California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Attorney General Jerry Brown and others filed motions Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California opposing a request to stay the court’s recent decision enjoining the enforcement of Proposition 8, the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. The requested stay would disallow gay marriage in California until [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Friday that prolonged use of global positioning systems (GPS) to monitor suspects’ vehicles violates the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The appellate court found that there exists a reasonable expectation of privacy in the “whole of a person’s movements over [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Friday urged the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) to stop segregating HIV-positive inmates . HRW claims the policy promotes stigma and discrimination because HIV-positive prisoners are housed in a separate maximum security facility, regardless of their sentence, and forced to serve longer sentences because they are excluded from many [...]
Suspected terrorist Adis Medunjanin pleaded not guilty Friday in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York to charges of participating in a plot to detonate a bomb inside the New York City Subway. In January, Medunjanin pleaded not guilty to charges that he received terrorist training conspired with Najibullah Zazi last [...]
Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum on Friday filed a response urging a federal court not to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the newly enacted health care reform law . The lawsuit was filed in March and has been joined by 19 other states and the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) . It [...]
Former Khmer Rouge official Kaing Guek Eav , also known as “Duch,” has hired Cambodian lawyer Kang Ritheary to replace his previous lawyer, according to documents released by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) Friday. Kaing fired his international co-counsel, Maitre Roux, in early July after sending a letter to ECCC President [...]
The US State Department warned Thursday that the alienation of European Muslim communities through various laws and policies could fuel recruitment for terror groups. The Country Reports on Terrorism 2009 , an annual report the State Department is required to publish under federal law , is meant to provide a full accounting of terrorist activities [...]
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) transferred several high-profile prisoners to Guantanamo Bay to await trial in 2003, only to transfer them back into the CIA’s network of secret prisons so they would not be entitled to lawyers and access to US courts, the Associated Press reported Friday. Among the suspects reportedly on the September 2003 [...]
Emma Founds, Pitt Law ’11, traveled to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) through Pitt’s Center for International Legal Education and reports on the ICTR’s difficulty in prosecuting gender-based crimes, such as rape and sexual assault… While there have been major advancements in the prosecution of gender crimes internationally, the ICTR has been lax [...]
The US Senate on Thursday failed to authorize a settlement between the US government and minority farmers for alleged discrimination. The $4.6 billion settlement would be distributed between several hundred thousand minority farmers. Among that group are Native American farmers claiming that the US Department of the Interior (DOI) failed to pay them royalties on [...]
