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High Court overturns city mandate on construction projects
Court Watch |
2019/09/16 23:31
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A divided Ohio Supreme Court has upheld a state law invalidating a Cleveland requirement that public construction contractors hire city residents for a portion of work on projects.
A 2003 Cleveland ordinance mandates that residents must perform 20% of the total hours on public construction projects over $100,000.
The GOP-controlled Legislature approved a bill in 2016 stripping local governments of the ability to impose such residency requirements on contractors. The high court on Tuesday sided with the state in a 4-3 decision.
Mayor Frank Jackson says the city will ask the Court to reconsider the ruling immediately.
Cleveland City Council President Kevin Kelley says the ruling is an attack on "the ability of cities to help life people out of poverty and establish careers.
Supreme Court ruling clear, but Brexit future still murky
The landmark British Supreme Court ruling that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's suspension of Parliament was unlawful did not deal directly with plans for Britain's anticipated departure from the European Union. Brexit will however be top of the agenda in Parliament now that lawmakers have returned.
As things stand, Britain is scheduled to leave the EU on Oct. 31 unless the British government requests an extension and the other 27 EU countries agree to a further delay.
However, Parliament passed a bill earlier this month before Johnson suspended Parliament requiring the prime minister to seek a three-month extension if no withdrawal agreement has been reached with the EU by Oct. 19.
Johnson insists that he is pursuing a deal with the EU, but has repeatedly said that if there is no deal, he will take Britain out of the EU on the scheduled Brexit date rather than request an extension.
For most economists, including those in government and the Bank of England, a no-deal Brexit would trigger a recession as trade barriers, including tariffs, are put up between Britain and the EU. There's also a widespread expectation that there will be gridlock at Britain's ports, and shortages of some food and medicine. |
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‘The Supreme Court Is Not Well. And the People Know It.’
Court Watch |
2019/09/04 14:45
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The Supreme Court as we once knew it?as a national institution that could at least sometimes stand apart from partisanship?died last year. The ongoing fight over its corpse spilled into public view last week.
On Thursday, 53 United States senators?every member of the Republican caucus?wrote a “letter” to the clerk of the Supreme Court assuring the justices that the Republican Party has their back. The Democrats, the senators told the Court, pose “a direct, immediate threat to the independence of the judiciary.”
The spat is about guns. The Court has granted review in a Second Amendment case entitled New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York, which (nominally) tests an obscure New York City ordinance governing how firearms owners could?note the past tense?travel with their weapons.
Under city law as it was when the case began, New Yorkers with a “premises” license had to keep their guns in their homes at all times, except when being taken to a licensed target-shooting facility for practice and training. But those facilities had to be in New York City itself. “Premises” licensees could not put their guns in their trunk and drive out of town for any reason?not to go to a gun range, not to compete in a shooting match, not to take the guns to a second home. |
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Cock-a-doodle-doo! French rooster crows over court win
Court Watch |
2019/09/04 14:43
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Maurice the rooster can keep crowing, a French court ruled Thursday, as it rejected a complaint from neighbors who sued over noise nuisance.
Maurice’s case and several other lawsuits against the sounds of church bells, cow bells, cicadas and the pungent smells from farms have prompted a national debate over how to protect rural culture from the encroachment of expectations that are more associated with urban areas.
Maurice’s owner, Corinne Fesseau, will be able to keep the rooster on the small island of Oleron, off France’s Atlantic coast, the court decided. The frustrated neighbors are considering an appeal.
The rooster owner’s lawyer, Julien Papineau, told The Associated Press that Fesseau “is happy. She cried when I when I told her the court’s decision.”
Maurice’s dawn crowing is exasperating Fesseau’s neighbors, a retired couple who moved to the island two years ago. They asked the court to make the animal move farther away, or shut up.
Instead, the judge in the southwest city of Rochefort ordered them to pay 1,000 euros ($1,005) in damages to Fesseau for reputational harm, plus court costs.
“That made my clients feel very bad,” their lawyer Vincent Huberdeau said. He said Fesseau intentionally put her chicken coop close to her neighbors’ window and then turned Maurice into a cause celebre for rural traditions, and that the judge went too far in punishing the plaintiffs instead.
Their case also backfired in the court of public opinion, at least locally. More than 120,000 people signed a petition urging authorities to leave Maurice alone ? and a “support committee” made up of roosters and hens from around the region came to support his owner during the trial in July.
“The countryside is alive and makes noise ? and so do roosters,” read one of their signs.
The ruling may spell good news for a flock of ducks in the Landes region of southwest France, where a trial is underway between farmers and neighbors angry over the creatures’ quacks and smell.
Authorities also ruled against residents of a village in the French Alps who complained in 2017 about annoying cow bells, and an effort last year to push out cicadas from a southern town to protect tourists from their summer song also failed.
