Nevada

Legislators in Nevada are considering a bill that would regulate drones, including the protection of privacy interests, the Associated Press' Riley Snyder reports. The bill would set "250 feet as the lowest level a drone can fly before trespassing, with some exceptions, and it requires a warrant for certain police observations by a drone on a private home," Snyder reports. The bill passed out of Assembly, but the Senate has not yet taken action.

A bill is being proposed in Nevada that would place privacy restrictions on the use of drones, the Associated Press' Riley Snyder reports: the bill "would limit how police can use drones in investigations and require the state's public safety department to keep a public listing of all drones used by state agencies. The bill also criminalizes using a drone to take a clandestine photo of a person in a private setting and sets certain trespassing rules for drones flying under 250 feet."

In the Midwest, the Michigan House has approved a bill to prohibit the use of drones for hunting, and Wisconsin lawmakers held a hearing this week on further regulations for drones, the AP reports. Wisconsin already banned drones that are capable of videorecording from flying in areas where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The cause of same-sex marriage and LGBT  rights advanced in several states around the country this week:

* The Idaho Supreme Court will now allow the adoption of a same-sex partner's children, The Washington Post's Eugene Volokh writes: "More broadly, the court concludes that such a second-parent adoption doesn’t require that the parties be married to each other, so that adoption of an opposite-sex partner’s (or even friend’s) children would be allowed as well, so long as the other requirements for adoption are met."

* Nevada has withdrawn its appeal to uphold that state's same-sex marriage ban, Bloomberg reports: "Nevada was defending a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages established by a voter-approved amendment. A federal judge in 2012 ruled that the state law didn’t violate the equal protection rights of eight same-sex couples that sued to overturn it. Yesterday, the state dropped its defense of the ban in the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco" due to the 9th Circuit's ruling that heightened constitutional scrutiny would not allow a gay man to be excluded from a trial involving an AIDS drug.

* Same-sex couples have filed a lawsuit to challenge Texas' same-sex marriage ban, Reuters reports.

* Same-sex couples have filed a lawsuit to challenge Ohio's ban on allowing both same-sex partners on children's birth certificates, the Associated Press reports. A similar Ohio lawsuit over death certificates had success, and the attorney prosecuting the cases says his tactics "will give the U.S. Supreme Court a wider variety of legal arguments to consider when appeals from various states reach their chambers."

 

The Associated Press reports that Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto said she is reevaluating her office's defense of that state's ban on same-sex marriage. Masto, according to the AP, says that the state's arguments have been severely weakened after the 9th Circuit ruled that it is unconstitutional to exclude jurors on the basis of sexual orientation.

Last year, a federal judge upheld Nevada's state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage because Nevada has "a 'legitimate state interest' in maintaining the traditional institution of marriage. The question 'is not the wisdom of providing for or recognizing same-sex marriage as a matter of policy,' he wrote. Instead, [U.S. District Judge Robert] Jones said it was a constitutional question about Nevada’s right not to recognize marriages from other states 'if those laws do not conform to Nevada’s one-man-one-woman civil marriage institution,'" the Associated Press reported. On Friday, the ruling was appealed to the Ninth Circuit. Nevada bans same-sex matrimony but authorizes domestic partnerships.

The district court decision was made before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

The New York Times has a report on a putatative class action filed against a Nevada psychiatric center alleging it had the practice of putting patients with mental illness onto buses to San Francisco and other California locales with one-way tickets. “In San Francisco, it’s been urban myth for decades that this sort of practice was going on,” San Franciso City Attorney Dennis Herrera told the New York Times and who is prosecuting the lawsuit. “But this is the first instance that I am aware of where we have been able to document a state-supported and state-sanctioned effort.”