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Evidence challenged: Miss. court blocks execution
Top Court Watch |
2013/05/13 23:58
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The Mississippi Supreme Court has indefinitely delayed Tuesday's scheduled execution of Willie Jerome Manning amid questions involving evidence in the case, intervening hours before he was set to die for the slayings of two college students.
Manning, who had challenged errors involving evidence analysis, was originally set to receive a lethal injection at 6 p.m. CDT at the state prison in Parchman. But with mere hours remaining, the high court blocked the execution until it rules further in the case.
Manning was convicted in 1994 in the shooting deaths of two Mississippi State University students, Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller. Their bodies were found in a rural area in December 1992.
The FBI has said in recent days that there were errors in agents' testimony about ballistics tests and hair analysis in the case.
Manning's lawyers had argued in recent filings before the Mississippi Supreme Court that the execution should be blocked based on the U.S. Justice Department's disclosures about testimony that it says exceeded the limits of science.
The court ruled 8-1 on Tuesday for a stay. The court had previously split 5-4 in decisions in the case. |
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Court considers Calif. prison mental health care
Top Court Watch |
2013/03/27 22:55
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A federal judge in Sacramento is set to hear arguments Wednesday over Gov. Jerry Brown's push to regain state control of inmate mental health care after 18 years of federal oversight and billions of dollars spent to improve treatment.
Lawyers representing the state argue that California is now providing a constitutional level of care to its prison inmates, while attorneys for the inmates say more improvement is needed.
California has spent more than $1 billion in construction for mental health facilities and increased salaries to hire more and better mental health workers. It now has more than 1,700 psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, social workers and nurses to treat more than 32,000 mentally ill inmates, or about one specialist for every 19 patients.
"California has invested tremendous amounts of money, resources and effort to transform its prison mental health care system into one of the best in the country," the state said in one of its recent court filings.
Inmates' attorneys say the efforts so far are not enough and that more mental health facilities must be built and staffed. They also say more must be done to reduce a suicide rate that exceeds the national average for state and federal prisons.
California's prison suicide rate was 24 per 100,000 inmates in 2012. That compares to 16 per 100,000 inmates in other state prisons and the historical average of nine suicides per 100,000 inmates in federal prisons. |
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Court won't allow challenge to surveillance law
Top Court Watch |
2013/02/28 23:43
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A sharply-divided Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out an attempt by U.S. citizens to challenge the expansion of a surveillance law used to monitor conversations of foreign spies and terrorist suspects.
With a 5-4 vote, the high court ruled that a group of American lawyers, journalists and organizations can't sue to challenge the 2008 expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) because they can't prove that the government will monitor their conversations along with those of potential foreign terrorist and intelligence targets.
Justices "have been reluctant to endorse standing theories that require guesswork," said Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for the court's majority.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was enacted in 1978. It allows the government to monitor conversations of foreign spies and terrorist suspects abroad for intelligence purposes. The 2008 FISA amendments allow the government to obtain from a secret court broad, yearlong intercept orders, raising the prospect that phone calls and emails between those foreign targets and innocent Americans in this country would be swept under the umbrella of surveillance.
Without proof that the law would directly affect them, Americans can't sue, Alito said in the ruling.
Despite their documented fears and the expense of activities that some Americans have taken to be sure they don't get caught up in government monitoring, they "have set forth no specific facts demonstrating that the communications of their foreign contacts will be targeted," he added. |
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Jury: Oregon car-bomb suspect guilty of terrorism
Top Court Watch |
2013/02/01 15:16
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Three hours before they handed down a sentence that could put an Oregon man in prison for life, deliberating jurors sent a note to a trial judge with a question.
Did the man whose fate they were deciding need to have envisioned the specific crime for which he was accused? Or did he merely need to be inclined toward some kind of terroristic act?
Their question more broadly reflects the central debate at the heart of the trial of Mohamed Mohamud, a 21-year-old Somali-American found guilty on Thursday of attempting to bomb a Portland Christmas tree-lighting in November 2010.
Prosecutors were met by a claim of entrapment by Mohamud's defense team, and needed to convince jurors that he was predisposed to terrorism by the time an FBI informant began discussing radical jihad with him over emails.
The judge, Garr King, told jurors Thursday that Mohamud only had to be likely to commit the offense or one like it, and he did not specifically have to be thinking about a bomb at the specific time and place at which he and two undercover FBI agents decided to plant one.
The bomb was a fake, supplied by the agents posing as jihadis.
Jurors were given starkly different portraits of the man who was 17 when the FBI began to focus on him. In the prosecution's description, Mohamud was a powder keg in search of a spark, an angry teenager with the right combination of anti-Western sentiment and a plausible cover story as an Oregon college student. |
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Mont. can pursue ex-billionaire bankruptcy
Top Court Watch |
2012/12/20 14:09
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Montana's bid to force ultra-luxury resort founder Tim Blixseth into bankruptcy and make him come up with up $57 million in purported back taxes has been resurrected by an appeals court ruling in the case.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overruled a lower court Monday and said Nevada is the proper venue for the case.
Blixseth, a one-time billionaire who lives in Washington state, is believed to have most of his assets in a Nevada-based trust.
On Tuesday, he promised an appeal.
The appellate ruling comes after a Dec. 5 order that Blixseth pay $41 million to creditors from the Yellowstone Club, the private ski resort he founded near Big Sky.
Beginning in 2005, Blixseth diverted most of a $375 million loan to the club to himself and then-wife Edra Blixseth. They used the money to buy up luxury estates around the world, a pair of jets, cars, furniture, art and jewelry.
When the resort started to founder, Tim Blixseth turned it over to Edra Blixseth during their 2008 divorce and took most of their remaining assets. The Yellowstone Club went bankrupt months later. It was later sold and is now under new ownership.
Montana tax authorities contend the money Blixseth got out of the 2005 loan, from banking giant Credit Suisse, was taxable. They've tried for more than two years to get him to pay up. A separate proceeding to get the money is pending before the Montana Tax Appeals Board. |
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