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MOBILE, Ala. — A former Alabama judge was cleared Monday of charges accusing him of paddling and sexually abusing male inmates. Former Mobile County Circuit Judge Herman Thomas was found not guilty on seven counts after more than a week of testimony. A judge threw out the remaining 14 charges. Defense attorneys had painted the 48-year-old as a prominent civic leader who became a victim of felons lying about him to manipulate the court system. Prosecutors said Thomas brought 11 young male inmates to a private courthouse office and severely paddled their bare bottoms for sexual gratification. Some of the...

Ruled teen's blog post created a created "foreseeable risk of substantial disruption" President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill a Supreme Court vacancy has yet another tie to Connecticut. She sided against a student in the infamous “douche bag” case, and that has upset some free-speech advocates. In August 2007, Judge Sonia Sotomayor sat on a panel that ruled against an appeal in Doninger v. Niehoff. Avery Doninger was disqualified from running for school government at Lewis S. Mills High School in Burlington after she posted something on her blog, referring to the superintendent and other officials as "douche bags" because...

California Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage ban nears The clock is ticking down on the California Supreme Court's imminent decision on whether to uphold Proposition 8, the voter-approved ballot measure restoring the state's ban on same-sex marriage. Based on regulations that require the justices to rule within 90 days of oral arguments in a case, the Supreme Court's decision in the legal challenge to Proposition 8 now will fall on one of three remaining days: Tuesday or next Thursday, or June 1. The high court normally only rules on Mondays and Thursdays, but will issue rulings next Tuesday because...

HARTFORD - Connecticut's Supreme Court ruled Friday that same-sex couples have the right to marry, making the state the third behind Massachusetts and California to legalize such unions. The divided court ruled 4-3 that gay and lesbian couples cannot be denied the freedom to marry under the state constitution, and Connecticut's civil unions law does not provide those couples with the same rights as heterosexual couples. "I can't believe it. We're thrilled, we're absolutely overjoyed. We're finally going to be able, after 33 years, to get married," said Janet Peck of Colchester, who was a plaintiff with her partner, Carole...

Less than a week before its October term is set to begin, the US Supreme Court became a spectacle of sound and fury on Wednesday over a landmark decision handed down three months ago declaring that the death penalty for child rapists is cruel and unusual punishment. At issue was whether the high court would revisit the landmark 5-to-4 decision after revelations last summer that contradicted the majority justices' conclusion that a "national consensus" had emerged against the death penalty for the rape of a child. The June 25 decision said only six states had laws authorizing capital punishment for...

DURHAM -- Former Durham district attorney Mike Nifong is off the hook for the time being from any civil lawsuits. The judge overseeing the Duke Lacrosse lawsuit filed by three exonerated players has put their suit on hold.

A legal immigrant in Northern California who was 20 when he began a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl faces deportation to Mexico under a ruling Thursday that was described as unjust by a majority of the federal appeals court panel that issued it. Although Juan Estrada-Espinoza's relationship with his girlfriend was consensual, the crime he committed under state law - unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor at least three years younger than he was - is considered sexual abuse of a minor under federal law and is grounds for mandatory deportation, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals...

Mention the name Charles Pickering to anyone but the most committed news junkie, and you’re apt to get a blank look or, at best, one of dim recognition. In the era of the 24-hour news cycle aimed at the ever-shortening attention span, the bitter Senate battles over the federal judiciary in which Pickering played so dramatic a part a few years back can seem like ancient history. But with the publication of A Price Too High, Pickering’s insider account of the nearly four years he spent in limbo as a nominee to the federal bench, as Democrats and their press...

Activist judges on the Supreme Court issued a major setback to workers who are discriminated against based on their sex Tuesday, effectively rewriting established law in order to give companies that practice discrimination a break. In a split 5-4 ruling, the court ruled against a woman who said she found out over time that she had been receiving smaller pay increases than her male counterparts at Goodyear. Tough, the justices said. In order for the claim to be valid, they said, the woman would have had to file a suit as soon as she got her first paycheck with the...

Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes in to say "The last few times that I sued a spammer in Washington Small Claims Court, I filed a "booby-trapped" written legal brief with the judge, about four pages long, with the second and third pages stuck together in the middle. I made these by poking through those two pages with a thumbtack, then running a tiny sliver of paper through the holes and gluing it to either page with white-out. The idea was that after the judge made their decision, I could go to the courthouse and look at the file to see...

