Supreme Court (US)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Civilian Prosecutors Rejected Evidence in 9/11 Case That Military Calls Crucial

      by

      The revelation sets in stark relief the decision by military prosecutors to seek to include the evidence, which has opened the door to years of litigation over confessions by the men accused of plotting the attacks.For years, a thorny question has dominated pretrial hearings in the military commissions case over the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: Did the men accused of plotting them voluntarily confess in 2007 after the C.I.A. had stopped torturing them, and could those statements be used as evidence at their eventual death-penalty trial?So it came as a surprise when a veteran F.B.I. analyst revealed that in 2009, when the Obama administration was planning to instead try the men in civilian court, federal prosecutors had decided against trying to offer the statements as evidence.The revelation sets in stark relief the contrary decision by military prosecutors to build their case around summoning the F.B.I. interrogators as witnesses, calling such potential testimony their “most critical” evidence. It also underlines how that decision has opened the door to years of litigation and contributed to a lengthy delay in getting the case to trial.Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, the chief prosecutor at Guantánamo from 2011 until his retirement in 2021, did not respond to a request for comment.During a closed hearing on March 6, Kimberly Waltz, a supervisory intelligence analyst at the F.B.I. who works on the Guantánamo prosecution team, disclosed that civilian prosecutors had decided the statements were unnecessary. In 2009, when she helped the civilian prosecution team evaluate the evidence, federal prosecutors rejected using the confessions at trial, according to a transcript of the hearing recently released by the government.“At that time it was my understanding,” she said, that “we were not going to be able to use them; they weren’t admissible.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Consumer Watchdog’s Funding

      by

      A decision against the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, could have cast doubt on all of its regulations and enforcement actions.The Supreme Court rejected a challenge on Thursday to the way the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded, one that could have hobbled the bureau and advanced a central goal of the conservative legal movement: limiting the power of independent agencies.The vote was 7 to 2, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing the majority opinion.Had the bureau lost, the court’s ruling might have cast doubt on every regulation and enforcement action it had taken in its 13 years of existence, including ones concerning mortgages, credit cards, consumer loans and banking.The central question in the case was whether the way Congress chose to fund the bureau had violated the appropriations clause of the Constitution, which says that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”Justice Thomas said the mechanism was constitutional.“Under the appropriations clause,” he wrote, “an appropriation is simply a law that authorizes expenditures from a specified source of public money for designated purposes. The statute that provides the bureau’s funding meets these requirements. We therefore conclude that the bureau’s funding mechanism does not violate the appropriations clause.”Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, dissented.The bureau, created after the financial crisis as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, is funded by the Federal Reserve System, in an amount determined by the bureau so long as the sum does not exceed 12 percent of the system’s operating expenses. In the 2022 fiscal year, the agency requested and received $641.5 million of the $734 million available.A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, ruled in 2022 that the bureau’s funding method ran afoul of the appropriations clause.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Justice Thomas Denounces ‘the Nastiness and the Lies’ Faced by His Family

      by

      The statement was among the few public remarks he has made since revelations that he had failed to report lavish gifts and travel from wealthy conservatives.Justice Clarence Thomas denounced on Friday “the nastiness and the lies” that have shadowed him in recent years as public scrutiny has mounted over his wife’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and luxury gifts he has accepted from billionaire friends.It amounted to some of the most extensive public remarks he has made since revelations that he failed to disclose years of lavish trips from wealthy conservatives, like the Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, including on private jets and a superyacht.“My wife and I, the last two or three years, just the nastiness and the lies,” said Justice Thomas, who did not specify what he was referring to in addressing a full ballroom of lawyers and judges gathered for a judicial conference in Alabama. “There’s certainly been a lot of negativity in our lives, my wife and I, over the last few years, but we choose not to focus on it.”The justice faced calls for recusal after text messages and emails showed that his wife, Virginia Thomas, known as Ginni, sought to overturn the election, appealing to administration officials and lawmakers. Justice Thomas has continued to participate in a number of cases related to the 2020 election, including three about Jan. 6 on the docket this term.The remarks were part of a wide-ranging conversation at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference held at a luxury resort on the waters of Mobile Bay, a shallow inlet of the Gulf of Mexico.Interviewed by a former clerk, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, now a federal judge in Florida best known for overturning the Biden administration’s mask mandate, Justice Thomas reminisced about past years on the court, when he said it would have been impossible to imagine anyone leaking opinions. That appeared to be a reference to the 2022 leak of the draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Major Supreme Court Cases of 2024

      by

      No Supreme Court term in recent memory has featured so many cases with the potential to transform American society. The consequential cases, with decisions arriving by late June or early July, include three affecting former President Donald J. Trump, two on abortion, two on guns, three on the First Amendment rights of social media companies […] More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Justice Alito Is Holding Trump to a Different Standard

