Free Republic

A panel of three federal judges in South Carolina ruled Friday the state’s 1st District was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and ordered state lawmakers to redraw the congressional map before any more elections can be held. The decision gave lawmakers until March to draw new lines for the district, which runs along the state’s southern coast and is currently represented by Republican Nancy Mace. The ruling is the latest in suits over this decade’s congressional redistricting based on the 2020 census results, including in states such as Florida and Texas. An individual voter and the state’s NAACP filed the lawsuit...

A federal judge has denied a restraining order on Thursday that would have blocked vaccine mandates for up to 125 city employees in South Carolina. Tom Fernandez and his firm Fernandez Law represented the plaintiffs, 100 of whom are first responders who filed a lawsuit against the cities of Charleston and North Charleston, Charleston County, and the St. Johns Fire District over the mandates. “They felt that it was nothing short of government coercion to get the vaccine,” Fernandez told The Epoch Times. “We filed a lawsuit in state court alleging their constitutional protections. They did not want the vaccine....

Dylann Roof, the white gunman who killed nine black people in the 2015 Charleston church massacre, is one step closer to execution after a federal appeals court in Virginia ruled he’s eligible to receive the death penalty. “His crimes qualify him for the harshest penalty that a just society can impose,” a three-judge panel for the Richmond-based Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote, according to The State newspaper. Roof was convicted in 2017 of slaughtering nine parishioners at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston after planning the attack for months in an effort to start a race war in the...

COLUMBIA, S.C. (FOX 46 CHARLOTTE) – The U.S. District Court of South Carolina denied Friday an injunction filed by two death row inmates scheduled for execution starting next week. Death row inmates Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens asked the court to find the electric chair to be declared cruel and unusual punishment violating the 8th amendment to the U.S. constitution. The case stems from Governor McMaster adding firing squad to the state’s execution methods except the firing squad is yet to be created and lethal injection is arguably unavailable. So Sigmon and Owens are set to die by the only...

A federal judge in South Carolina ruled Tuesday that local election authorities cannot discard absentee ballots whose signatures do not match those on file. U.S. District Judge Richard Mark Gergel, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said that the signature authorization procedures being used by local authorities were “subjective.”

Late Monday afternoon the Supreme Court issued a “Stay” with regard to an order from a South Carolina federal district court judge who rewrote a provision of South Carolina election law due to the impact of COVID 19. Judge Julianna Michelle Childs, an appointee of President Obama, granted an injunction for Plaintiffs preventing the South Carolina election officials from enforcing a provision of South Carolina election law requiring a witness signature on an absentee ballot envelope. Judge Childs set for the relief being sought by the plaintiffs as follows: SNIP But the Supreme Court’s emergency “stay” prevents Judge Childs order...