The five liberal judges on the Supreme Court, the same five who gave cities the right to confiscate the property of poor people in Kelo v. New London, just decided, against historical fact and scientific evidence, that the EPA should control CO2. Eventually, when the Democrats are in power, this might mean stringent controls on industrial plants, power plants and internal combustion engines – controls that will greatly increase costs and reduce efficiency – in order to limit a harmless substance that all plant life needs in order to grow.

A notice of appeal has been filed with the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals over actions by city officials in Philadephia who not only refused to protect the speech rights of 11 Christians at a public homosexual festival, but arrested them for quoting the Bible and speaking against the behavior. The Alliance Defense Fund said it is appealing a judge's Jan. 19 dismissal of the group's federal court lawsuit against the city officials. "Speech cannot be silenced simply because another person or group does not agree with it," said Ted Hoppe, an attorney allied with the ADF. "City officials must...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — The lawyers defending I. Lewis Libby Jr. against perjury charges rested their case today, but not before suffering a series of defeats in legal rulings by the presiding judge...... .........Judge Walton ruled against Mr. Wells on two motions seeking Mr. Russert’s recall. Mr. Russert, in his testimony, denied that he had told Mr. Libby about Ms. Wilson as Mr. Libby had claimed.... .....But at the time Mr. Russert had already discussed his conversation with Mr. Libby with an F.B.I. agent and Mr. Wells asserted that Mr. Fitzgerald agreed not to raise that matter because it would...

Judge: Defense Misled Court About Libby Feb 14 2:13 PM US/Eastern By MATT APUZZO Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense attorneys misled the court into thinking that former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby would testify in his CIA leak trial, a federal judge said Wednesday, as he blocked Libby from using some classified evidence in the case. Libby is accused of lying and obstructing an investigation into the 2003 leak of a CIA operative's identity. His attorneys have said for months in court papers that Libby would testify that he had important national security issues on his...

CHICAGO - Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Thursday told students and faculty at the Northwestern University School of Law that he believes the high court functions best when justices focus narrowly on the case at hand. Justices run great risks when they go beyond the specifics of the case and attempt to set public policy, said Roberts, a strict constructionist confirmed in his post in September 2005. "Judges should act like judges, not like statesmen," Roberts said in response to a student question following a lecture at the university. The talk concluded the first of Roberts' two days...

HOUSTON -- Tyron Garner, one of two men whose 1998 arrests led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down bans on sodomy, has died, according to a spokesman for the legal firm that represented him. Garner, 39, died early Monday at a Houston hospital, said Mark Roy, a spokesman for Lambda Legal in New York City. Garner had been suffering from meningitis and had been in his brother's care for the past six months. "Over the last few months, he lost the use of his legs from meningitis," Roy told The Associated Press. Garner and John Lawrence were...

1967 TYRONE GARNER 2006 Defendant in landmark sodomy ruling was not motivated by politics The key civil liberties victory for gays was 'fight against all odds' Tyrone Garner, whose arrest in violation of Texas sodomy laws led to a challenge before the Supreme Court and an eventual victory that struck down such statutes across the country, died after a lengthy illness, friends said Wednesday. He was 39. Garner, who died Monday of meningitis in a Houston-area hospital, was openly gay but not politically active when he chose to fight his arrest in court, said his lawyer, Mitchell Katine. "He was...

Are there no limits to which activist judges won’t go to advance their political and policy agendas? Answer: No. I wrote an entire book about it. And U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, appointed in the twilight of the Carter administration, is the latest in a long list of disgraceful lawyers who abuse their power. There are four things that strike me most about Taylor’s opinion. First, she grants standing to such plaintiffs as the ACLU, CAIR, Greenpeace, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Christopher Hitchens, and others, without a shred of information showing any connection between the plaintiffs’ assertions...

Today: August 16, 2006 at 11:0:38 PDT Teens Sent to Jail Over Deer-Decoy Crash ASSOCIATED PRESS KENTON, Ohio (AP) - A judge decided two high school athletes can complete the football season this fall before they serve 60-day jail sentences for a car crash caused by a decoy deer placed in a country road. Two teens were injured. "I shouldn't be doing this, but I'm going to. I see positive things about participating in football," Judge Gary McKinley said Tuesday. Dailyn Campbell, a 16-year-old quarterback for Kenton High, and 17-year-old teammate Jesse Howard will serve their time in a juvenile...

Ex-teacher gets 15 to life for molesting students VISTA -- A former Escondido middle school teacher -- denounced by victims' families as a predator and praised by his family and friends as a decent man who would never harm children ---- was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years to life in state prison. Peter Thomas Ziskin, 44, of Solana Beach was convicted in May of 17 of the 26 child molestation charges prosecutors had filed against him. Ziskin was acquitted of six of the charges, and jurors were unable to reach a verdict on three counts. The charges involved allegations that...

