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Court rejects AG Kane's request to reinstate law license
Legal Business |
2016/02/09 13:39
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Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane's law license will remain suspended after the state's highest court on Friday denied her request to have it reinstated while she fights criminal charges of leaking secret grand jury material and lying about it.
The court's unanimous rejection could pave the way to an unprecedented vote in the state Senate on whether to remove her from office.
A Kane spokesman said the first-term Democrat was disappointed, but not surprised.
A Senate vote could happen in the coming weeks after a special committee spent about three months exploring the question of whether Kane could run the 800-employee law enforcement office without a law license. Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre, said senators will discuss the matter when they reconvene in the Capitol next week.
"It's an important issue," Corman said. "It's really unprecedented, so I think it deserves to be addressed."
In seeking to have her license reinstated, Kane argued that Justice Michael Eakin should not have participated in the suspension vote because of his involvement in a salacious email scandal.
In its one-page order, the Democrat-controlled court said Kane did not seek the recusal of Eakin "at the earliest possible time." As a result, the justices said, Kane gave up her ability to object on that basis to the court's unanimous decision in September to suspend her license.
Kane has released hundreds of emails, including some that Eakin sent and received through a private email account in the name of John Smith. Eakin, a Republican, has been suspended with pay by his fellow justices while he awaits trial before an ethics court that could result in his being kicked off the bench.
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High court seems skeptical of mandatory public union fees
Legal Business |
2016/01/14 13:41
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The Supreme Court appears ready to deliver a major setback to American unions as it considers scrapping a four-decade precedent that lets public-sector labor organizations collect fees from workers who decline to join.
During more than an hour of oral arguments Monday, the high court's conservative justices seemed likely to side with a group of California teachers who say those mandatory fees violate the free-speech rights of workers who disagree with a union's positions.
Labor officials fear unions' very existence could be threatened if workers are allowed to get all the benefits of representation without at least paying fees to cover the costs of collective bargaining. The case affects more than 5 million workers in 23 states and Washington, D.C.
But Justice Anthony Kennedy rejected arguments by lawyers for the state of California and the California Teachers Association that the current fee system is needed to prevent non-members from becoming "free riders" ? workers who reap the rewards of union bargaining and grievance procedures without paying for it.
"The union basically is making these teachers compelled riders for issues on which they strongly disagree," Kennedy said, noting the political nature of bargaining issues like teacher salaries, merit promotions and class size.
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Finland court jails Iraqi twins suspected of IS killing
Legal Business |
2015/12/15 08:25
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A Finnish court on Friday jailed 23-year-old twin brothers from Iraq for four months pending trial on suspicions they were Islamic State militants who fatally shot 11 unarmed soldiers in Iraq in June 2014.
Friday's custody hearing was held behind closed doors at the Pirkanmaa District Court in Tampere.
The two were arrested Tuesday at a refugee center in the town of Forssa, 120 kilometers (75 miles) northwest of capital of Helsinki. Finnish police say an IS video shows the men taking part in a massacre outside the Iraqi city of Tikrit.
The killing of the 11 Iraqi soldiers was part of atrocities committed by IS in the Camp Speicher military base outside Tikrit, where 1,700 Iraqi soldiers were captured and then killed by IS militants.
National Bureau of Investigation spokesman Jari Raty said the court case will start in April. If guilty, the brothers face up to life imprisonment, which in Finland means being released — although not automatically — after serving between 12 and 15 years.
It was not known what the men had pleaded because their defense lawyers were barred from commenting.
The men had arrived in Finland in September but it was unclear whether they were asylum-seekers — although Finnish media claimed they are. Some 17,000 Iraqis have sought asylum in Finland so far this year, by far the biggest national group to seek shelter in the country.
The tabloid Ilta-Sanomat quoted Omar Mohammed, an asylum-seeker from Baghdad at the Forssa refugee center, as saying the brothers had avoided talking to other refugees. |
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South African appeals court nears Pistorius ruling
Legal Business |
2015/11/29 22:39
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An official says a top South African appeals court is finalizing a decision on whether to send Oscar Pistorius back to prison by overturning a lower court's manslaughter conviction and finding the double-amputee Olympian guilty of murdering girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
Paul Myburgh, registrar of the Supreme Court of Appeal, told The Associated Press on Monday that no date for the ruling has been announced.
