Cultivated Compendium

Florida's 17th judicial circuit wanted to charge $132,000 to search for records pertinent to the Center for Public Integrity 's request to access procedures and policies regarding foreclosure cases. "Charging high fees for access to public information can undermine public records laws and serve as a back-door way for government agencies to avoid releasing information they want kept private," the center notes. The center is seeking reconsideration of the bill, which it says are excessive.

Last month, the United Nations General Assembly approved a document to strengthen the rights of indigenous peoples around the world as part of a meeting of international leaders. However, Steven Newcomb, writing for Indian Country Today Media Network, says that it is clear that American Indian tribes are not being recognized as sovereign nations by the United Nations or by the United States: "What the United States government is supporting in the United Nations is an international recognition of the United States’ imposed 'domestic dependent nation' status for our Originally Free Nations, a status premised on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination. The U.S. is fully supportive of that 'domesticated' and 'tribal' status being recognized in the United Nations because it serves to validate in the international arena the centuries-old, 'under-the-thumb' system of US domination and Original Nation subjection, which is typically called U.S. federal Indian law and policy."

The laws of copyright, patent and trademark are changing because cloud computing is making it possible to connect software "in just about everything," The New York Times' Quentin Hardy reports. For example, "everything, be it software and networking or power, is different when so many computers are spread across the globe. The pace of innovation is so quick, and the number of players so small, that in some cases, the players elect not to patent inventions, wary of what they’d disclose about themselves in the application," Hardy writes. 3-D printing may change things even more because "designs there can be widely shared and modified in a computer, to an extent that originals are hard to recognize, let alone protect."

The Republican State Leadership Committee, a national Republican group, is planning on spending $5 million on judicial races this year, reports Joe Palazzolo in the Wall Street Journal: "The GOP committee’s president, Matt Walter, said his organization’s main opponents are labor unions and groups of personal-injury lawyers, who have long contributed to state judicial races." The heavy spending is prompting judges to campaign more in order to hold onto their seats, Palazzolo further reports, which means that judges are forced into the "ethically tricky process of soliciting big money and stumping for votes from constitutents they might face in court."

The trend of outside money being given to judicial campaigns has accelerated since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down federal limits on corporate and union campaign spending, WSJ further reports.

The Tulsa World has conducted a two-part investigation into the case built against Michelle Murphy, who was released from jail after her murder conviction was dismissed Friday. The World found that the blood and DNA found at the scene of her baby's death was not Murphy's.

She also allegedly made an incriminating statement that "'I could've been so angry I needed to take it out on somebody and ended up hurting my son.'" Murphy said during her trial that she only made the statement because a police officer told her she could see her other child if she confessed.

According to the World, The key prosecution witness, a 14-year-old who had made sexual advances against Murphy--then a young teenage mom- reacted aggressively when facing rejection. The witness killed himself accidently by autoerotic asphyxiation. His statement incriminating Murphy was admitted, but evidence about his violent behavior was not admitted.

When Twitter filed its First Amendment lawsuit this week challenging the government gag on disclosing government surveillance requests to its customers, the company did so to establish "a constitutional right to truthfully inform its customers and the broader public that it has not received particular types of surveillance requests. In other words, Twitter is seeking judicial endorsement of its right to publish a 'warrant canary,'" Brett Max Kaufman writes in Just Security. According to Kaufman, the Electronic Frontier defines a warrant canary as a "'regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into place, and the canary statement is removed,' thereby informing the public that the process has been received."

The reason why Twitter is fighting against government compulson to remain silent and to report when it has not received surveillance requests is that the government has taken the position that Twitter is bound by a settlement reached with other tech companies about reporting surveillance requests even though it did not sign onto the accord, Kaufman said.

After examining 43,000 reports from local law enforcement agencies sent to the Justice Department, The Washington Post has found that "police agencies have used hundreds of millions of dollars taken from Americans under federal civil forfeiture law in recent years to buy guns, armored cars and electronic surveillance gear. They have also spent money on luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles." While the law was meant to impede illegal drug trafficking, it also has meant that law enforcement can seize property without having to prove a crime has occurred, the Post further reports. The Post found that 81 percent of the $2.5 billion reported on the forms was taken in cases in which no indictment was filed.

Tennessee voters will be deciding whether to keep the state's method of selecting appellate judges, the Associated Press reports. Under a "merit selection" system, the governor makes appointments to fill vacancies on the state's appellate courts and voters then decide whether to keep the judges and justices in retention elections. A proposed constitutional amendment would allow legislators to reject the governor's nominees.

Control of the Tennessee appellate courts has been heated this year. Three Democratic justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court were retained in the most expensive judicial campaign in the state's history. Republican Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey funded much of the effort to oust the justices. According to the AP, he will push for popular elections for judges if the constitutional amendment fails.

This past week saw the United States make an even bigger step in advancing LGBT rights: the U.S. Supreme Court rejected several challenges to judicial rulings throwing out state bans on same-sex marriage. But both The Economist and Foreign Policy note that there is a large divide in rights for gay people around the world and advances in the United States, Europe and Latin America have lead to a backlash in other parts of the world. 

Seventy-eight countries make gay sex illegal, but 113 have legalized it, The Economist notes in a leader. The U.N. Human Rights Council recently passed a resolution on sexual orientation and gender identity. Suzanne Nossel, writing in Foreign Policy, reports that 38 out of 55 African nations have laws punishing sodomy. "While gay rights are on the march in many parts of the world, the very progress that activists have celebrated in the halls of the United Nations, on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, and in confetti-dusted city halls around the United States may actually be worsening the danger for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in far-flung parts of the world," Nossel reports. "... In much of Africa, the Mideast, and Central Asia -- including Russia -- a nasty backlash has ensued that, at least for now, may be making life worse for some of the world's most vulnerable gay populations."

Jeffrey Vagle, writing in Just Security, says that a recent decision from U.S. District Lucy Koh could strengthen the positions of plaintiffs seeking standing to challenge government surveillance. Courts have consistently ruled that plaintiffs don't have standing to challenge government surveillance, he notes, even though "research has long shown that even the mere awareness of government surveillance, under which an individual could reasonably expect herself to be observed, can yield very real chilling effect injuries, including self-censorship and an increased reluctance to associate with certain people or groups. Foucault would, of course, argue that this is the entire point of surveillance."

Koh ruled in a case involving a data breach at Adobe that the plaintiffs had standing to bring their claims because they need only show a "'substantial risk that the harm will occur, which may prompt plaintiffs to reasonably incur costs to mitigate or avoid that harm.'" The reasoning in Koh's decision "may be a sign that future surveillance harms will soon be recognized as an 'injury in fact,'" making it easier for plaintiffs to assert standing and keep pursuing their cases in court, Vagle said.