Court nixes part of Texas political map By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer 13 minutes ago WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld most of the Republican-boosting Texas congressional map engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay but threw out part, saying some of the new boundaries failed to protect minority voting rights. ADVERTISEMENT The fractured decision was a small victory for Democratic and minority groups who accused Republicans of an unconstitutional power grab in drawing boundaries that booted four Democratic incumbents from office. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060628/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_texas_redistricting Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said Hispanics do not have...

SAN FRANCISCO – A suburban San Diego teenager who was barred from wearing a T-shirt with anti-gay rhetoric to class lost a bid to have his high school's dress code suspended Thursday after a federal appeals court ruled the school could restrict what students wear to prevent disruptions. The ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals addressed only the narrow issue of whether the dress code should be unenforced pending the outcome of the student's lawsuit. A majority of judges said, however, that Tyler Chase Harper was unlikely to prevail on claims that the Poway Unified...

CECILE RICHARDS, the new and instantly embattled president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, would like those retro "folks" — her word — intent on knocking her organization, and the entire abortion rights movement, off the map to know she takes after her maternal grandmother That would be the tall, whip-thin woman who, nine-months pregnant and bedridden, took a timeout from home-birthing a future governor of Texas — Ms. Richards's mother, Ann — to wring the neck of the chicken her family was having for dinner. Plucky. "I love the idea of that story, and I'm sure it's true,"...

Watching the Alito confirmation hearings is much like watching an old Matlock rerun, except with Barney Fife doing the questioning… If it weren’t so infuriating, it would be about as interesting as watching paint dry. Apparently, I need to point out a few things to my friends across the aisle, not the least of which is the fact that a seat on the Supreme Court is NOT an elected position, but rather a presidential appointed position based upon the judicial qualifications of the candidate, not their personal ideologies.

Maybe Ronnie Earle has the goods on Tom DeLay and maybe not. I'm perfectly content to let a jury consider the evidence and decide. But if a jury does convict DeLay, I'm proposing a new nickname for the man who was, until Wednesday, one of the most powerful figures in national politics. Forget "The Hammer." He will be "Scarface." As in Al Capone. The connection? Capone was a monumental tough guy who ran gambling, prostitution, protection, bootlegging and other rackets in Chicago — only to be brought down on lower level charges that he cheated on his income taxes. DeLay...

Unbelievable! I'm not even Catholic and my jaw dropped when I read this report by James Taranto in Best of the Web. Catholics Need Not Apply No one seriously argues anymore that Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. Rather, pro-Roe advocates rest their case on policy grounds (warnings about coat alleys and back hangers, etc.) or, when they must argue the law, on the power of precedent. Of the five Supreme Court justices who more or less upheld Roe in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, three went out of their way to avoid endorsing the decision, emphasizing...

NEW YORK (AP) - A federal judge has told the government it will have to release additional pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, civil rights lawyers said. Judge Alvin Hellerstein, finding the public has a right to see the pictures, told the government Thursday he will sign an order requiring it to release them to the American Civil Liberties Union, the lawyers said. The judge made the decision after he and government attorneys privately viewed a sampling of nine pictures resulting from an Army probe into abuse and torture at the prison. The pictures were given to...

BOSTON -- Opponents saw it as a huge blow to the American family. Supporters looked on it as a moment of liberation. The first legal gay marriages in Massachusetts were a pivotal moment in America's culture wars. A year later, the legacy is mixed -- they remain legal here, and civil unions have been legalized in neighboring Connecticut, but a dozen states were propelled to prohibit same-sex weddings. In the past year, more than 6,000 same-sex couples have tied the knot, many rushing to exchange vows in the days and weeks that followed the May 17 start to the weddings....

Virginia Court Strikes Down Law Against Sex By Singles POSTED: 4:20 pm EST January 14, 2005 RICHMOND, Va. -- The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down an archaic and rarely enforced state law prohibiting sex between unmarried people. The unanimous ruling strongly suggests that a separate anti-sodomy law in Virginia also is unconstitutional, although that statute is not directly affected. The justices based their ruling on a U.S. Supreme Court decision voiding an anti-sodomy law in Texas. "This case directly affects only the fornication law but makes it absolutely clear how the court would rule were the sodomy law...

DALLAS - The arrest of a 12-year-old boy on charges that he molested a 4-year-old girl at a fast-food restaurant playground may point to a growing problem of sexually aggressive children, child-abuse experts say. The boy was arrested Wednesday in suburban Houston on charges of indecency with a child and aggravated sexual assault. Police would not discuss in detail what happened to the girl, other than to say her mother said she'd been touched inappropriately. The arrest came a week after the Dallas Independent School District expelled two first-grade boys after one performed a sex act on another during class....

