Cultivated Compendium

Florida's death penalty law has been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as unconstitutional, The Huffington Post's Cristian Farias reports. The reason? Allowing judges, instead of juries, to impose the death penalty violates the Sixth Amendment. The court ruled 8-1 that only a jury, not a judge, can decide the "aggravating circumstances" that would lead to the decision that execution is the appropriate sentence for a defendant.

 A judge in murderer Timothy Hurst's case independently decided to impose capital punishment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court, opined that the Sixth Amendment requires Florida to base Hurst's sentence on a jury verdict, not judicial factfinding.

Legal writer Linda Hirshman challenges the assumption that the next president will hold great power over the Supreme Court's makeup. The partisan divide is so deep in Washington that it may be impossible to get Supreme Court nominees confirmed, Hirshman says in this Washington Post opinion piece. The consequence would be that judgments of the lower circuit courts of appeal would stand in case the Supreme Court justices were evenly divided. That would favor liberals because of the "wealth of recent Democratic appointments on the lower courts," Hirshman opines, and also because "much of the conservative heartland is marooned in blue circuits."

Judicial reform in China is moving apace to make courts independent of the local government, The New York Times' Ian Johnson reports: "Currently, lower-level courts in China are overseen by the county government, whose party boss runs the courts as a wing of the government, like the police force or sanitation services." Under the reform effort, courts would be under provincial administration.

Dockets also are being made public for the first time, and there are pilot projects to establish circuit courts to have judges from one province to hear cases from another province.

But Johnson notes that the reforms are really more making the courts efficient, rather than independent. In a prior reform effort in the early 2000s, most of the people involved in the "Rights' Defenders" movement have since been arrested or silenced, Johnson reports. 

The Utah Supreme Court has approved a new legal profession: limited paralegal practitioners, The Salt Lake Tribune's Jessica Miller reports. The new legal professional category has been created to help more citizens access the justice system.

The LLPs could assist clients outside of the courtroom--but not inside--by filling out forms, representing clients in mediations or preparing settlements.

Utah Supreme Court Deno Himonas told Miller "'we need to come up with an economically viable model that will help improve access for those individuals in our civil justice system."'

Washington state has started a similiar intiative to use non-lawyers to help close the justice gap.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are issuing new mortgage bonds this year, which would transfer the risk of default to private investors on all but the safest mortgages, The Wall Street Journal's Joe Light reports. The hope is the new bonds will expand the market for home mortgages as well as prevent taxpayers from being on the hook if another mortgage crisis develops.

Light notes that almost all of the U.S. housing market currently depends upon guarantees from government-backed entities. But the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates Fannie and Freddie, has set a goal for the companies to transfer most of the risk on new mortgages to private investors.

The difference in net worth between the typical white family and black family is $131,000, ProPublica's Paul Kiel reports. As a consequence of that racial wealth gap, black families have smaller financial reserves to fall back on and more likely to be sued over a debt or land in jail because of unpaid tickets and court fines.

Kiel and a reporting partner found that debt-collection lawsuits in three U.S. cities were twice as high in mostly black communities than they were in mostly white communities. 

He suggests reform to debt collection laws, such as reducing the amount of income subject to garnishment or setting a small sum in bank accounts as off limit to collectors.

In Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s annual report on the state of the federal courts, he has "implored lawyers to work together and judges to take a more hands-on role to improve a federal litigation system that has grown 'too expensive, time-consuming, and contentious,'" The Washington Post's Robert Barnes reports. Roberts said the 2015 amendments to the federal civil rules provide an opportunity to improve the federal courts, including for burdensome discovery requests.

Even though Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer doubts that mass internment would happen again in the United States, ABC News' Alexander Mallin reports.

The Supreme Court has never overturned its decision approving of the Roosevelt Administration's detention of Japanese Americans in World War II. But, if mass detention of one group was attempted again in the U.S., Breyer said American courts would likely enforce the country's "'stronger traditions of civil liberties'" that have developed in the intervening 70 years.

Over $15 million was spent on the most recent election for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, including $12.2 million in direct campaign contributions and $3.5 million from two independent groups, Associated Press' Christina Almeida Cassidy reports. Almost $10 million was raised by the three Democratic candidates who were ultimately successful in winning seats on the court. Most of that money was raised from labor unions and trial lawyers.

Pennsylvania is not alone in seeing an infusion of contributions to state supreme court races. In 2014, spending on judicial elections tallied at over $34.5 million.

A record number of American cities have enacted efforts to protect LGBT rights, the Christian Science Monitor's Jessica Mendoza reports: "The Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) 2015 Municipal Equality Indexfound that 32 million people now live in cities with explicit and comprehensive equal-rights policies." However, the report notes that protection from discrimination in employment and transgender rights still needs much, much more progress, Mendoza reports.