WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court says states must look beyond an intelligence test score in borderline cases of mental disability to determine whether a death row inmate is eligible to be executed.
The justices said in a 5-4 ruling Tuesday that Florida cannot rely solely on an IQ score above 70 to bar an inmate from claiming mental disability. Justice Anthony Kennedy said for the court that IQ tests have a margin of error and that inmates whose scores fall within the margin must be allowed to present other evidence of mental disability.
Category: Blind Justice
FBI director can’t find good programmers because of zero tolerance drug policy
Apparently, the federal government’s continued war on marijuana is making it very difficult for FBI to go after real criminals. FBI Director James B. Comey says he is having trouble recruiting qualified programmers to deal with cybercrime because of the governments strict anti-marijuana rule:
Congress has authorized the FBI to add 2,000 personnel to its rolls this year, and many of those new recruits will be assigned to tackle cyber crimes, a growing priority for the agency. And that’s a problem, Mr. Comey told the White Collar Crime Institute, an annual conference held at the New York City Bar Association in Manhattan. A lot of the nation’s top computer programmers and hacking gurus are also fond of marijuana.
“I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” Mr. Comey said.
The issue has gotten so bad Comey is thinking about making the agency’s restriction a bit less draconian. Currently, you can’t apply if you smoked pot less than three years ago.
Supposedly, the reason we are spending billions of dollars locking people in cages for consuming this plant is that it’s so horrible for a person, it is worth taking away that person’s freedoms just to stop them from using it.
Yet here is one of America’s top law enforcement officials basically acknowledging that you can use marijuana and still be a very successful and productive member of society. In fact he admits his problem is there are so many productive cannabis consumers he has trouble finding many successful tech workers who don’t occasionally use it.
PA marriage ban overturned
Great news. I’m hoping Corbett doesn’t appeal:
PHILADELPHIA — Pennsylvania’s ban on gay marriage was overturned by a federal judge Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III called the plaintiffs — a widow, 11 couples and one of the couples’ two teenage daughters — courageous.
“We now join the 12 federal district courts across the country which, when confronted with these inequities in their own states, have concluded that all couples deserve equal dignity in the realm of civil marriage,” Jones wrote.
An appeal to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is likely. Gov. Tom Corbett’s office had defended the law after Attorney General Kathleen Kane called it unconstitutional and refused to defend it.
State marriage bans have been falling around the country since the U.S. Supreme Court last year struck down part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
In all, 18 states give legal status to gay marriage. If Jones’ decision stands, Pennsylvania would become the 19th and legalize gay marriage throughout the Northeast.
Good news
Cecily McMillan got a light sentence:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – An Occupy Wall Street protester convicted of assaulting a police officer during a demonstration two years ago was sentenced on Monday to a 90-day jail term.
A New York jury on May 5 found Cecily McMillan guilty of elbowing a police officer, Grantley Bovell, in the eye as he was attempting to arrest her.
McMillan, 25, was arrested along with scores of others on March 17, 2012 at a demonstration marking the protest movement’s six-month anniversary in New York City.
While thousands of people were arrested during Occupy protests in 2011 and 2012, most of those cases were dismissed, some were resolved out of court and just 67 have gone to trial.
John Doe lawsuit: Judge’s assistant married to Walker campaign lawyer
Interesting. I have to say, that was one of the strangest rulings I’d ever seen. This makes sense:
An assistant to the judge who called for a halt to the John Doe investigation into possible illegal campaign coordination between Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign and conservative groups is married to a lawyer for Walker’s campaign.
Steven Biskupic, a former U.S. attorney who is representing a party in the secretive John Doe probe, indicated Thursday in an email to the State Journal that there was no conflict of interest for Judge Rudolph Randa, whose judicial assistant is Cary Biskupic, Steven Biskupic’s wife.
“For the time period that my wife has worked for Judge Randa, I have not and would not appear in front of him on any matter,” Steven Biskupic said. “I have not been and will not be involved in the (Eric) O’Keefe federal lawsuit. Even before the case was assigned to Judge Randa, I and my partner would not and could not participate in a lawsuit against Fran Schmitz personally.”
A state appeals court ruling in the John Doe investigation, which is separate from the lawsuit brought by the Wisconsin Club for Growth against the prosecutors in federal court, established that Biskupic is representing a party in the case.
