New York

A sharply divided New York Court of Appeals ruled that a golf course owned by the Seneca Indian Nation doesn't have sovereign immunity shielding it from lawsuits, according to an AP report. The builder of the golf course, which is close to Niagara Falls, has sued over money it says it is owed on the course's construction contract. The majority held that the corporate entity, a wholly owned subsidiary that owns the golf course, is not immune from suit because it can't bind tribal money and the Senecas don't own the golf course land. The dissent said there was no rational basis to distinguish the subsidiary from its corporate parent, which is an arm of the tribe and does have immunity.

A New York judge has ruled that the confession of the defendant in the Etan Patz case is admissible, ProPublica's Naveena Sadasivam reports. The defendant's lawyers argued that his confession to the murder of a little boy whose face was famously plastered on milk cartons is false. New York Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley ruled that "Hernandez did have the mental capacity to waive his rights to have an attorney present and understood that he had the right to remain silent," ProPublica reports.

New York Law Journal's Mark Hamblett reports that the New York Court of Appeals is going to answer a question posed to it by the Second Circuit: does New York City's law governing debt collection apply to law firms? A federal district court judge held "in 2013 the law does not apply to plaintiff law firms that attempt to collect debts, and violates a provision of the New York City Charter because it purports to grant New York City the authority to grant or withhold licenses to practice law," Hamblett reports.

According to a report in Capital New York, New York settled a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union to improve the legal representation that defendants too poor to afford their own lawyers receive in Ontario, Onondaga, Schuyler, Suffolk and Washington counties. The settlement establishes caseload limits for public defenders and a monitoring compliance agreement.

New York's approval rate for parole applications has been sliced in half since 2005, falling from 52 percent to 24 percent between 2005 and 2013, City Limits' Bill Hughes wrote earlier this month.

Jim Murphy, a former county legislator in Schenectady County and a longtime volunteer with the New York chapter of CURE, Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants, said he has been plugging parole board statistics into spreadsheets and "he believes he will soon be able to show a pattern emerging that can predict which parole board commissioners are more or less likely to grant or deny parole. 'A good number of these people—not all of them—but a good number seem to be making their decisions based on the politics of the case,'" Murphy told City Limits.

Criminal justice advoces said that "crimes that receive a disproportionate amount of media attention are judged more harshly by parole boards than similar offenses that are off the public radar."

Journalist Jana Winter was subpoeaned by defense lawyers for James Holmes, the defendant charged with the mass murder of movie theatregoers in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012, about who her law enforcement sources were for a story "which said Holmes sent a notebook to his psychiatrist that indicated he had plans for the shootings," the New York Law Journal reported this week. The New York Court of Appeal heard arguments on whether the New York shield law should apply to Winter when she was subpoeaned in a Colorado criminal court case.

Winter's attorneys argued that New York's shield law protecting reporters from disclosing their confidential sources applies to New York-based reporters covering affairs outside of the state. Attorney Christopher Handman argued, according to the NY Law Journal, that "'the idea that New York, prideful as it was about being the center of the dissemination and the gathering of news throughout the world, would limit its protections to reporters talking to sources in New York about parochial New York affairs flies in the face of the way the Legislature broadly defined news to be worldwide events.'"

New York's rental market is absurdly expensive and it seems to be having an impact on sober homes for people to get treatment, including those coming back into society after being jailed.

According to The Crime Report, Suffolk County sought to pay $500 per resident for sober homes (which is $300 more than the state pays per resident), but one operator told the county that  "'[f]ive hundred dollars is not going to cut it,' [Rosemary] Dehlow [chief program officer for Community Housing Innovations] said. 'Everything in this RFQ I believe in. You want solid housing; you want restrictions on certain things; you want to make sure they're clean.' But, Dehlow said, the legislation and the RFQ ignore the underlying void that sober homes have come to fill." She said that sober homes have 20 people in a house because it's affordable.

TCR, a publication affiliated with John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and ProPublica have been reporting on people who have died while living in sober homes. For example, one mother testified about her son overdosing on heroin despite living in a sober home, according to TCR.

New Yorkers will vote on a ballot measure that would increase the age at which appellate judges have to retire to age 80. The New York Times reports that Governor Andrew Cuomo has been quietly opposing Proposition 6. One reason may be that if the ballot meaure passes it would "allow two Republican judges to serve longer terms, limiting his ability to put a lasting liberal stamp on the Court of Appeals," The Times reports.

Raising the retirement ages of judges isn't just a New York issue. Legislation in Pennsylvania has advanced that would increase the retirement age for judges from age 70 to age 75. The legislation has to pass the Pennsylvania General Assembly another year before it can go to voters to approve it in 2015.