender, sometimes denies mortgages to homes encumbered by gas leases. And for the past year, Sovereign Bank has been including clauses in mortgages allowing it to declare borrowers in default if any part of the subsurface property has been “leased, assigned or otherwise transferred for use to extract minerals, oil or gas,” according to a copy of the bank’s mortgage addendum. If mineral rights are severed, “we would not move forward with financing a property,” said a bank spokeswoman.

Insurance policies usually exclude damage from “industrial operations,” and some companies are denying coverage altogether for homes where the mineral rights have been severed. Title insurance companies have been exempting anything to do with mineral rights from their policies, too.

Landowners have pushed back with mixed results. The D.R. Horton returned mineral rights to a group of 700 angry homeowners in North Carolina after an inquiry by the state Department of Justice. But some individuals haven’t been so lucky. Earlier this year, Martin Whiteman of West Virginia lost an appeal for an injunction and damages after Chesapeake Appalachia—a subsidiary of Chesapeake Energy—used ten acres of his 101 acre sheep farm to set up three wells and a series of disposal pits that rendered the land practically unusable. As the practice expands and more people discover that a few lines of legalese have radically changed the deal they thought they were getting, it’s possible states will clarify how developers have to disclose this practice. Until then, it’s buyer beware.

The whole piece is worth a read. You can find it here.

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How Tens of Thousands of Americans Got Cheated Out of Their Mineral Rights

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Quote of the Day: $3.5 Million Is Chickenfeed

by dx1d3x0 Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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From Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

I don’t think $3.5 million is a heck of a lot of money.

This remark came in the context of oral arguments over campaign finance limits. Scalia’s position seems to be that since there’s a ton of money already flooding our political campaigns, there’s not much reason not to allow even vaster sums to sluice through the system. I guess you have to be a constitutional scholar to understand this logic.

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Quote of the Day: $3.5 Million Is Chickenfeed

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Nebraska Court Decides 16-Year-Old Is Too Immature for an Abortion, But Motherhood’s Okay

by pwbqczv Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a 16-year-old could not get the abortion she wanted because she “was not mature enough to make the decision herself.” The Court’s ability to force the teen, a ward of the state known only as Anonymous 5, to carry her unwanted child to term is a direct result of the state’s 2011 parental consent law that requires minors seeking an abortion to get parental approval.

But Nebraska is not unique: similar rulings could happen in most other states across the country. Laws that mandate parental involvement in teens’ abortions offer anti-choice judges new opportunities to limit abortion access. And while it is unclear whether such parental involvement legislation affects minors’ abortion rates in general, Sharon Camp, former president and CEO of Guttmacher Institute, wrote in an article for RH Reality Check that such mandates can put teens at risk of physical violence or abuse and “result in teens’ delaying abortions until later in pregnancy, when they carry a greater risk of complications and are also more expensive to obtain.” The case of the Nebraska teen also shows that parental involvement legislation overlooks wards of the state, leaving pregnant young adults who have no legal parents at the behest of the court system.

Here’s a map of parental consent laws across the United States:

According to Guttmacher, “only two states and the District of Columbia explicitly allow” all minors to consent to their own abortions. On the other hand, a whopping 39 states require some kind of parental involvement in a minor’s decision to have an abortion.

There are two major types of legislation mandating parental involvement in their child’s decision to have an abortion: Parental consent and parental notification laws. Parental consent laws mandate that a minor who has decided to get an abortion first get the OK from either one or both of her parents (or her legal guardian). Parental notification laws, on the other hand, require that a parent or legal guardian be notified of a child’s decision to get an abortion, either by the minor herself or by her doctor. Eight states, including Nebraska, mandate a notarized statement of consent from a parent before the abortion is performed. And in Arkansas, the Governor recently signed a law making it a crime to assist a minor in obtaining an abortion without her parent’s consent, “even if the abortion was performed in a state where parental consent is not required.”

Almost all states with parental involvement laws include some exceptions to the rules. Many states allow exceptions in medical emergencies or in cases of abuse, assault, incest, or neglect. Only a handful of states extend their consent or notification laws to other adult relatives, like grandparents.

But one exception in particular has increased the role of the courts in the personal decision-making of teens. As a result of a Supreme Court ruling that parents cannot have complete veto power in determining whether their child gets an abortion, almost all states offer a “judicial bypass” to their parental involvement laws. The bypass allows minors to go to the courts to waive their state’s involvement laws; but in effect moves the power to veto a teen’s abortion from her family to the courts.

