Free Republic

President Biden on Wednesday said the verdict that found the three white men charged in the death of Ahmaud Arbery guilty of multiple counts of murder is not enough, and called for a future of unity. “While the guilty verdicts reflect our justice system doing its job, that alone is not enough. Instead, we must recommit ourselves to building a future of unity and shared strength, where no one fears violence because of the color of their skin,” Biden said in a statement. He said his administration “will continue to do the hard work to ensure that equal justice under...

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 at 2:49 am Ford $131 Million Verdict 9th Largest in U.S. History By Stacy In a landmark ruling going against U.S. automaker Ford, a $131 million verdict was returned by the jury leaving the manufacturer culpable for the wrongful death of Minor League baseball player Brian Cole. The New York Mets hopeful had been driving his Explorer and was thrown from the vehicle when it flipped, suffering terminal injuries. Get the full story, pictures and video below Company spokeswoman Marcey Evans said Cole had been driving over 80 miles per hour when he went off the...

LOS ANGELES Attorneys who failed to get kingpins of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang acquitted on charges of murder, conspiracy and racketeering are trying a novel approach to save their clients from possible death sentences. The defense for Barry "The Baron" Mills and Tyler "The Hulk" Bingham have filed motions with a federal judge arguing that the government must present live witnesses during their clients' sentencing phase or nothing at all. The argument is based on the 2004 U.S. Supreme Court decision Crawford v. Washington, in which the high court found that defendants have the right to confront witnesses whose...

The Bush administration hardly needs encouragement to deny public access to vital government information. Regrettably, encouragement came last week in the form of a federal appellate court ruling supporting the administration's refusal to divulge details about the role of energy industry lobbyists in drafting White House energy policy.At issue were the secretive workings of the energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney early in President Bush's first term. Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club sued to compel disclosure about the panel's work, relying on the Federal Advisory Committee Act, intended to promote government integrity by requiring such panels...

WASHINGTON, April 26 - When Gary Small walked into a sports store in his hometown of Delmont, Pa., to buy a pistol, he probably did not see himself as the central figure in a Supreme Court case. But that is what he became. Before walking out of the store with his 9-millimeter pistol on June 2, 1998, he filled out the mandatory federal form. It asked whether he had ever been convicted "in any court" of a crime punishable by a year or more in prison. Fatefully, he answered "no." In fact, Mr. Small had never been convicted of any...

WASHINGTON, March 30 - The Supreme Court ruled today that older workers can, in some circumstances, recover damages from their employers for harm caused by age discrimination even if the harm was not deliberate. The court, ruling 5 to 3 in a case closely watched by business interests, held that the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act does allow such lawsuits. But the court also made clear that the estimated 75 million people covered by the law - workers over age 40 - must clear a high threshold of evidence to prevail. Justice John Paul Stevens and the four other...

A Yemeni cleric who once said Osama bin Laden called him his sheik was convicted of terrorism-financing charges today in a federal court in New York City. The victory for the Justice Department came in one of the government's most visible terrorism-financing prosecutions, which had for a time appeared uncertain after the F.B.I.'s star informer drew attention by setting himself on fire outside the White House in November. The sheik, Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, a prominent Yemeni who once held a government post in his homeland, was convicted after a five-week trial that federal prosecutors portrayed today as providing "an...

In the second ecclesiastical trial in less than a year of a gay Methodist minister, a jury of 13 clergy in eastern Pennsylvania convicted a fellow pastor today of violating church law by living in a lesbian relationship and ordered her defrocked. The ruling is evidence of the United Methodist Church's efforts this summer to tighten rules banning "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals" from the ministry, a step that gained greater urgency after the jury in a trial in Bothell, Wash., in March cleared another lesbian minister of breaking church law. At the trial in Pughtown, Pa., the jury voted 12 to...

GUEST OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Los Angeles Say that an I.R.S. agent leaks a politician's income tax return to a newspaper reporter, an act that is a federal felony. The newspaper may have a First Amendment right to publish the information, especially since it bears on a matter of public interest. The government, meanwhile, is entitled to punish the agent, to protect citizens' privacy and ensure a fair and efficient tax system. To punish the agent, prosecutors may need to get the leaker's name from the reporter; but if the reporter refuses to testify because of a "journalist's privilege" to protect confidential...

The case was familiar, if disturbing. A Bronx man had been accused of punching and threatening his girlfriend. But the woman refused to testify. Prosecutors, though, soon got a break. A Bronx Criminal Court judge appeared to stake out some novel legal ground just weeks after a United States Supreme Court decision. He ruled that prosecutors could use 911 recordings of the woman's anguished call for help as evidence, even though she would not testify. Within weeks, prosecutors and judges around the country seized on the March 25 decision, by Judge Ethan Greenberg, citing it as important precedent as they...

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Nov. 8 - A federal judge ruled Monday that President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals. The ruling by Judge James Robertson of United States District Court in Washington brought an abrupt halt to the trial here of one detainee, one of hundreds being held at Guantánamo as enemy combatants. It threw into doubt the future of the first set of United States military commission trials since the end of World War...

Christopher Pittman said he remembered everything about that night in late 2001 when he killed his grandparents: the blood, the shotgun blasts, the voices urging him on, even the smoke detectors that screamed as he drove away from their rural South Carolina home after setting it on fire. "Something kept telling me to do it," he later told a forensic psychiatrist. Now, Christopher, who was 12 years old at the time of the killings, faces charges of first-degree murder. The decision by a local prosecutor to try him as an adult could send him to prison for life. While prosecutors...