      by

      I mentioned it in passing in my Friday column, but I was struck — disturbed, really — by one specific point made by Justice Samuel Alito during Thursday’s oral arguments in Trump v. United States.Alito began innocuously enough: “I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully if that candidate is the incumbent.”“Of course,” answered Michael Dreeben, the lawyer arguing the case for the Department of Justice.“Now,” Alito continued, “if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”The implication of Alito’s question is that presidential immunity for all official acts may be a necessary concession to the possibility of a politically motivated investigation and prosecution: Presidents need to be above the law to raise the odds that they follow the law and leave office without incident.If this sounds backward, that’s because it is.There have been, in the nearly 236 years since Americans ratified the Constitution, 45 presidents. Of those, 10 sought but did not win re-election. In every case but one, the defeated incumbents left office without incident. There was no fear that they would try to overturn the results or subvert the process, nor was there any fear that their successors would turn the power of the state against them. Thomas Jefferson did not try to jail John Adams after the close-fought 1800 election; he assured the American people that “we are all republicans, we are all federalists.” Jimmy Carter did not sic the F.B.I. on Gerald Ford in the wake of his narrow victory; he thanked him for “all he has done to heal our land.”By Alito’s lights, this should not have been possible. Why would a president leave if he could be prosecuted as a private citizen? The answer is that the other nine people who lost had a commitment to American democracy that transcended their narrow, personal or partisan interests.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Supreme Court to Hear Starbucks Challenge to Labor Ruling

      by

      The case, which stems from the firing of seven Starbucks workers in Memphis, seeks to limit the National Labor Relations Board’s ability to obtain a court intervention in labor cases.The Supreme Court is set to hear Starbucks’s challenge on Tuesday to a federal judge’s order to reinstate workers who were attempting to unionize a store in Memphis.Starbucks is asking the court to make it harder for the National Labor Relations Board to obtain intervention by judges in cases where a company is accused of violating labor law. The case stems from the February 2022 firing of seven workers who let local journalists into a closed store to conduct interviews about their unionization efforts.Starbucks, which has faced hundreds of accusations of labor law violations across the country, argues that there is a patchwork of standards under which the N.L.R.B. can seek a court injunction. The appellate court in this case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, applies a lower standard, and Starbucks is pushing the Supreme Court to apply a more strict, uniform standard that is in line with other circuits.Starbucks said the workers were fired because admitting the journalists into the store violated several company policies. Starbucks Workers United, the union representing the company’s workers, filed an unfair labor practice charge over the firings, arguing that the company selectively enforced the rules against organized workers. The labor board issued a complaint against Starbucks two months later.A federal judge granted the labor board’s request to reinstate the workers while proceedings over the firings played out, which could take years. An appellate judge upheld the reinstatements last year, and the company requested the Supreme Court review. The high court agreed to hear the case in January.Lisa Blatt, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly, is representing Starbucks and is a veteran of the Supreme Court bar. In the past two years, she won rulings in favor of Google — a closely watched case seeking to make tech companies liable for content posted by its users — and for Jack Daniel’s in an intellectual property case against the seller of a dog toy.Elizabeth B. Prelogar, the U.S. solicitor general, is representing the labor board. She has represented the government in several high-profile cases, including Dobbs v. Jackson in June 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutionally protected right to an abortion. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      The Town at the Center of a Supreme Court Battle Over Homelessness

      by

      A lawsuit by a group of homeless residents of a small Oregon town could reshape the way cities across the country deal with homelessness.Inside a warming shelter, Laura Gutowski detailed how her life had changed since she became homeless two and a half years ago in Grants Pass, a former timber hub in the foothills of southern Oregon.Her husband’s death left her without steady income. She lived in a sedan, and then in a tent, in sight of the elementary school where her son was once a student. She constantly scrambled to move her belongings to avoid racking up more fines from the police.“I never expected it to come to this,” Ms. Gutowski, 55, said. She is one of several hundred homeless people in this city of about 40,000 that is at the center of a major case before the Supreme Court on Monday with broad ramifications for the nationwide struggle with homelessness.After Grants Pass stepped up enforcement of local ordinances that banned sleeping and camping in public spaces by ticketing, fining and jailing the homeless, lower courts ruled that it amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment” by penalizing people who had nowhere else to go.Many states and cities that are increasingly overwhelmed by homelessness are hoping the Supreme Court overturns that decision — or severely limits it. They argue that it has crippled their efforts to address sprawling encampments, rampant public drug use and fearful constituents who say they cannot safely use public spaces.That prospect has alarmed homeless people and their advocates, who contend that a ruling against them would lead cities to fall back on jails, instead of solutions like affordable housing and social services.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Kamala Harris Moment Has Arrived

      by

      One of Kamala Harris’s most memorable moments during the 2020 presidential election cycle was when, during a Democratic primary debate, she sharply criticized Joe Biden for working with segregationists in the Senate in their shared opposition to busing.She personalized her criticism, saying: “There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”The power in the attack was not only the point being made but that she — a person affected from a group affected — was making it. Although some of Biden’s defenders saw her remark as a gratuitous broadside, there was an authenticity to the way she confronted the issue.The verbal jab also aligned with the national zeitgeist at a time when calls for racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement were ascendant.She ticked up in the polls, and donations poured in. Ultimately, her candidacy didn’t catch fire, but the following summer, Biden, the eventual nominee, made a historic offer to Harris to join his ticket, leading to her becoming the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American to be vice president.Fast-forward to now, when Vice President Harris has served nearly a full term alongside President Biden, and she is moving into another moment when the political stars are aligned for her as the perfect messenger on a subject that has fixed Americans’ attention and is central in the 2024 presidential campaign: reproductive rights.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More