Walker’s campaign paid Biskupic’s law firm $86,000 last year, according to a recent campaign finance report. Walker’s campaign is also one of the targets in the John Doe probe, according to court filings.
Jurors tell judge: Don’t send Occupy activist to jail
This is one of the more uplifting things I’ve heard in a while. Will the judge listen? I seem to recall there’s a mandatory minimum on the charges:
A majority of the jurors who this week convicted an Occupy Wall Street activist of assaulting a New York police officer have asked the judge in her case to not send her to prison.
Cecily McMillan was on Monday found guilty of deliberately elbowing officer Grantley Bovell in the face, as he led her out of a protest in March 2012. She was convicted of second-degree assault, a felony, and faces up to seven years in prison. She was denied bail and is being detained at Riker’s Island jail.
However, nine of the 12 jurors who unanimously reached the verdict have since taken the unusual step of writing to Judge Ronald Zweibel to request that he not give her a prison sentence on 19 May.
“We the jury petition the court for leniency in the sentencing of Cecily McMillan,” they wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian. “We would ask the court to consider probation with community service.
Finally freed from a ban on researching the case, including potential punishments, some were shocked to learn that they had just consigned the 25-year-old to a sentence of up to seven years in prison, one told the Guardian. “They felt bad,” said the juror, who did not wish to be named. “Most just wanted her to do probation, maybe some community service. But now what I’m hearing is seven years in jail? That’s ludicrous. Even a year in jail is ridiculous.”
Though it came as a surprise to some of the eight women and four men who found her guilty of second-degree assault, McMillan said that the potential prison sentence had been on her mind for the two years since she was arrested for elbowing Officer Grantley Bovell in the face at a demonstration in Zuccotti Park, where protesters had gathered to mark six months of the Occupy movement.
Voters want term limits for SCOTUS
I’m surprised that many people have been paying attention:
An overwhelming majority of voters would support sweeping reforms to the Supreme Court, as trust and confidence in the institution has eroded in recent years, according to a new survey by the Democratic-aligned firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.
Wide majorities disagree with the recent 5-4 party-line rulings that have upended a century of campaign finance law and tilted the rules in favor of the extremely wealthy and major corporations. The landmark Citizens United ruling was opposed by a whopping 80-18 margin. The more recent McCutcheon decision, which lifted caps on total giving, was said by a 51 percent majority to be likely to create more corruption, while 8 percent suggested it would lead to less.
By a 60-36 spread, those surveyed said that Supreme Court justices were more likely to be carrying out a personal or political agenda than working to render a fair and impartial judgment, an opinion that cut across party lines. John Roberts swore before Congress during his confirmation hearings that he had great respect for precedent. But once confirmed as chief justice, he embarked on a remarkable run of conservative judicial activism that has favored the wealthy while undermining affirmative action and protection for voting rights.
Overall approval of the Supreme Court has been falling since its 5-4 Bush v. Gore decision handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, according to Gallup.
H/t Thomas Soldan.
The difference between liberal and conservative justices
Are conservative justices more likely to decide in favor of conservative plaintiffs than liberal plaintiffs, and are liberal justices more likely to find in favor of liberal plaintiffs? 
Paul Waldman pretty much lays it out about a new study that shows bias in a way even a conservative can’t ignore:
What jumps out is how different the conservative justices are from the liberal justices. While all the liberal justices ruled more often for liberal plaintiffs than conservative ones, the differences tended to be pretty small. But for the conservative justices, the differences ranged from large to enormous. While the headline on the times story reads, “In Justices’ Votes, Free Speech Often Means ‘Speech I Agree With,'” they could have titled it, “In Conservative Justices’ Votes, Free Speech Usually Means ‘Speech I Agree With,'” and it would have been more accurate.
We don’t know whether this pattern holds in other kinds of cases, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it did—if, for instance, the liberal justices were slightly more likely to strike down a conservative regulation, while the conservative justices were much more likely to strike down a liberal regulation. And this kind of pattern has analogues in many different areas of politics.
