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Religious clerks in Kentucky follow law, but see conflict
Legal Interview |
2015/09/13 10:32
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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 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 |
2015/09/11 10:32
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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.
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Appeals court clears way for trial over dancing baby video
Attorney News |
2015/09/07 10:32
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A federal appeals court Monday cleared the way for a trial in a copyright lawsuit over a YouTube video showing a baby dancing to the Prince song, "Let's Go Crazy."
The lawsuit was filed by the baby's mother, Stephanie Lenz, after Universal Music sent a notice to YouTube demanding the video be taken down for violating the song's copyright. Lenz posted the 29-second video in February 2007. It was taken down a few months later, but went back up weeks later and remains on the site. It has been viewed more than a million times.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said copyright holders can't demand videos and other content that uses their material be taken down without determining whether they constitute "fair use." It's the first circuit court to issue such a ruling, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the civil liberties group that represented Lenz in her lawsuit.
Fair use allows segments of copyrighted works to be used for purposes of criticism, comment, research or in other limited circumstances without a license from the copyright holder.
Lenz said the video is fair use and Universal had failed to consider that before ordering the video taken down.
Universal said it considered fair use and still determined the use of Prince's song in the video was unauthorized.
The 9th Circuit said a jury would have to decide whether Universal had done enough to form a good faith belief that the video violated fair use. The court agreed with a lower court that rejected Universal's and Lenz's motions to grant pre-trial judgments in their favor. The 9th Circuit also said Lenz could seek damages.
When asked for comment, a spokesman for Universal Music Group deferred to a statement from the Recording Industry Association of America, which said it disagreed with the "burden the court places upon copyright holders before sending takedown notices." Universal had argued that considering whether material is fair use could slow its response to stamping out pirated versions of its work.
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Court rules against St. Louis police in ticket scandal
Attorney News |
2015/08/20 10:49
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The St. Louis police department will have to turn over records from its probe into a scandal over 2006 World Series tickets now that the Missouri Supreme Court has thrown out a final appeal that sought to block the documents' release.
The state high court's ruling on Tuesday upholds decisions by a St. Louis judge and a state appellate court who ordered the release of records from the department's investigation of officers who gave tickets that had been confiscated from scalpers to friends and family.
"This ends it," Neil Bruntrager, a lawyer for the officers, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a story Thursday. "We certainly are disappointed. There are privacy issues at play."
Eight officers and six supervisors were disciplined for giving away the tickets to the three games played in St. Louis during the series, in which the Cardinals defeated the Detroit Tigers in five games. But the police department refused to turn over the records of its internal probe, leading the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri to sue, saying the records should be released under Missouri's Sunshine Law.
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Appeals court won't reinstate 1990 arson-murder conviction
Court News |
2015/08/20 10:48
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An elderly man who spent 24 years in prison for his daughter's death in a fire will remain free after a federal appeals court in Pennsylvania on Wednesday refused to reinstate his murder conviction.
Han Tak Lee, 80, a native of South Korea who earned U.S. citizenship, was exonerated and freed last year after a judge concluded the case against him was based on since-discredited scientific theories about arson. Prosecutors appealed, saying that other evidence pointed to his guilt.
The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the appeal, meaning Lee will stay out of prison.
Lee said Wednesday in a brief phone interview that he was happy about the ruling. His attorney, Peter Goldberger, called on prosecutors to drop the case.
"I hope, now, that they will finally see there is no basis for this conviction," Goldberger said. "They can say it's nobody's fault, that science changed, that this is over now, and the federal court has had the last word."
Monroe County District Attorney David Christine, who prosecuted Lee in 1990, said he will consider an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"Although we are disappointed in the ruling, we know that the Court of Appeals gave very serious consideration to the arguments of all parties, and entered a decision only after careful and thoughtful scrutiny of all the relevant facts and legal issues," he said via email. "However, we remain convinced that in spite of the debunking of some of the (prosecution witnesses) on the cause and origin of fire accepted by the scientific community in the 1980s, the defendant's guilt was otherwise established by relevant and admissible evidence presented to the jury."
Lee's conviction was one of dozens to be called into question around the U.S. amid revolutionary changes in investigators' understanding of how an intentionally set fire can be distinguished from an accidental one.
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