Cultivated Compendium

Constitutional amendments have been proposed to transform the selection of Kansas appellate judges, the Topeka Capital-Journal's Tim Carpenter reports. One plan would abandon a merit-selection system in which a nominating commission forwards finalists for Supreme Court vacancies to the governor. The governor already has the power to pick Court of Appeals judges outright. Another plan would institute elections for both appellate courts.

Jeffrey Jackson, a law professor at Washburn University in Topeka, testified during a legislative hearing that "judges should not be reshaped into politicians who compete for contributions and work the campaign trail."

Foreign Policy's Phelim Kine reports on the many, many threats that Afghanistan journalists face: The Taliban said last year that it would specifically target journalists and NGOs as part of its insurgency, and there were eight journalists killed in 2014. A Human Rights Watch report documented how media outlets are increasingly subject to harassment, threats and violence from security forces and pro-government warlords. And the official Media Violations Investigation Commission, rather than examining if complaints about the accuracy of reporting have merit, directly forward complaints to the Attorney General's office to intiate legal action against journalists. The result? Afghani journalists self-censor in order to protect themselves (this reminds me of how some Mexican news outlets stopped reporting on drug trafficking because of the murders and kidnappings they faced from drug cartels): "A Kabul-based senior newspaper editor told Human Rights Watch that reporting on certain politically connected mujahidin warlords — veterans of the conflicts against both the Soviet occupation and the Taliban — were effectively off limits for his reporters," Kine reports. 

A federal judge has ordered an Alabama probate judge not to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples anymore, the Montgomery Advertiser's Brian Lyman reports. The probate judge closed his marriage-license bureau after Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore on Sunday ordered probate judges not to issues licenses to same-sex couples. U.S. District Judge Ginny Granade struck down Alabama's constitutional and statutory bans on same-sex matrimony, and the stay on her order was lifted Monday. At the close of the business day, 19 counties were not issuing marriage licenses, and 25 had closed their bureaus altogether.

Jesse Eisinger, writing in a column for ProPublica and the New York Times, argues that sunshine is not actually the best mechanism to ensure government accountability. Even though disclosure and transparency has become the answer to every problem in modern society, requiring "corporations and government to release reams of information on food, medicine, household products, consumer financial tools, campaign finance and crime statistics,"  dicslosure doesn't work when transactions become complex, he writes. The answer? "Hard and fast rules. If lawmakers want to end a bad practice, ban it. Having them admit it is not enough."

Last year, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that a death row inmate couldn't get DNA testing on evidence in his case because he didn't prove that it contained biological material. According to the Associated Press, now a Texas lawmaker has proposed a reform to the crime-scene DNA testing law that he authored to allow any convicted person to request testing on "evidence that is reasonably likely to contain biological material," not just of evidence that "'containing biological material.'"

The Third Circuit has ruled that the religious exception from the mandate that all health insurance plans cover contraception is fair, The Legal Intelligencer's Saranac Hale Spencer reports. The accommodation for nonprofit religious organizations requires a head of a religious nonprofit to submit a self-certification to insurers that it will be claiming the exception so that the insurer, not the employer, is paying for the contraceptive portion of insurance coverage. The challengers argued "the act of sending the notification to the insurance company makes them complicit in providing the contraceptive services to which they object, which qualifies as a substantial burden under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act," but the appellate panel reasoned that "'the regulatory notice requirement does not necessitate any action that interferes with the appellees' religious activities,'" Spencer reports.

The Second Circuit has upheld the certification of class actions against law firm Mel Harris and Associates, as well as a debt-buying company and a process serving agency, for allegedly intentionally failing to serve debtors in debt-collection cases and obtaining default judgments in New York City Civil Court, the New York Law Journal's Mark Hamblett reports.

The plaintiffs allege that more than 90 percent of the debtors were never served and the defendant provided bogus proof of service and affidavits of merit attesting to their personal knowledge of the debts to win default.

As the trial proceeds in the murder of Etan Patz, who disappeared in 1979 while walking to a NYC bus, the Associated Press' Adam Geller reports on how confessions like the one in the Patz murder case can be clouded by defendants' mental illnesses. The presiding judge has found that Pedro Hernandez's confession to Patz's murder is admissible, but some experts said the defendant's history of mental illness "raise difficult questions about whether a suspect is exercising free will in talking to police, and greatly increase the potential for false confessions." Only the final part of Hernandez's interrogation was recorded, not the hours of questioning before he gave a videotaped recording.

Of the 300-plus people who have been cleared by the Innocence Project, a quarter falsely confessed, and 30 to 40 percent of those people were mentally ill or mentally disabled.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California has ruled that a group of AT&T customers haven't been able to show they have standing to show that their Fourth Amendment rights were violated by alleged surveillance of all of their Internet communications, The Recorder's Ross Todd reports. Even though a retired AT&T technician Mark Klein reports that the the company's Internet traffic is routed to a secret room controlled by the government, the judge "found that Klein could not establish 'the content, function, or purpose of the secure room at the AT&T site based on his own independent knowledge' and that lawyers challenging the program under the Fourth Amendment hadn't offered enough admissible evidence to support standing."