Cultivated Compendium

The Washington Post's Robert Barnes has a preview of arguments next week in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Elonis. Anthony Elonis made several threats on Facebook in rap-style lyrics toward his estranged wife, law enforcement, schoolchildren and co-workers, and he was convicted in federal court of making "true threats" toward most of those people. At issue in the Supreme Court is whether the test for proving someone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of making a true threat should be whether they subjectively intended to make good on the threat or if a reasonable person would view the speech as a threat. At issue are " the unique qualities of social media," Barnes writes. "In this rapidly evolving realm of communication, only the occasional emoticon may signal whether a writer is engaging in satire or black humor, exercising poetic license, or delivering the kind of grim warnings that have presaged school shootings and other acts of mass violence."

The Tulsa World's Ziva Branstetter reports that few Oklahomans receive compensation after their convictions are overturned because of evidence they are innocent: "Like most other states, Oklahoma’s wrongful conviction law requires a legal finding of 'actual innocence' after convictions are overturned. In practice, the process often requires exonerated people to prove their innocence again in court." Branstetter found in her review that just six out of 28 Oklahomans listed on the National Exoneration Registry collected any money for their years spent in prison.

The New York Times reports on the "Civil Gideon" movement, which is pushing to guarantee low-income Americans lawyers in civil cases involving basic needs like housing and employment. The problem is "free legal assistance in noncriminal cases is rare and growing rarer. A recent study in Massachusetts found that two-thirds of low-income residents who seek legal help are turned away." Several projects around the country are trying to improve guidelines for triaging clients between those who have to be turned away, those who can benefit from some self-help guidance and those who get their cases taken. And Washington state is experimenting with licensed legal technicians; that's an example of the efforts to find less costly alternatives than using lawyers on cases.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe's efforts to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act was thwarted because former Senator Phillip P. Puckett quit the state Senate, The Washington Post's Laura Vozzella reports. McAuliffe had hoped to sneak budget language past the Republicans to expand Medicaid on his own: "Then McAuliffe’s camp found an obscure bit of language in the previous year’s budget that appropriated extra Medicaid funds if — and only if — a newly formed (and hopelessly deadlocked) state Medicaid commission agreed to expansion. If the language was ripped out of that context, the thinking went, McAuliffe could claim that it authorized him to spend an extra $2 billion a year in federal Medicaid funds."

Puckett was enticed to quit by Republicans who discussed jobs for himself and his daughter, Vozzella reports. The jobs nor the Medicaid expansion have come to fruition.

KYW's Cherri Gregg reports that sheriff's deputies strip-searched juveniles appearing in criminal and custody cases in Philadelphia family court this week after the new courthouse officially opened. The juveniles were made to take off all their clothes, squat and cough. The practice was stopped by court administrators, Gregg reports. "Sources said the main concern of adults who complained about the procedures was ongoing traumatization of the children, since some of these juveniles may have already been victims of physical, sexual, or other abuse," Gregg also reports."

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has decided it will not follow the Restatement (Third) of Torts, which "would have allowed defendants to introduce elements regarding the foreseeability of a product's risks, and whether alternative, safer designs were available when the product was manufactured," The Legal Intelligencer's Max Mitchell reports. The Second Restatement does not consider the feasibility of an alternative design or a manufacturer's conduct. The court did adapt PA's products law to allow juries to consider "consumer expectation and risk-utility balancing tests."
 

U.S. District Judge Brian Morris ruled yesterday that Montana's ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, the Los Angeles Times reports. He found that the state's constitutional ban on same-sex matrimony violated the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

Even though the National Transportation Safety Board ruled that the FAA can fine drone operators for commercial use of their aircraft, including toy models, Popular Mechanics reports that the ruling was narrowly focused on "'whether unmanned aircraft systems are subject to an aviation safety regulation concerning reckless operation.'" A rule to integrate drones into American airspace will take up to a year before it goes into effect, Popular Mechanics further reports.

USA Today's Brad Heath reports that it's not just Ferguson, Mo., where more blacks get arrested than whites: "At least 1,581 other police departments across the USA arrest black people at rates even more skewed than in Ferguson." For example, more than half of the people arrested in Detroit suburb Dearborn, Mich., are black, but only 4 percent of the city's residents are black. Phillip Goff, president of the University of California Los Angeles' Center for Policing Equity, told Heath the disparities are driven by law enforcement bias and by problems in education and employment.