Cultivated Compendium

The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled this week that a private prison company can be held liable for three female inmates who were raped by a guard, The Associated Press' Morgan Lee reports. The Corrections Corporation of America was found liable for $3 million in damages.

That award is on appeal to the Tenth Circuit. The federal circuit court certified a legal issue to the New Mexico Supreme Court on whether the prison operator could be found liable when the employee was aided in committing the rapes due to his job position. The state court ruled affirmatively on the question.

Corporate giving to super PACs, including by "ghost" corporations, is breaking records this presidential election cycle, The Washington Post's Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy report. More and more legal entities are being formed right before they make six- and seven-figure contributions to super PACs: "Many corporate givers this cycle are well-established hedge funds, energy companies and real estate firms. But a significant share of the money is coming from newly formed LLCs with cryptic names that offer few clues about their backers."

Election regulators are failing to take action. The divided FEC has not issued any new rules regarding corporate donations that could violate the federal ban on straw donations.

Kentucky Democratic legislators have passed legislation to try to maintain that state's Kynect health care exchange and its Medicaid expansion, the Courier-Journal's Tom Loftus reports. However, the legislation doesn't have a chance of passing the Republican-controlled state Senate.

Republican Governor Matt Bevin is doing away with Kynect and shifting to the federal healthcare insurance exchange. Bevin is also asking for a waiver from federal regulators for how Kentucky runs its Medicaid expansion.

No surprise that the biggest news in the legal world is Merrick Garland's nomination by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday. The Republicans in U.S. Senate are refusing to even give a hearing to Garland, who is the chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

But in the unlikely event that Garland gets confirmed to the Supreme Court, Robert Barnes, writing for the Washington Post, observes that replacing the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia with Garland "would be the most significant shift on the Supreme Court since Clarence Thomas was confirmed in 1991 to replace the liberal civil rights giant Thurgood Marshall."

Scholars project that Garland would be to the right of the court's liberals and would join Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is to the left of the court's conservatives, in the center of the court.

Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, told The Post, “'Chief Judge Garland’s jurisprudence is the epitome of centrist, case-by-case adjudication — not because he lacks deep methodological commitments, but because he’s never been prone to go out of his way to wax philosophical about those commitments. He has a remarkable dearth of separate opinions, and even his majority opinions tend to be fairly efficient, technical resolutions of the legal questions before him.”' 

Three former immigration judges have challenged the assertion by a Justice Department official that 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds can represent themselves in court and don't have a right to a lawyer in deportation proceedings, The Washington Post's Jerry Markon reports.

The judges made their argument in a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which is hearing an appeal on whether immigrant children are entitled to taxpayer-funded attorneys. The judges wrote in their brief "'children are simply incapable of representing themselves in immigration proceedings. Absent effective representation for a child, it is impossible for anyone in an immigration court — including the Immigration Judge — to investigate and develop the child’s case to a degree that would permit the fair adjudication that due process requires,"' Markon reports.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are trying to get the government to provide appointed counsel to every indigent child in immigration court proceedings, but the Justice Department is opposing their lawsuit.

Jack H. Weil,  an assistant chief immigration judge in the Justice Department office that sets and oversees policies for the nation’s 58 immigration courts, was offered as an expert witness in the lawsuit by the Justice Department. According to the Post, Weil said in a deposition in the lawsuit that "'I’ve taught immigration law literally to 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of patience. They get it. It’s not the most efficient, but it can be done.”'

The U.S. military has proposed historic changes to its justice system in the wake of concerns about the sexual assault of service members, ProPublica's T. Christian Miller reports. However, the proposed reforms don't address the power of senior commanders to decide whether to press charges, select juries and to vacate court martial convictions. 

The changes would include the issuance of sentencing guidelines for military crimes and having military judges, not juries, determine sentences. 

Charles Erdmann, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, told ProPublica "'these would be the biggest reforms in 30 years.'"

Reuters' Julia Edwards reports that President Barack Obama is likely to pick one of two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit as his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. His selection has come down to Judge Sri Srinivasan, who, if confirmed, would be the first Asian American to serve on the nation's highest court, or Judge Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit.

The announcement is expected as soon as tomorrow.

Senate Republicans have vowed not to hold confirmation hearings on any nominee the president names to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has come out against doctors prescribing highly addictive opioid painkillers, The Washington Post's Karoun Demirjian and Lenny Bernstein report.

The nonbinding guidelines from the federal government recommend that doctors prescribe alternative courses of treatment before resorting to opioid painkillers to treat chronic pain. The guidelines have been developed in light of the national public health crisis of addiction to heroin and narcotic painkillers.

The CDC estimates that almost 28,700 people died from overdoes from prescription opiods and heroin in 2014, The Post reports.

President Barack Obama would sign a Freedom of Information Act reform bill that has passed the U.S. Senate, Politico's Josh Gerstein reports. The bill "calls for a centralized portal to request records from all government agencies and writes into the law a presumption of openness that the Obama Administration adopted by executive order when he took office in 2009," Gerstein reports. Freedom of information advocates have been criticizing the Obama administration for having broken that promise of openness.

A similar bill has passed the House of Representatives and needs to be reconciled with the Senate FOIA bill.

An Alaska judge has ruled that state's governor had the authority to expand Medicaid, without legislative approval, to cover people between the ages of 19 and 64 who are not caring for dependent children, not disabled and not pregnant, and who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, The Associated Press' Becky Bohrer reports. 

Legislators argued that the group is not a mandatory group to be covered under Medicaid. The judge, however, ruled that state law needs to be changed for that population not to have to be covered.