Focus on the Family is forcing lawmakers who voted against the impeachment of a Denver judge to turn over all their correspondence in the case. The Colorado Springs conservative group, citing the state's Open Records Law in letters to each member of the House Judiciary Committee, demanded e-mails, letters, cell phone bills and notes from the hearing on the effort to impeach Judge John Coughlin. Focus on the Family lobbied in favor of impeaching Coughlin because of a decision he made in a lesbian custody case. But the impeachment effort failed when three Republicans joined five Democrats on the committee...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the government does not have to release 11-year-old photographs from the suicide of Clinton administration White House lawyer Vincent Foster.</p> <p>The unanimous decision makes it more difficult to use a public records law to access law enforcement records. Justices said the privacy rights of survivors outweigh the benefits of releasing some photographs.</p>

SALT LAKE CITY — A leading civil rights attorney prepared Monday to file a federal lawsuit challenging Utah’s ban on polygamy, citing the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Texas sodomy law. The suit says Salt Lake County clerks refused a marriage license to plaintiffs G. Lee Cook, an adult male, and J. Bronson, an adult female, because Cook was already married to D. Cook. That woman had given her consent to the additional marriage. In denying the marriage license, the county violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment right to practice their religion, attorney Brian Barnard says in...

Court Allows Arrests of All in Drug Stops WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court issued a traffic warning Monday: Beware of whom you ride with. If drugs are found in a vehicle, all occupants can be arrested, the justices said in a unanimous decision. It was a victory for Maryland and 20 other states that argued police frequently find drugs in traffic stops but no one in the vehicle claims them. The court gave officers the go-ahead to arrest everyone. In a small space like a car, an officer could reasonably infer "a common enterprise" among a driver and passengers,...

Sad day for freedomMona Charen (archive) December 12, 2003 | Print | Send On Dec. 10, 2003, freedom took two body blows. The first was the decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to permit the limitation of political speech. This is not exotic dancing or flag burning. This is "Vote for Sam Smith" -- the beating heart of our democracy. The Supreme Court has just tied a gag around our mouths, and most of the intellectual class is delighted. Apologists obscure the crude reality of this repression by calling it "campaign finance reform." Well, you can call...

<p>Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restrictions upon such inconsequential forms of expression as virtual child pornography, tobacco advertising, dissemination of illegally intercepted communications, and sexually explicit cable programming, would smile with favor upon a law that cut to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.</p>

Supreme Court whitewash? Posted: December 11, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com The Associated Press story covering the Supreme Court hearing on requested release of Vincent Foster crime-scene photos read as follows: "Five government investigations concluded that White House attorney Vincent Foster's death in 1993 was a suicide." Not true. There haven't been five government investigations. In fact, there hasn't been even one real government investigation. Instead, there have been five cover-ups, all using the same tainted evidence and the same tainted investigators. Attorney Allan Favish believes the public may learn something from 10 unreleased police photos of Foster and has taken...

[Reading from an Associated Press wire story:] "A sharply divided..." There's nothing "sharply divided" about this. We got four liberals and we got two Republicans who read the editorial pages - or two conservatives who read the editorial pages - on the Supreme Court. Let me just stick with the details here, and then I will ad-lib my commentary and analysis after presenting to you the facts. "A sharply divided Supreme Court upheld key features of the nation's new law intended to lessen the influence of money in politics, ruling today that the government may ban unlimited donations to political...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court halted the execution Wednesday of a condemned inmate who was part of a lawsuit that challenged one of the drugs used to carry out the death sentence. Kevin Lee Zimmerman won his reprieve about 20 minutes before he could have been put to death for a fatal stabbing and robbery at a Beaumont motel in 1987. In a brief order, Justice Antonin Scalia stopped the punishment pending an additional order from him or the court. ``I'm disappointed,'' Zimmerman told a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman, Michelle Lyons. ``I was ready to...

In a tragic decision today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that jeopardizes a cardinal principle of the U.S. Constitution: free speech. Concerned Women for America's Chief Counsel Jan LaRue noted that the decision means less protection for political speech, the very speech the First Amendment aims to shield, than for pornography. The following article comes to us from the James Madison Center for Free Speech of Washington, D.C. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution mandates that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." Today the United States Supreme Court has...

