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Supreme Court won't reinstate $250K award in police shooting
Topics in Legal News |
2015/10/20 15:08
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The Supreme Court will not reinstate a $250,000 award to the father of a suspected marijuana user in Maryland who was killed by police in a middle-of the-night raid.
The justices on Monday left in place a court ruling that overturned the jury award in the death of Andrew Cornish in 2005. A SWAT team entered Cornish's apartment in Cambridge,
Maryland, at 4:30 a.m. with a search warrant to look for marijuana.
The jury found that police violated Cornish's constitutional rights by failing to "knock and announce" their presence before going inside.
A lawsuit filed by Andrew Kane over his son's death argued that Cornish was awakened by the intrusion, grabbed a knife for protection and was shot in the head seconds later.
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Quaid expected in Vermont court to face charge
Topics in Legal News |
2015/10/12 10:52
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Actor Randy Quaid is expected to be arraigned in Vermont in connection with a California vandalism case.
The 65-year-old Quaid was taken into custody Friday night while trying to cross into the United States from Canada. He was detained by troopers in Vermont after Canadian officials said he'd be deported.
Quaid and his wife, Evi, are wanted in Santa Barbara, California, to face felony vandalism charges filed in 2010 after they were found squatting in a guesthouse of a home they previously owned.
The pair skipped several court appearances and went to Canada, where Evi Quaid was granted citizenship. Randy Quaid's bid for permanent residency was denied.
Quaid is to appear in court Monday on a fugitive from justice charge. It wasn't immediately known if a hearing will be held for his wife.
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Court rejects ex-NY Fed employee's retaliation claim lawsuit
Topics in Legal News |
2015/09/23 22:51
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A New York-based federal appeals court has rejected claims of a former employee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who says she was fired for her probe into the banking firm Goldman Sachs.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Wednesday upheld a lower-court ruling dismissing Carmen Segarra's lawsuit.
She claimed the New York Fed interfered with her examination of Goldman Sachs' legal and compliance divisions and directed her to change findings.
The appeals court was particularly dismissive of Segarra's effort to hold three New York Fed employees responsible. It said the effort was "speculative, meritless, and frankly quite silly."
The Federal Reserve oversees Wall Street's biggest financial institutions.
Last year, Senate Democrats accused the Fed of being too close to big banks it regulates.
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Religious clerks in Kentucky follow law, but see conflict
Topics in Legal News |
2015/09/17 15:26
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Clerk Mike Johnston prays twice a day, once each morning and once each night, and asks the Lord to understand the decision he made to license same-sex marriage.
“It’s still on my heart,” said Johnston, whose rural Carter County sits just to the east of Rowan County, where clerk Kim Davis sparked a national furor by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, a decision that landed her in jail.
Johnston is one of Kentucky’s 119 other clerks, many of them deeply religious, who watched the Kim Davis saga unfold on national television while trying to reconcile their own faith and their oath of office. Sixteen of them sent pleading letters to the governor noting their own religious objections. But when forced to make a decision, only two have taken a stand as dramatic as Davis and refused to issue licenses.
And others say they find the controversy now swirling around their job title humiliating.
“I wish (Davis) would just quit, because she’s embarrassing everybody,” said Fayette County Clerk Don Blevins, whose office serves the state’s second-largest city, Lexington.
After the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in June, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear ordered clerks across the state to issue licenses, launching them along markedly different paths. The clerk in Louisville, Bobbie Holsclaw, issued licenses that very day and the mayor greeted happy couples with bottles of champagne. |
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Ferguson panel recommends police, court reform, transparency
Topics in Legal News |
2015/09/15 15:27
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A reform panel formed after the Ferguson police shooting of Michael Brown is recommending the consolidation of the metro area's police departments and municipal courts, a newspaper reported Monday.
Gov. Jay Nixon and others have scheduled an afternoon news conference to release details of the Ferguson Commission report that has been 10 months in the making. But the St. Louis Post-Dispatch received a copy of the commission's 198-page report ahead of its official release.
"The law says all citizens are equal," the report's introduction states. "But the data says not everyone is treated that way."
The events in Ferguson raised concerns about police departments and municipal courts in that north St. Louis County town, but also elsewhere in the region. The departments and courts have been accused of targeting minorities to raise revenue, leading to the mistrust that was a key component of the unrest following Brown's death.
In addition to court and police department consolidation, the commission recommends changes in several other areas to address social and economic divisions highlighted since the shooting. The 16-person commission suggested establishing a statewide, publicly accessible database to track police shootings and developing a statewide plan to deal with mass demonstrations that focuses on preserving life.
It recommends establishing school-based healing centers to address behavioral and health issues.
The commission was established in November during the unrest that followed the fatal shooting in August of Brown, 18, who was black and unarmed, by Ferguson officer Darren Wilson. A St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Department of Justice declined to prosecute Wilson, who is white, but the shooting spurred a national "Black Lives Matter" movement and led to protests and rioting in and around Ferguson. |
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