For instance, we all know that Washington has become more “polarized” in recent years, and if you listened to the way the media talk about it, you’d think that Democrats and Republicans have moved away from the center at similar speeds, each becoming equally opposed to compromise and intransigent. But that isn’t true. According to the Poole-Rosenthal DW-NOMINATE data, which are the state of the art in measuring congressional votes, what has happened in recent years is that Democrats in Congress have become slightly more liberal, while Republicans have become massively more conservative. (If you go to this page, you can see the data by scrolling down to the charts labeled “Party Means on Liberal-Conservative Dimension” for both the House and Senate.)
Or to take another area, both liberals and conservatives are sometimes confronted with cognitive dissonance when the world turns out not to be how they would like it to be. But while liberals end up being slightly more likely than conservatives to believe some things that aren’t true, conservatives are hugely more likely, on a range of topics from climate change to whether we found Saddam Hussein’s fictional weapons of mass destruction to whether Barack Obama is a United States citizen, to simply deny reality and convince themselves that the world accords with their preferences (Chris Mooney documented many of the ways conservatives are more likely to engage in “motivated reasoning,” processing information through the filter of their pre-existing beliefs, in his book The Republican Brain).
There are other things you could add to that list, depending on your opinions. Most Democrats I know would probably say that while people on their side sometimes play dirty in campaigns, Republicans always play dirty, and much dirtier. On the other hand, Republicans would probably say just the opposite. But this study provides some pretty compelling evidence that when you last heard Antonin Scalia say that all he cares about is the intent of the Founders, and you thought he was full of crap, you were absolutely right.
SCOTUS: Prayer okay at public meetings
We didn’t need that separation of church and state, anyway:
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a town in upstate New York may begin its public meetings with a prayer from a “chaplain of the month.”
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, said “ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define.”
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the town’s practices could not be reconciled “with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government.”
Town officials said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer. In practice, the federal appeals court in New York said, almost all of the chaplains were Christian.
Two town residents sued, saying the prayers ran afoul of the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion.
Cops can search your car for no good reason in PA
And to be practical, they always could. We’re all grownups here, right? We all know that cops lie about probable cause to search, and now the famously corrupt PA State Supreme Court has given them its blessing. Seamus fucking McCaffery wrote the opinion? The judge whose lawyer wife was making big money referring clients to law firms? The same wife whose ticket he tried to fix?
Oh yeah, we have a great Supreme Court here:
As it turns out, until a few days ago, if you got pulled over in PA doin’ 55 in a 54 or what have you, you could have told a police officer who asked to search your car “Well, my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk and the back, and I know my rights so you go’n need a warrant for that,” and you would have been correct. That is no longer the case. According to Lancaster Online, “Pennsylvania police officers no longer need a warrant to search a citizen’s vehicle, according to a recent state Supreme Court opinion.”
The way it used to work, with marijuana for an example, is that an officer who smelled weed could only search the car with the driver’s consent or if illegal substances were in plain view. For an additional search, a warrant was needed. But now, “it only takes reasonable probable cause for an officer to go ahead with a search without a warrant.” The opinion, authored by chief justice Seamus McCaffery, says that PA now adopts “the federal automobile exception… which allows police officers to search a motor vehicle when there is probable cause to do so.” And Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman said the ruling puts PA in line with federal law and many other states. For what it’s worth, Jay-Z’s legal advice in “99 Problems” is no longer good advice in PA and even at the time of the song’s realase, was not good advice on a federal level. According to an actual law journal article on the matter:
If this Essay serves no other purpose, I hope it serves to debunk, for any readers who persist in believing it, the myth that locking your trunk will keep the cops from searching it. Based on the number of my students who arrived at law school believing that if you lock your trunk and glove compartment, the police will need a warrant to search them, I surmise that it’s even more widespread among the lay public. But it’s completely, 100% wrong. There is no warrant requirement for car searches. The Supreme Court has declared unequivocally that because cars are inherently mobile (and are pervasively regulated, and operated in public spaces), it is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment for the police to search the car—the whole car, and everything in the car, including containers—whenever they have probable cause to believe that the car contains evidence of crime. You don’t have to arrest the person, or impound the vehicle. You just need probable cause to believe that the car contains evidence of crime. So, in any vehicle stop, the officers may search the entire car, without consent, if they develop probable cause to believe that car contains, say, drugs.”
H/t Seth Okin.