Cultivated Compendium

Another settlement has been reached in the class action brought by the kids imprisoned in juvenile detention facilities after two Pennsylvania judges were given cash by the facilities' owners, The Scranton Times Leader reports. "Three companies behind the private, for-profit juvenile detention and treatment facilities at the heart of the scandal that sent two former Luzerne County judges to jail have reached a settlement with numerous juveniles and parents, promising to put $2.5 million into an account to be disbursed for legal fees and to the families and individuals who are part of the class-action suit," The Times Leader also reports.

(My thanks to my husband, Jason Rearick, for flagging this development for me.)

Washington state has an upcoming vote on a measure that would require the labeling of genetically modified foods. Now the Washington State Attorney General alleges that the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a major lobbying group for food manufacturers, violated campaign finance laws in its effort to oppose that measure, Reuters reports. The Attorney General alleges GMA has spent more than $7 million in its campaign against the proposed disclosure law "while shielding the identity of its contributors," Reuters reports.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a challenge to a "patent troll" who says it invented podcasting, GigaOm reports. According to EFF's petition for inter partes review, patent owner Personal Audio says it invented podcasting in 1996, but EFF says "distributing episodes of media content on the Internet--had been known for at least three years at that point." Read the full petition here: https://www.eff.org/document/podcasting-petition-inter-partes-review

A John Jay College of Criminal Justice study found that New York sober homes, or residences for poor drug and alcohol addicts, are often unsanitary, dangerous and accept kickbacks from outpatient drug treatment programs to require their residences to attend those treatment programs, ProPublica reported today.

ProPublica also notes: "The report estimates that as many as 10,000 New Yorkers currently reside in three-quarter [or sober] houses. Residents are often former prisoners or recent patients of residential drug treatment programs. Most are unemployed and receive Medicaid. A little less than half have been homeless at one point in their lives."

The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports: "Five years after Congress authorized a sweeping warrantless surveillance program, the Justice Department is setting up a potential Supreme Court test of whether it is constitutional by notifying a criminal defendant — for the first time — that evidence against him derived from the eavesdropping, according to officials." The disclosure will be made after an internal debate within the DOJ on wheterh such disclosure is legally necessary.

A federal judge did not rule today as expected on Michigan's bans on same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption. Instead, the Detroit Free Press reports, the judge set a trial date in February. The judge also said in court that he must decide the issue as a matter of law.  The challenge is to a constitutional amendment adopted by voters. This is an example of an area left untouched by the U.S. Supreme Court: do state-level bans on same-sex matrimony violate federal or state constitutional rights?

The Washington Post editorializes that children, even teenagers, should not be held in the adult criminal justice system. Among other reasons, incarceration does little to prevent minors from committing crimes again, minors are the most likely to be sexually abused by other inmates, and "teenagers are not fully developed; studies have shown that their brains aren’t as capable of moral reasoning and impulse control as adults in their early or mid-20s," The Post argues.

A legislative task force appointed to give advice to elected representatives on the release of crime scene photos and emergency-call recordings heard testimony that "the news media needs access to as much information as possible -- even gruesome photos -- about Connecticut homicides in order to better inform the public," The Connecticut Post reported.

Meanwhile, a Connecticut legislator, whose district includes the town where the Sandy Hook school shootings occurred, questioned trusting the judgment of the media about releasing such materials. '"The idea of the public's need to know and the public's intrusion versus the victims' rights was obscene, in my mind. Having been there, having observed the behavior of the media was outrageous. To ask me to specifically trust the judgments of the media, I'm not willing to do that,"' The Post reported the legislator saying.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether to change the state's products liability law to allow for negligence principles. "The Third Restatement allows arguments on the foreseeability of a product's risk and requires a plaintiff to establish that an alternative, safer design was viable when the product was manufactured, effectively opening the door for defendants to insert issues of negligence into products liability litigation. The Second Restatement focuses litigation on the characteristics of the products, and does not allow a fact-finder to consider the manufacturer's conduct, or the feasibility and practicality of an alternative design," The Legal Intelligencer, Pennsylvania's legal newspaper (and my journalism alma mater), reports.