And here is where the Nebraska case comes in. In this case, the biological parents of Anonymous 5 had previously been stripped of their legal parental rights after physically abusing their daughter and, as a result, the pregnant teen had no legal parents and was instead a ward of the state. With no parent to consent to her abortion, she was forced to ask permission from the courts, who then denied her request, essentially finding her mature enough to carry a baby she doesn’t want but too immature to consent to her own abortion. Instead of offering an alternative to parental consent, the courts serve as just another barrier between teens—especially wards of the state—and access to safe abortion services.

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Nebraska Court Decides 16-Year-Old Is Too Immature for an Abortion, But Motherhood’s Okay

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Anthony Kennedy Denounces Anthony Kennedy’s Supreme Court Jurisprudence

by daniel13stoko Posted on October 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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Justice Anthony Kennedy thinks our political system should solve more problems on its own, instead of turning to the courts to solve them. Jonathan Adler is unimpressed:

In most cases, the Supreme Court intervenes not to help the democratic process to function, but rather to alter the way in which these questions have been resolved. Moreover, Justice Kennedy is more prone to support such intervention than most of his colleagues, having voted to invalidate DOMA, Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, McCain-Feingold, the PPACA, the Stolen Valor Act, and so on. The only sense in which these questions were not “solved” before they came to the Court is in that the resolution was not that which Justice Kennedy would have preferred (or which Justice Kennedy believed is constitutionally compelled).

The Supreme Court, if it chose, could informally agree to overturn only those laws that are definitively unconstitutional. It has, needless to say, chosen nothing of the sort, with justices at both ends of the political spectrum routinely voting to overturn statutes based on wholly novel and often tortuous lines of reasoning. In recent years, this has been far more common among Anthony and his fellow conservatives than among the liberal justices.

However, if Kennedy is serious, perhaps he should propose a constitutional amendment that would require a two-thirds majority to overturn an act of Congress. More prosaically, since Kennedy is so often a swing vote, he could personally decide never to overturn a law unless there were at least five other votes already in favor. But he pretty obviously hasn’t the slightest intention of doing so.

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Anthony Kennedy Denounces Anthony Kennedy’s Supreme Court Jurisprudence

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Court Orders Release of Dying Prisoner After 41 Years in Solitary, But Louisiana Plans to Appeal

by vserko45 Posted on October 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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Earlier today, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana overturned the murder conviction of the dying prisoner Herman Wallace, ordering that the state “immediately release Mr. Wallace from custody.” But the state is appealing the decision.

Wallace is one of two members of the so-called Angola 3 who, along with Albert Woodfox, has been held in solitary confinement for more than 41 years. This summer, Wallace was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. He was taken off chemotherapy in September, and currently resides in a prison medical facility. The state’s reluctance to set free an aging and gravely ill prisoner highlights some of the issues covered by James Ridgeway in his award-winning story “The Other Death Sentence,” an article that chronicles the graying of America’s prison population, and the associated costs, both moral and financial.


Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.


Interactive: Inside a Solitary Cell


What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind


Documents: 7 Surprising Items That Get Prisoners Thrown Into Solitary


Maps: Solitary Confinement, State by State


VIDEO: Shane Bauer Goes Back Behind Bars at Pelican Bay

See more MoJo coverage of solitary confinement.

Here’s some background on the Angola 3, from Ridgeway’s own extensive coverage of their saga.

Convicted of armed robbery, the men were sent to Angola in 1971. Wallace and Woodfox were Black Panthers, and they began organizing to improve conditions at the prison, which did not win them points with the prison administration. In 1972 they were prosecuted and convicted for the murder of a prison guard named Brent Miller. They have been fighting the conviction ever since, pointing out (PDF) that one of the eyewitnesses was legally blind and the other was a known prison snitch who was rewarded for his testimony.

After the murder, the two—along with a third inmate named Robert King—were put in solitary, where they have remained ever since. (King was released in 2001, after 29 years in solitary, when his conviction in a separate prison murder was overturned.) Several years ago, Wallace and Woodfox were transferred to separate prisons, but they are still held in solitary.

The Times Picayune reports that Baton Rouge District Attorney’s office is now in the process of filing an appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court, and will also be asking for a stay of Herman’s release. Maria Hinds, a personal advocate who’s been closely involved in Wallace’s case since 2008, says that for now, the warden at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Facility, where Wallace is being held, has refused to release him, and that Wallace’s lawyers have filed a motion for contempt of court against the warden for violating a court order.

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Court Orders Release of Dying Prisoner After 41 Years in Solitary, But Louisiana Plans to Appeal

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