Romanian voters Saturday rejected a referendum proposal to impeach reformist President Traian Basescu . Basescu was suspended by the opposition-dominated parliament last month for allegedly abusing his powers. Earlier this month, the Romanian Constitutional Court upheld an opposition-sponsored bill making it easier to remove the president by reducing the number of popular votes required for [...]
Australian Guantanamo detainee David Hicks was transferred to a maximum security prison near his hometown of Adelaide, South Australia Sunday to serve the remainder of his nine-month prison sentence. In March, a US military commission at Guantanamo Bay recommended sentencing Hicks to seven years in prison, but all but nine months of that were effectively [...]
The Texas Youth Commission (TYC) will release 226 inmates from its juvenile prison system after an investigation revealed that their sentences were improperly extended. Commission Special Master Jay Kimbrough, appointed early this month by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to investigate the TYC, formed a six-member panel in March to review extended sentences after inmate advocates [...]
Eric Linge, Pitt Law '09, files from Mumbai: India is a nation that takes religion seriously. Articles 25-8 of the Constitution guarantee citizens the fundamental right to religious freedom. Rickshaw drivers stick their arms up into the air when they pass by cows pulling shrines on carts down the road. And beginning two weeks ago, [...]
The US Army Court of Criminal Appeals (ACCA) issued a partial stay Friday in the court-martial of US Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada after the defense filed a motion to dismiss asserting that the February mistrial and that subsequent refiling of charges against Watada constituted double jeopardy and a second trial would violate Watada's constitutional [...]
A New York jury found the Long Island Diocese of Rockville Centre negligent in the hiring and retention of a youth minister who repeatedly molested two victims between 1999 and 2002 on Friday, and was ordered to provide $11.4 million in damages. Paul Mones, an attorney for the plaintiffs, characterized the decision as a powerful [...]
US Navy Lt. Cmdr. Matthew M. Diaz, a former staff judge advocate stationed at Guantanamo Bay , was sentenced Friday to six months in prison and is to be dismissed from the US Navy for leaking detainee names to a human rights lawyer. Diaz was convicted at a court-martial Thursday of one count of communicating [...]
Spanish National Court prosecutors Friday appealed investigating magistrate Santiago Pedraz's indictment of three US soldiers with homicide and "a crime against the international community" in the 2004 death in Iraq of cameraman Jose Couso , saying that soldiers did not commit a crime because the death was an "accident of war." Sgt. Shawn Gibson, Capt. [...]
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has filed a lawsuit on behalf of 16 lawyers who once represented Guantanamo Bay detainees to force US government agencies to turn over recordings allegedly made of the lawyers while meeting with their clients. The CCR filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in the US District Court [...]
Ben Davis : "I recognize that we are in a moment in which we are desperately looking for (present or former) legal heroes in Justice, but while the Ashcroft hospital bed story makes great cinema – there are no great legal heroes here. Might I say that those who attempted to block extralegal conduct under [...]