Eyewitness News, a South African media outlet, says a ruling is expected this week. It cites unnamed court officials.
Pistorius, 29, was released from jail on Oct. 19 after serving a year in prison and is under house arrest.
Prosecutors say Pistorius shot Steenkamp during an argument on Valentine's Day 2013. The defense says Pistorius killed Steenkamp by mistake, thinking an intruder was in his house.
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Ruling gives Sandusky back $4,900-a-month Penn State pension
Legal Business |
2015/11/14 22:05
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The state must restore the $4,900-a-month pension of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky that was taken away three years ago when he was sentenced to decades in prison on child molestation convictions, a court ordered Friday.
A Commonwealth Court panel ruled unanimously that the State Employees' Retirement Board wrongly concluded Sandusky was a Penn State employee when he committed the crimes that were the basis for the pension forfeiture.
"The board conflated the requirements that Mr. Sandusky engage in 'work relating to' PSU and that he engage in that work 'for' PSU," wrote Judge Dan Pellegrini. "Mr. Sandusky's performance of services that benefited PSU does not render him a PSU
employee."
Sandusky, 71, collected a $148,000 lump sum payment upon retirement in 1999 and began receiving monthly payments of $4,900.
The board stopped those payments in October 2012 on the day he was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison for sexually abusing 10 children. A jury found him guilty of 45 counts for offenses that ranged from grooming and fondling to violent sexual attacks. Some of the encounters happened inside university facilities.
The basis for the pension board's decision was a provision in the state Pension Forfeiture Act that applies to "crimes related to public office or public employment," and he was convicted of indecent assault and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.
The judges said the board's characterization of Sandusky as a Penn State employee at the time those offenses occurred was erroneous because he did not maintain an employer-employee relationship with the university after 1999.
The judges ordered the board to pay back interest and reinstated the pension retroactively, granting him about three years of makeup payments.
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Chile appeal court upholds convictions in Americans' killing
Legal Business |
2015/09/08 17:26
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A Chilean appeals court has upheld the conviction of a retired brigadier general and a former civilian air force employee in the killing of two Americans shortly after the 1973 military coup that overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende.
The Appeals Court of Santiago on Saturday confirmed the 7-year sentence given to retired Gen. Pedro Espinoza Bravo as the mastermind in the killings of documentary filmmaker Charles Horman, 31, and journalist Frank Teruggi, 24. The court also ratified the 2-year sentence for retired civilian air force employee Rafael Gonzalez Berdugo for his complicity in Horman's death.
The Americans' deaths were the subject of the 1982 film "Missing" by Constantin Costa-Garvas, with Jack Lemmon playing Horman's father.
Espinoza Bravo and Gonzalez Berdugo are currently behind bars in other criminal cases.
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Appeals court reverses ruling that found NSA program illegal
Legal Business |
2015/08/29 13:26
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A federal appeals court on Friday ruled in favor of the Obama administration in a dispute over the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephone data on hundreds of millions of Americans.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed a lower court ruling that said the program likely violates the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches.
But the impact of the appeals court's ruling is uncertain because Congress has passed legislation designed to replace the program over the next few months. The appeals court sent the case back for a judge to determine what further details about the program the government must provide.
The ruling is the latest in a succession of decisions in federal courts in Washington and New York that at various points threatened the constitutionality of the NSA's surveillance program, but have so far upheld the amassing of records from U.S. domestic phone customers.
The appeals court ruled that challengers to the program have not shown "a substantial likelihood" that they will win their case on the merits.
Judge Janice Rogers Brown said it was possible the government would refuse to provide information that could help the challengers win their case. In a separate opinion, Judge Stephen Williams said the challengers would need to show they actually were targeted by the surveillance program.
Judge David Sentelle dissented in part, saying he would have thrown the case out entirely because the plaintiffs offered no proof they were ever harmed.
All three judges were appointees of Republican presidents.
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