Cultivated Compendium

U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein, D-California, plans on introducing legislation to strengthen drone safety laws, Lawfare's Cody Poplin writes. The legislation would expand the moratorium on private drone use unless the FAA authorizes it, while imposing felony penalties. The bill would require a "safety certification for expansions of private drone use," Feinstein wrote to the head of the FAA.

The Second Circuit appeared skeptical during oral argument Tuesday over the Authors Guild's claim that it's not fair use for Google to scan millions of out-of-print books and post them online, Gigaom's Jeff John Roberts reports. The guild argued the scanning project is not fair use because it is commercial in nature, Roberts reports, which was a shift in strategy after "Judge Denny Chin awarded a decisive victory to Google in November of last year by throwing out the Authors Guild’s class action suit, after concluding Google Books was 'highly transformative.'"

The New York Times' Adam Liptak reports on the U.S. Supreme Court's oral arguments today on whether Peggy Young was unlawfully discriminated against by UPS when the company refused to assign her to lighter duty during her pregnancy: "The basic question in the case, Young v. United Parcel Service, No. 12-1226, was what to make of language in the pregnancy law that requires employers to treat 'women affected by pregnancy' the same as 'other persons not so affected but similar in their ability or inability to work.'"

The UPS has said it will start offering light duty to pregnant women next year, but defends its old policy as legal and fair.

A Staten Island grand jury cleared a NYPD police officer in the death of Eric Garner while he was held in a chokehold after being arrested for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, the New York Post's Larry Celona and two others reports. Garner's death was caught on a video that went viral and involved the same specter of white-officer brutality toward white men that the Michael Brown case has inspired. City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called for a Department of Justice investigation into the case.

Several conservatives have joined United Nations human rights lawyers seeking to stop the execution of a severely mentally ill Texas man. Scott Panetti's execution is slated to proceed today at 6 p.m. unless last-minute appeals filed yesterday have any effect, UPI reports.

Kathryn Kase of the Texas Defender Service told the Los Angeles Times, '"He thinks the prison system implanted a listening device in his teeth and knows what he's going to do before he does it. He's all wrapped up in this delusion that the prison system wants to 'rub him out' for trying to convert these heathens and preach the gospel."'

But the Texas Attorney General's Office said in court papers that Panetti knows that he killed his inlaws while his wife and child looked on and that he was sentenced to die for that crime.

The Federal Aviation Administration has said no to a petition from the Electronic Privacy Information Center to conduct rulemaking about the privacy and civil liberties concerns raised by drones, Gizmodo's Adam Clark Estes writes. The FAA, which has to prioritize making rules when immediate safety or security concerns are at stake, said privacy is not an immediate safety concern, but "conveniently, the agency didn't comment on whether drones and privacy present a security concern," Estes says. While it's understandable that the FAA didn't trckle drones and privacy, Este concludes "it makes the issue even more frustrating, because if the agency in charge of regulating drones is not going to protect privacy in its drone rulemaking, who will?"

U.S. Senators Michael Bennett and Orrin Hatch are circulating a draft bill to exempt some electronic health records, including medical charts and health histories, from the FDA's oversight, Reuters' Christina Farr reported last week. Medical technology that is classified as posing a low risk to patient safety would be exempt from FDA regulation. Bradley Merrill Thompson, an FDA-specialist with the Washington D.C.-based legal firm Epstein Becker & Green, told Reuters the bill would have unintended consequences.

The Washington Post's Sari Horwitz continues that newspaper's fantastic coverage of issues in Indian Country. This latest installment looks at how American Indian youth sent into the juvenile justice system are just locked away most of the time. There is no schooling, counseling or vocational opportunity at the juvenile facilities like the one on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota (which has been known to be the poorest part of the entire United States), just the "isolation of incarceration." When serious cases are handled by federal prosecutors, juveniles are sent into the federal system where there is no juvenile division or probation system for juveniles. In contrast, the juvenile facility on the Rosebud Reservation seeks to integrate "'traditional Lakota cultural information, and rehabilitate our youth by bridging the gaps they might have with their identities and who they are.'"

According to a report in Reuters, several leaders of major American corporations are threatening to start siding with the foes of healthcare reform if President Barack Obama's administration does not stop challenging some workplace wellness programs: "The programs aim to control healthcare costs by reducing smoking, obesity, hypertension and other risk factors that can lead to expensive illnesses. A bipartisan provision in the 2010 healthcare reform law allows employers to reward workers who participate and penalize those who don't." But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed lawsuits challenging wellness programs at Honeywell and two other companies, Reuters reports. The EEOC argues that the programs require medical testing in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

According to Reuters, big companies could pursue several strategies to challenge Obamacare: support legal challenges to the subsidies given to people with low incomes to buy health insurance on the federal exchange, make executives available to testify at hearings on Obamacare, and radically change employer-sponsored health insurance by giving workers a fixed amount of money to buy coverage on private insurance exchanges.

Ohio is preparing to join the ranks of several other states that have enacted provisions to keep secret their execution procedures, The Marshall Project's Maurice Chammah reports. The American Board of Anesthesiology has warned that it might revoke the certificate of any anesthesiologist who participates in an execution. A proposed Ohio law would protect doctors' licenses if they participate in executions. The law also would protect the identity of compounding pharmacies that mix drugs used in lethal injections. There are similar laws in Missouri, Pennsylvania and Arizona, among other states.

Megan McCracken, Eighth Amendment Resource Counsel at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law's Death Penalty Clinic told Chammah that “'when secrecy statutes prevent the courts from reviewing pertinent information about execution procedures, they effectively prevent a determination of whether the execution procedures are constitutional.”'