Cultivated Compendium

Two Arizona reporters have received a $3.75 million settlement because they were falsely arrested in 2007 by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The Phoenix New Times reports that their co-founders "Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin were taken from their homes in the middle of the night and jailed on misdemeanor charges alleging that they violated the secrecy of a grand jury -- which turned out never to have been convened."

Two-and-a-half years after the paper published the sheriff's address as part of an investigation into the sheriff's commercial real estate transactions, Arpaio and Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas "collaborated to appoint Phoenix attorney Dennis Wilenchik as a 'special prosecutor' to go after the paper. He issued grand jury subpoenas for the notes, records, and sources of the paper's reporters and editors for all Arpaio-related stories over a broad period of time, as well as for the IP addresses of New Times' readers of such stories," according to the New Times.

The Associated Press reports that U.S. District Judge Timothy Black ruled today that Ohio's 9-year-old ban on same-sex marriage cannot extend to refusing to recognize valid same-sex marriages from other states on death certificates. The ruling is likely to have a broader impact than just on death certificates because of the judge's sweeping language. According to the AP, the judge reasoned: "'The question presented is whether a state can do what the federal government cannot — i.e., discriminate against same-sex couples ... simply because the majority of the voters don't like homosexuality (or at least didn't in 2004). Under the Constitution of the United States, the answer is no."'

The New York Times reports that the White House has asserted the state secrets privilege in two federal cases pending in California. The plaintiffs are challenging the constitutionality of the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance programs. "The government said that despite recent leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that made public a fuller scope of the surveillance and data collection programs put in place after the Sept. 11 attacks, sensitive secrets remained at risk in any courtroom discussion of their details — like whether the plaintiffs were targets of intelligence collection or whether particular telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon had helped the agency," The Times reports.

Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, writing in the Los Angeles Times, argues that the U.S. Supreme Court should follow the lead of the 9th Circuit and add live streaming of court proceedings: "When Justice David H. Souter uttered his now-infamous declaration in 1996 that cameras would roll into the Supreme Court over his dead body, the Internet was relatively new and Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the iPhone were as real as Capt. Kirk's communicator. Today, there are few facets of daily life that are not available instantly online, including many criminal trials, which you can even watch on your mobile device at 30,000 feet. What this has done is create an expectation by the public that if something is truly important, it can be witnessed firsthand."

United Press International has this roundup of cases to watch when the U.S. Supreme Court reconvenes January 13: "The big dog in the rest of the Supreme Court term which ends when the justices 'rise; for the summer recess -- when the supreme backsides leave their comfortable rocking chairs behind the bench -- is the challenge to the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate. The case demonstrates a Washington fact: The Supreme Court often influences how the average American lives as much or more than Congress or the White House. The justices agreed to settle the dispute over the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate -- whether the health of women covered is dispositive, as the Obama administration argues, or whether the owners of for-profit businesses may use religious objections to avoid providing contraception insurance."

FierceEMR reports that consolidation and new business relationships between healthcare providers will create issues regarding patient privacy and electronic health records, according to two healthcare attorneys interviewed by the blog.

Health law attorneys Michael Kline and Elizabeth Litten with Fox Rothschild in Princeton, N.J., told FierceEMR that the issues could include:

a. the expansion of health care entities "increases the risk of breach of the data as the octupus grows";

b. fights over who gets the patient, including if it means that the entity that controls the health care records is in control of the patient.

A federal judge struck down Utah's ban on same-sex marriage as violative of LGBT couples' rights to due process and equal protection, the AP reports. U.S. District Judge Robert J. Shelby's ruling could prime the issue for the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, while ruling this year that a ban on federal benefits for gay couples is unconstitutional, did not address whether there is a fundamental right for same-sex couples to get married in the United States.

The Wall Street Journal reports that research by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee found that data brokers are maintaining health records as part of their massive data collection: "Marketers maintain databases that purport to track and sell the names of people who have diabetes, depression, and osteoporosis, as well as how often women visit a gynecologist."

There is little oversight of data brokers, including from the subjects of the data collection; we don't have the right to find out what type of data is collected about us or who buys the information about us.

"An industry which began in the 1970s collecting data from public records to help marketers send direct mail has become an engine of a global $120 billion digital-advertising industry, helping marketers deliver increasingly targeted ads across the web and on mobile phones," The Journal also reports.

The Philadelphia City Paper reports on multiple legislative proposals pending in Pennsylvania to deny prisoners access to open records. On one hand, access to public records allows prisoners, including "jailhouse lawyers," to investigate the conditions of their confinement. On the other hand, public officials report being inundated with public-records requests from inmates, including flr personal information about the public employees who played a role in their incarceration.

The Legal Intelligencer's Max Mitchell reports that grand jury documents show that it was unclear whether Cynthia Baldwin, the former general counsel for Penn State, represented the institution or three former university administrators in a grand jury probe into convicted serial sex-abuser Jerry Sandusky. For example, "according to the transcripts of grand jury proceedings from April 13, 2011, before former university President Graham Spanier was brought out to testify regarding his awareness of allegedly reported incidents of sexual assault committed by former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, Baldwin indicated to the judge that she represented 'the university solely.' However, when Spanier took the stand less than an hour later, he identified Baldwin as his counsel."