Since Maurice’s tale came to light, some French lawmakers have suggested a law protecting the sounds and smells of the countryside as part of France’s rural heritage. |
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Cosby lawyers ask appeals court to toss #MeToo conviction
Court Watch |
2019/08/12 09:10
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A Pennsylvania appeals court on Monday questioned why actor Bill Cosby never got a supposed non-prosecution agreement in writing as his lawyers asked the panel to overturn his sexual assault conviction.
Cosby, 82, is serving a three- to 10-year prison term for drugging and molesting a woman at his home in what became the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era.
The three-judge panel asked why Cosby’s top-shelf lawyers didn’t follow the norm and get an immunity agreement in writing, and approved by a judge, when accuser Andrea Constand first came forward in 2005.
“This is not a low-budget operation. ... They had an unlimited budget,” said Superior Court Judge John T. Bender. “Could it be they knew this was something the trial court would never have allowed?”
Cosby’s lawyers have long argued that he relied on the promise before giving testimony in Constand’s 2005 lawsuit that proved incriminating when it was unsealed a decade later.
Judge Carolyn Nichols echoed Bender’s point, asking, “how can the elected district attorney bind that office in perpetuity?”
Cosby’s lawyers also attacked Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill’s decision to let five other accusers testify when Cosby went on trial last year, after more than 60 accusers came forward and his deposition was unsealed. Prosecutors said they chose women whose accounts showed that Cosby had a “signature” crime pattern. Bender seemed to agree, interrupting defense arguments that their stories had significant differences. |
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Suspect in Norway mosque attack bruised but smiling in court
Court Watch |
2019/08/10 09:11
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A suspected gunman accused of an attempted terrorist attack on an Oslo mosque and separately killing his teenage stepsister appeared in court on Monday looking bruised and scratched, but smiling.
The suspect did not speak, and his defense lawyer Unni Fries told The Associated Press he “will use his right not to explain himself for now.”
Philip Manshaus, 21, was arrested Saturday after entering a mosque in Baerum, an Oslo suburb, where three men were preparing for Sunday’s Eid al-Adha Muslim celebrations. Police said he was waving weapons and several shots were fired but did not specify what type of weapon was used. One person was slightly injured before people inside the Al-Noor Islamic Center held the suspect down until police arrived on the scene.
Police then raided Manshaus’ nearby house and found the body of his 17-year-old stepsister. He is also suspected in her killing, police said, but did not provide details.
The head of Norway’s domestic security agency said Monday officials had received a “vague” tip a year ago about the suspect, but it was not sufficient to act because officials had no information about any “concrete plans” of attack.
Hans Sverre Sjoevold, head of Norway’s PST agency, told a news conference that the agency and the police receive many tips from worried people every day and the information “didn’t go in the direction of an imminent terror planning.”
The suspect’s lawyer declined to comment on Norwegian media reports that Manshaus was inspired by shootings in March in New Zealand, where a gunman killed 51 people, and on Aug. 3 in El Paso, Texas, which left at least 22 dead.
The suspect smiled as he appeared in court Monday with dark bruises under both eyes and scratches across his face and neck. Police had said that he was prepared to cause deaths and more injuries but didn’t succeed because people inside the mosque helped neutralize him.
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Gun-control backers concerned about changing federal courts
Court Watch |
2019/08/08 09:13
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California has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation, including a ban on the type of high-capacity ammunition magazines used in some of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.
How long those types of laws will stand is a growing concern among gun control advocates in California and elsewhere.
A federal judiciary that is becoming increasingly conservative under President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate has gun control advocates on edge. They worry that federal courts, especially if Trump wins a second term next year and Republicans hold the Senate, will take such an expansive view of Second Amendment rights that they might overturn strict gun control laws enacted in Democratic-leaning states.
The U.S. Supreme Court so far has left plenty of room for states to enact their own gun legislation, said Adam Winkler, a gun policy expert at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. But he said the success of the Trump administration in appointing federal judges, including to the high court, could alter that.
“Those judges are likely to be hostile to gun-control measures,” Winkler said. “So I think the courts overall have made a shift to the right on guns. We’ll just have to see how that plays out.”
The legal tug-of-war already is playing out in California.
The state banned the sale of high-capacity ammunition magazines nearly two decades ago as one of its numerous responses to deadly mass shootings; a voter initiative passed three years ago expanded on that, banning all ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds even among gun owners who already possessed them.
Earlier this year, a Republican-appointed federal judge overturned the ban, triggering a weeklong bullet buying spree among California gun owners before he put his decision on hold pending appeal. The same judge is overseeing another lawsuit brought by gun-rights groups that seeks to repeal a state law requiring background checks for ammunition buyers.
Legal experts, lawmakers and advocates on both sides said the decision in the case over ammunition limits foreshadows more conflicts between Democratic-leaning states seeking to impose tighter gun laws and an increasingly conservative federal judiciary.
“What you’re looking at in the Southern District of California is happening all over the country,” said Frank Zimring, a University of California, Berkeley law professor who is an expert on gun laws. |
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