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Prominent Chinese rights lawyer tried in closed proceedings
Trending Legal Issues |
2018/12/26 13:39
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The trial of a prominent human rights lawyer began in northern China on Wednesday with about two dozen plainclothes officers stationed outside a courthouse and at least one supporter taken away by police.
Reporters, foreign diplomats and supporters were prevented from approaching the municipal court in Tianjin city where lawyer Wang Quanzhang was being tried. Wang's wife, Li Wenzu, was kept from attending the proceedings by security agents who had blocked the exit of her apartment complex since Tuesday.
Li told The Associated Press by phone Wednesday that Liu Weiguo, Wang's government-appointed lawyer, confirmed the trial had started. But he did not tell her whether it was now over or whether a verdict had been reached.
The court said in a statement on its website that it "lawfully decided not to make public" the trial hearings because the case involved state secrets. A decision will be announced at a future date, the court said.
Wang is among more than 200 lawyers and legal activists who were detained in a sweeping 2015 crackdown. A member of the Fengrui law firm, among the most recognized in the field broadly known in China as "rights defending," he was charged with subversion of state power in 2016. He has been held without access to his lawyers or family for more than three years.
Fengrui has pursued numerous sensitive cases and represented outspoken critics of the ruling Communist Party. Wang represented members of the Falun Gong meditation sect that the government has relentlessly suppressed since banning it as an "evil cult" in 1999. Group leaders have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms and ordinary followers locked up as alleged threats. |
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Cancer the latest health woe for resilient Justice Ginsburg
Court and Trial |
2018/12/24 16:06
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is resting in a New York hospital following surgery to remove two malignant growths in her left lung, the third time the Supreme Court’s oldest justice has been treated for cancer and her second stay in a hospital in two months.
Worries over Ginsburg’s health have been a constant of sorts for nearly 10 years, and for liberals, particularly in the last two. Ginsburg, the leader of the court’s liberal wing and known to her fans as the Notorious RBG, has achieved an iconic status rare for Supreme Court justices.
If she did step down, President Donald Trump would have another opportunity to move a conservative court even more to the right. “Wishing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg a full and speedy recovery!” Trump tweeted after the court’s announcement Friday.
But Ginsburg has always bounced back before, flaunting her physical and mental fitness. After past health scares, she has resumed the exercise routine popularized in a book written by her personal trainer and captured in a Stephen Colbert video. Weeks after cracking three ribs in a fall at the Supreme Court in November, the 85-year-old Ginsburg was asking questions at high court arguments, speaking at a naturalization ceremony for new citizens and being interviewed at screenings of the new movie about her, “On the Basis of Sex.”
Ginsburg will remain in the hospital for a few days, the court said. She has never missed arguments in more than 25 years as a justice. The court next meets on Jan. 7.
While it’s hard to refer to good luck and cancer diagnoses in the same breath, this is the second time for Ginsburg that cancerous growths have been detected at an apparently early stage through unrelated medical tests.
The nodules on her lung were found during X-rays and other tests Ginsburg had after she fractured ribs in a fall in her Supreme Court office on Nov. 7, the court said. In 2009, routine follow-up screening after Ginsburg’s colorectal cancer 10 years earlier detected a lesion on her pancreas. Doctors operated and removed the growth they’d previously spotted, plus a smaller one they hadn’t seen before. The larger growth was benign, while the smaller one was malignant. |
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Mississippi chief justice: Time for another to lead court
Trending Legal Issues |
2018/12/24 15:37
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After 21 years on the Mississippi Supreme Court and 10 years as chief justice, Bill Waller Jr. says it's time for someone else to take the helm.
Waller's court has at times questioned problems with forensic evidence, but passed when asked to rule on the legality of Mississippi's cap on punitive damages. He said his biggest regret is not getting a statewide system of county courts.
Gov. Phil Bryant has announced that he will replace Waller with Court of Appeals Chief Judge Kenny Griffis, while Presiding Justice Michael Randolph will become the next leader of the nine-member Supreme Court, based on seniority. The outgoing chief justice, son of the late Gov. Bill Waller Sr., a Democrat who served from 1972 to 1976, said he still might run for governor himself.
Waller came on to the court in a different time, before the new judicial building was started, when most record-keeping was on paper and when a hot political battle was waging over limiting damages on civil lawsuits. Another change has been improvements in how inmates are represented in appeals, with the creation of the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel and then the Office of Indigent Appeals.
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Appeals court agrees to hear case involving Trump DC hotel
Top Attorney News |
2018/12/21 16:06
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A federal appeals court agreed Thursday to take up a case accusing Donald Trump of profiting off the presidency in violation of the U.S. Constitution, giving the president's legal team its first major victory in the case.
The order issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, hits the pause button on the ongoing federal court case in Maryland before deadlines to respond to subpoenas issued earlier this month seeking tax returns, receipts and other records from 13 Trump businesses and other entities.
It came just three days after Justice Department lawyers filed papers seeking a writ of mandamus appeal, criticizing U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte and arguing that that the "intrusive" discovery that has already begun would distract the president from his performance of his constitutional duties and could cause separation of powers concerns.
For Justice to succeed at the appeals level, they must meet a demanding standard that would partly rest on showing Messitte's decisions to be clearly wrong.
The lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia alleges that because Trump has not divested himself of his business holdings, foreign and domestic government spending at Trump's Washington hotel amounts to gifts to the president in violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause.
Oral arguments before the three-judge appeals court are scheduled for March, delaying what had been a brisk discovery schedule set in the district court by several months. The order also notes that lawyers should be prepared to also address substantive issues such as whether the plaintiffs in the case can even sue and, if victorious, compel the president to stop violating the Constitution.
Justice Department spokeswoman Kelly Laco told The Associated Press the "DOJ is pleased" by the order. |
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New voter ID law immediately challenged in N Carolina court
Trending Legal Issues |
2018/12/20 16:07
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The North Carolina law detailing a new voter photo identification requirement got challenged in court Wednesday mere moments after the Republican-led General Assembly completed the override of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's veto of the measure.
Six voters filed the lawsuit in Wake County court less than 15 minutes after the state House finished the override in a mostly party-line 72-40 vote. The Senate already voted to override Tuesday.
The photo ID law implements a constitutional amendment approved in a referendum last month that mandates photo identification to vote in person, with exceptions allowed. Still, the plaintiffs contend the law violates the state constitution and should be blocked, saying it retains requirements within a 2013 photo ID law that federal judges struck down.
The voters — five black residents and one described as biracial — say the restrictions will harm African-American and American Indian residents disproportionately and unduly burden the right to vote. It also creates a financial cost to voting in the form of lost work times and the need to secure transportation to obtain an ID, the lawsuit said.
"The General Assembly has simply reproduced the court-identified racially discriminatory intent it manifested a mere five years ago when it enacted a very similar voter ID requirement," according to the plaintiffs' lawyers. Some of the attorneys work for an organization that helped challenge the 2013 law. That litigation took nearly four years to resolve.
Before and after the lawsuit was filed Wednesday, Republican lawmakers said the implementing legislation carries out what 55 percent of voters who supported the referendum in November wanted. GOP legislators rejected Cooper's veto message that the bill was a "sinister and cynical" attempt to suppress the voting rights of minorities, the poor and the elderly. Rather, they said, it was designed to discourage voter fraud and increase the public's confidence in elections.
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