Cultivated Compendium

Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional sentencing juveniles to mandatory life sentences, the New York Times reports that "most states have taken half measures, at best, to carry out the rulings, which could affect more than 2,000 current inmates and countless more in years to come." State supreme courts have been split on whether the ruling was retroactive, The Times further reports.

One example of a long sentence is a 70-year sentence given to a 14-year-0ld in Florida.

The Times also notes: "Pennsylvania has the most inmates serving automatic life sentences for murders committed when they were juveniles: more than 450, according to the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. In October, the State Supreme Court found that the Miller ruling did not apply to these prior murder convictions, creating what the law center, a private advocacy group, called an 'appallingly unjust situation' with radically different punishments depending on the timing of the trial."

The Washington Post's Robert Barnes writes that "compulsory union fees conflict with the First Amendment’s protection against forced association and speech," but Supreme Court precedent allows for public employees who opt out of union membership to still be forced to "pay 'fair share' fees to support the organization’s collective-bargaining work." The issue is coming up in a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court on whether Illinois in-home assistants to peoples with disabilities and other people who otherwise could be institutionalized (paid through Medicaid-waiver programs) have to pay union fees. The justices are being asked to overrule their precedent.

Two separate pieces caught my eye today: the adminstrative-law systems for disability claims and Medicare are failing. The Medicare adminstrative-law system is facing a tremendous backlog, while the disablity-claims system could be facing many fake claims.

The Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals has a backlog of 357,000 claims, which developed because the number of cases grew by 184 percent while the system's resources remained constant, The Washington Post reports. The chief judge has suspended "new requests for hearings filed by hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and other health-care providers," The Post reports.

Meanwhile, D. Randall Frye, administrative law judge for the United States Social Security Administration, wrote in the New York Times today that there are no checks and balances in the system against claimants who might be fraudsters. Frye says other administrative law judges and he want an adversarial system in which there would be an advocate for taxpayers to challenge medical evidence and to review case files and in which social-media evidence could be used to check the credibility of claimants. "Social Security disability courts have millions of claimants and constitute one of the world’s largest judicial systems. But the system is not run by anyone with real judicial experience. Instead, we are at the mercy of unelected bureaucrats whose only concern is how many cases each judge can churn out and how fast we can do it," Frye opined.

The Iowa Supreme Court is considering removing the bar examination as a requirement for bar admission for graduates of the two law schools in Iowa, the Des Moines Register reports. One of the arguments in favor of the elimination of the bar exam is that graduates wouldn't have to wait months in order to start working as a lawyer. One law-school official told the Register that, by his calculation, graduates would reduce their debt level by 30 percent by avoiding the delay of their entry into their profession as well as avoiding the need to borrow the costs of studying for the bar exam.

Oxfam's Emily Greenspan writes about threats to a Peruvian law requiring the consultation of indigenous people before development occurs. Peru is apparently considering foregoing such consultation in its most productive oil block. "This would violate Peru’s indigenous peoples’ consultation law and the human rights of the indigenous communities inhabiting the area, as articulated in the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples," Greenspan writes. There already has been extreme pollution in that block: "Oil companies have dumped millions of barrels of production waters directly into the Tigre, Corrientes, Pastaza, and Marañon rivers in Block 192 over the last four decades," Greenspan further writes.
 

Vermont is considering two pieces of legislation to seek the prevention of wrongful convictions. One bill would require blind lineups "in which the officer conducting them doesn’t know which participant is the suspect and therefore can’t influence the witness," The Rutland Herald reports. The other bill would call for taping police interogations in homicide and sexual-assault interrogations, the paper further reports.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in two cases on whether police making an arrest must get a warrant before searching a suspect's mobile phone, Bloomberg reports. "More than 90 percent of American adults own mobile phones, giving the cases broad practical significance. The outcome also may hint at how the justices would view the National Security Agency’s telephone-data program, an issue likely bound for the high court," Bloomberg further writes.

Pennsylvania's voter ID law has been struck down, The Legal Intelligencer's Sara Spencer reports. The judge reasoned: “'The right to vote, fundamental in Pennsylvania, is irreplaceable, necessitating its protection before any deprivation occurs. Deprivation of the franchise is neither compensable nor replaceable by after-the-fact legal remedies, necessitating injunctive and declaratory relief,'" Spencer writes. Oddly, the decision was not published so it could be citeable.

Judge Steven W. Rhodes of United States Bankruptcy Court blocked Detroit's plan to "pay $165 million to two big banks to extricate itself from some long-term financial contracts that have been costing the bankrupt city tens of millions of dollars a year," The New York Times reports. The judge said that the payment is too expensive.

The judge's rejection of the payout was a surprise, The Times further reports. The judge said that, instead of paying the $165 million to Bank of America and UBS to get out of interest-rate swap contracts (that are using Detroit's tax dollars earned from local casinos as collateral), Detroit could sue to get out of the contracts.