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Tag(s) Selected:  Anthony Kennedy
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5/23/2011 Justices, 5-4, Tell California to Cut Prisoner Population
Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced “needless suffering and death.” Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed vigorous dissents. Justice Scalia called the order affirmed by the majority “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Justice Alito said “the majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California.” The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.” Monday’s ruling in the case, Brown v. Plata, No. 09-1233, affirmed an order by a special three-judge federal court requiring state officials to reduce the prison population to 110,000, which is 137.5 percent of the system’s capacity. There have been more than 160,000 inmates in the system in recent years, and there are now more than 140,000. Prison release orders are rare and hard to obtain, and even advocates for prisoners’ rights said Monday’s decision was unlikely to have a significant impact around the nation. “California is an extreme case by any measure,” said David C. Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, which submitted a brief urging the justices to uphold the lower court’s order. “This case involves ongoing, undisputed and lethal constitutional violations. We’re not going to see a lot of copycat litigation.” State officials in California will have two years to comply with the order, and they may ask for more time. Justice Kennedy emphasized that the reduction in population need not be achieved solely by releasing prisoners early. Among the other possibilities, he said, are new construction, transfers out of state and using county facilities. (New York Times)
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posted: 5/27/11                   0       7
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5/17/2011 Smell Pot? SCOTUS Kills 4th Amendment
The Supreme Court says police can enter your home without a warrant, if they smell marijuana, and if when knocking on the door, they hear what sounds like the destruction of evidence. But apparently, by making sounds like destruction of evidence like flushing a toilet, police can come in. Students for Sensible Drug Policy's Aaron Houston discusses. (Russia Today)
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posted: 5/18/11      
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5/11/2010 Kagan Argued to Ban Political Pamphlets
The court, in its 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, ruled against Kagan’s contention that the government can limit political speech by corporations. In a scathing concurrence to the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts blasted Kagan’s argument. (Newsmax)
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posted: 5/24/10                   0       22
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1/6/2009 Congress' plan would let AG 'ban guns at will': 2nd Amendment critics are 'ready to run wild'
A perfect storm is developing for Second Amendment opponents that could allow President-elect Barack Obama's choice for attorney general – Eric Holder – to "ban guns at will" despite the 2008 affirmation from the U.S. Supreme Court that U.S. citizens have a right to bear arms. The situation was described with alarm by Alan Korwin, author of Gun Laws of America, in a recent commentary. (World Net Daily)
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posted: 7/25/10                   0       4
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12/9/2000 Contesting the Vote: The Overview; Florida Court Backs Recount; Bush Appealing To U.S. Justices
Wielding its power with a force that neither candidate had fully anticipated, a four-member majority of the seven-member court suddenly erased the growing sense of inevitability that had developed around Gov. George W. Bush and set loose what could turn out to be days of confusion and disorder (New York Times)
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posted: 8/7/09                   0       8
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