<p>WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court (search) upheld key features of the nation's new law intended to lessen the influence of money in politics, ruling Wednesday that the government may ban unlimited donations to political parties.</p> <p>Those donations, called "soft money," had become a mainstay of modern political campaigns, used to rally voters to the polls and to pay for sharply worded television ads.</p>

The first killing of an abortion doctor by an anti-abortion activist happened in 1993. Since then, six more people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics, which is fewer people who ended up dead by being in the vicinity of recently released Weatherman Kathy Boudin. Most of the abortionists were shot or, depending upon your point of view, had a procedure performed on them with a rifle. This brings the total to: seven abortion providers to 30 million fetuses dead, which is also a pretty good estimate of how the political battle is going. The nation embarked on...

<p>A Utah man with five wives is in court fighting to get his bigamy conviction overturned on the basis of the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling that decriminalized homosexual relations.</p> <p>The legal action by polygamist Tom Green in the Utah Supreme Court seems to confirm predictions of a Republican lawmaker and other social conservatives who warned that the high court's decision would open the door to attempts to legalize other sexual activities that historically have been outlawed by states, such as bigamy, polygamy, prostitution, adult incest and even bestiality.</p>

Think back: How long ago would you have scoffed at the idea of two men getting married? Or the Supreme Court endorsing sodomy? Or "domestic partners" enjoying the same rights and benefits as married couples? Or network television featuring shows with gays and lesbians? Or companies such as Avis announcing, "Domestic partners are automatically included as additional drivers. No extra fees charged. No questions asked." Or even that you would take the term "sexual rights" seriously? It wasn't that long ago. The forces for perversion have subjected us to a propaganda campaign of such intensity that most Americans have surrendered...

TORONTO - Garfield Dunlop is busy on the hustings, giving the same spiel at every door in his suburban Ontario district. "I've got some literature here on same-sex marriage," says the avuncular politician, pressing a pamphlet into the palm of a white-haired woman who smiles and motions him into her home. "It's a sin," he continues, climbing into the foyer. "And it could tear apart the fabric of our society." For a man in for the political fight of his life, an incumbent running for a seat in the provincial parliament, Mr. Dunlop's rhetoric could read like a death wish....

-snip- Judge Roy Moore, the publicity-seeker who put the 2.5-ton Ten Commandments in the Alabama state courthouse, declared Monday that he could disobey the direct order of a federal judge because "judges do not make laws, they interpret them." Since, Moore continued, an interpretation can be wrong, therefore he may defy a judicial order. So presumably Judge Moore also thinks that if he sentences a man to prison, the man can declare that the interpretation might be wrong and walk free? It's exactly the same logic. Moore further said that the First Amendment precept, "Congress shall make no law respecting...

Left-wing "comedian" Al Franken got tripped up by some big fat lies this week. He's sorry he got caught, but smugly silent about making fun of countless American kids who have taken abstinence vows.Thanks to Court TV's Smoking Gun Web site (www.thesmokinggun.com), we now know that the Saturday Night Live leftover abused his position as an "academic fellow" (now that's funny) at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy in a puerile attempt to trick Attorney General John Ashcroft into publicly sharing his personal experience with abstinence.Franken urged Ashcroft to share...

When an Oak Creek woman found her 14-year-old daughter nude in the woman's bed with a 14-year-old boy, the teens didn't strike her as being overly concerned. "They both freely admitted that their intention was to 'have sex,' " records quote the woman as saying. They "were confrontational and remorseless." The teens even "challenged" the woman to call police. So she did. Now, the couple's would-be sexual encounter in October has both of them facing serious criminal charges. Their case takes a course through the intersection of morals and law, a bustling crossroads at a time when sexuality has become...

The news that five members of the Supreme Court were winging their way over to Italy on the heels of the decision striking down Texas' anti-sodomy law seemed somehow appropriate. Some of the flying judges were no doubt there to discuss their newly proposed constitution -- given as the official reason for the junket. But two or three of them must have at least contemplated communing with European elitists on how they ought to vote on upcoming cases here. After all, in the Texas case they had for the first time in a majority opinion cited European public opinion, decisions...

Back Door to History Thank J.R. Quinn for the gay celebrations Gay rights supporters hailed the U.S. Supreme Court's June 26 decision in Lawrence v. Texas as a watershed that will forever change gay and lesbian life in America. Many of the players in the drama have gotten their 15 minutes of fame, from the eagerly sound-biting lawyers to the publicity-shy defendants. But what about Harris County Sheriff's Deputy J.R. Quinn? He's the Frank Wills of this new day for gays ('70s trivia time: Wills was the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in). In 1998 Quinn arrested John Lawrence...