Cultivated Compendium

A columnist for The State, a newspaper in South Carolina, writes about a unique wrinkle arising out of that state's system for selecting the chief justice of its supreme court: legislators might break with tradition of selecting the longest-serving justice as a matter of course.

The current chief justice and another current justice on the court both have gone through a vetting process with a merit selection commission. Usually, the most senior justice is elevated as a matter of tradition to become the chief justice. But Supreme Court Justice Costa Pleicones is challenging incumbent Chief Justice Jean Toal.

"The Legislature will break precedent if it elects Mr. Pleicones. But even if it re-elects Mrs. Toal, the status quo already has been interrupted, making it much easier for lawmakers to break with tradition and skip over Mr. Pleicones and, who knows, perhaps skip over Mr. Beatty, possibly even select a chief justice who isn’t on the court," Cindi Ross Scoppe wrote.

The issue with all of this? Politicizing a branch of government that is supposed to be apolitical, Scoppe argued.

New York's rental market is absurdly expensive and it seems to be having an impact on sober homes for people to get treatment, including those coming back into society after being jailed.

According to The Crime Report, Suffolk County sought to pay $500 per resident for sober homes (which is $300 more than the state pays per resident), but one operator told the county that  "'[f]ive hundred dollars is not going to cut it,' [Rosemary] Dehlow [chief program officer for Community Housing Innovations] said. 'Everything in this RFQ I believe in. You want solid housing; you want restrictions on certain things; you want to make sure they're clean.' But, Dehlow said, the legislation and the RFQ ignore the underlying void that sober homes have come to fill." She said that sober homes have 20 people in a house because it's affordable.

TCR, a publication affiliated with John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and ProPublica have been reporting on people who have died while living in sober homes. For example, one mother testified about her son overdosing on heroin despite living in a sober home, according to TCR.

The Arkansas attorney general certified a ballot measure today that would allow voters to amend the state constitution to recognize same-sex matrimony, according to ArkansasMatters.com. The ballot measure must now have get signatures in support to get on the ballot.

The Pennsylvania Superior Court has stayed part of the sentence of a former Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice convicted of political corruption, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. Joan Orie Melvin, who is appealing her conviction, won't have to write letters of apology until her appeal is disposed of. The court reasoned that, if Orie Melvin's succeeds in getting a new trial, "'it is possible that her apology letters could be used as evidence against her,"' according to the Post-Gazette.

 

Andrew Cohen, in a blog for The Atlantic, argues that the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous decision to reject "a claim by a convicted murderer who argued that she was denied her Sixth Amendment right to the 'effective assistance of counsel' because her lawyer counseled her to reject a manslaughter plea deal without first adequately investigating the facts of her case" turns the constitutional right to counsel into a right without a remedy.  Cohen expounds: "Your lawyer may have violated ethical rules; he may have failed to timely consult with other attorneys; he may have not adequately investigated your case; he may have given you bad advice that leads you to withdraw a guilty plea. And yet the legal standards imposed by the Supreme Court declare that you still aren't entitled to any meaningful relief by the courts. In law school, they call this 'a right without a remedy.' In real life, it's called injustice."

After lawmakers approved legislation to authorize same-sex marriage in Illinois, Governor Pat Quinn has said he will sign the bill, the Chicago Tribune reports. The newspaper also reports that the prospects for the legislation improved when supporters could point to the situation "in in which gay couples living in states that recognize same-sex marriage have more rights than their counterparts in states that haven't legalized gay marriage. The two-class system was a clear narrative that advocates could use when lobbying lawmakers who were on the fence, contending it just didn't make sense for gay couples in Illinois to be denied access to benefits that were available to couples living just across the border in Iowa."

Iowa has same-sex marriage as the result of a ruling by that state's Supreme Court.

Lawfare has a comprehensive roundup of all the legislative proposals to reform the mass surveillance that has been revealed by Edward Snowden's leaks. One suggested reform is to end the ex parte proceedings in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in which the government's requests face no opposition: "Judging by the bills in play, there’s pretty much two ideas for doing so: the addition of a new 'Special Advocate,' a lawyer who would argue in the public interest in FISC proceedings; or of an amicus curiae, or 'friend of the court,' when called upon by the court," according to Lawfare.
 

CBS reports: "With the support of every member of the Democratic caucus and some Republicans, the Senate on Monday voted to move forward with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill that would prohibit discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity." That means the full Senate is very likely to pass the bill.

But the bill's prognosis in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is not so good. Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner came out against the legislation Monday.

The Legal Intelligencer (my journalism alma mater) reports on the continuing trend of the reduction in mass torts in the Philadelphia court system. Court leaders, however, have seen a 5% uptick in filings by out-of-state plaintiffs suing over the pharmaceutical drugs they took.

One attorney told The Legal that more vigorous regulation by the Obama administration may have led to fewer tort lawsuits. "Obama has been more proactive in putting out more label changes, warning physicians about the side effects of prescription drugs. That takes away a lot of the failure-to-warn claims," plaintiffs attorney Sol Weiss said.