Former judge Amanda Williams has been indicted for allegedly lying to a grand jury, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Bill Rankin reports. Williams came to national attention after This American Life reported that "she behaved in a tyrannical manner and locked up some drug court defendants indefinitely," Rankin writes.
The first non-lawyer legal technicians authorized to provide some legal services in Washington state have passed their qualifying examination, Robert Ambrogi blogs on Law Sites. Seven of nine passed.
The program seeks to help bridge the access-to-justice gap by licensing non-lawyers to provide legal advice in some areas, including domestic relations.
The U.S. Supreme Court has made it harder for prosecutors to convict people who make threats on social media, The Washington Post's Robert Barnes reports.
Petitioner Anthony Elonis was convicted of threatening to kill his estranged wife, law enforcement officials and a kindergarten class through Facebook posts written in a rap lyric-esque way; he was convicted under a federal law that makes it a crime to communicate '''any threat to injure the person of another.'"
But the high court, in a narrow opinion, said that Elonis' state of mind had to be considered, Barnes reports. The majority of the justices rejected the idea that a poster's intent is immaterial in judging whether he or she has stepped outside the bounds of the First Amendment and truly threatened others. Lower courts have found that what matters is only if a reasonable person would interpret the words as a threat.
The court's narrow ruling leaves it up to the lower courts to develop exactly what standard should be applied to determine if a poster has made a true threat.
Texas has enacted a law making it easier for convicted defendants to get DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project.
People who have been convicted of crimes now have to show that there a reasonable likelihood that evidence contains DNA, Texas Lawyer's Angela Morris reports. The law was enacted in response to Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rulings strictly interpreting Texas' "post-conviction DNA testing statute 'to require proof that biological evidence exists before a judge can allow testing to see if exculpatory biological evidence exists. This new interpretation severely restricts a judge's ability to order DNA testing … which in turn prevents the discovery of exonerations in cases where exculpatory evidence is often microscopic,'" Morris reports.
The D.C. Circuit has refused to block the release of videos showing a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay being force-fed, The Intercept's Cora Currier reports. Media organizations are seeking footage of Abu Wa'el Dhiab's force-feedings, and the district court granted their motion to unseal and release the video.
The court concluded that the district court's decision was not an immediately appealable order and that it lacks jurisdiction
The D.C. Circuit has refused to block the release of videos showing a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay being force-fed, The Intercept's Cora Currier reports. Media organizations are seeking footage of Abu Wa'el Dhiab's force-feedings, and the district court granted their motion to unseal and release the video.
The court concluded that the district court's decision was not an immediately appealable order and that it lacks jurisdiction
The Washington Supreme Court has ruled that state's law allowing defamation defendants to get cases thrown out early violates the constitutional right to a trial by jury, the Volokh Conspiracy's Eugene Volokh reports. The anti-SLAPP law says defamation plaintiffs can only move forward with their cases if they can show they would prevail by clear and convincing evidence, and the Washington Supreme Court said this stringent standard violates the right to a jury in civil cases. Volokh notes that many other states have anti-SLAPP statutes that only require judges to determine if the plaintiffs has "stated and substantiated a legally sufficient claim," not to weigh evidence.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, won't allow homeowners to get forgiveness on their mortgages even if they owe substantially more on their homes than they are worth, The Huffington Post's Ben Hallman reports. Leaders of FHFA think that giving debt forgiveness to some homeowners would encourage other people to stop paying their mortgages in order to get debt forgiveness too. But the Congressional Budget Office has found that principal reduction plan could help 1.2 million borrowers save their homes and also save Fannie and Freddie, as well as taxpayers, $2.8 billion, Hallman reports.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that bankruptcy judges can decide issues that would normally be handled by federal district judges--if the parties involved consent, Supreme Court Brief's Marcia Coyle reports. The consent can be implied.
Sotomayor opined that it doesn't violate the separation of powers to allow bankruptcy courts, which are created by Congress under Article I of the Constitution, to decide claims submitted to them by consent so long as there is supervision by Article III courts, which are the judicial branch of the federal government as defined by Article III of the Constitution.
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether low-income taxpayers can only receive subsidies for health insurance if they purchased their policies on state-run insurance exchanges, not federal exchanges. The four words at issue in the Affordable Care Act? "Established by a state." The New York Times' Robert Pear reports that the two dozen Democrats and Republicans involved in writing the law say those four words were not meant to make tax subsidies in the law available only in states that established their own health insurance marketplaces.
For example, former Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, said the words in dispute are a "'drafting error."' Christopher E. Condeluci, who was a staff lawyer for Republicans on the Finance Committee, told Pear that, when senators drafted a backup plan to allow the federal government to establish an exchange in any state that didn't have its own, it was an oversight to not include a cross-reference to the section of the tax code providing subsidies.
But Pear notes that some Supreme Court justices, including Justice Antonin Scalia, interpret laws based not on "'what Congress would have wanted, but what Congress enacted.”'
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