Reports of widespread abuse at schools across Los Angeles have shaken the district, but most of the attention has focused on Miramonte Elementary, a school in South Los Angeles in a working class neighborhood. Police say a teacher abused dozens of students at the school, many of whom are the children of Latino immigrants. Now, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which is investigating the abuse, is concerned that some of these parents will not come forward because they are afraid of deportation.

The department has assured parents they will not ask about their immigration status when they come forward, but parents are not convinced:

“That is what they say, but it’s one thing that they say it and another that they do it,” said the father of a 10-year-old female student at the school, a man named Raymundo who was reluctant to use his last name because he is undocumented. “I don’t trust them. If I had a ferocious pit bull at home, and I told you to come in, it won’t bite, what would you do?”

Raymundo is one of several parents who, rather than go directly to the authorities, have sought legal counsel. He and other parents are among those filing personal injury lawsuits against the school district on behalf of eight students whose families believe they were abused by the teachers, both charged with committing lewd acts against children. [...]

[Attorney Jessica] Dominguez said she knows of at least two families at the school who are refusing to come forward because they don’t want to be found out. Raymundo said he’s spoken to several undocumented parents who believe their children were harmed.

“I think there are more than five or six parents of the children who don’t have documents, or even children who don’t have documents,” he said in a phone conversation.

Raymundo added that he went to the school to talk to the school’s director, but was told the director was busy so he could talk to the sheriff. “But I didn’t want to. I thought they were going to ask me for identification. So I left the school,” Raymundo said.

The problem Miramonte parents are facing highlights how abuse victims are reluctant to come to the police because they fear being deported. These victims can access U-Visas, intended for crime victims, which some Miramonte parents are pursuing. But that won’t alleviate the fears of all parents or convince all victims to come forward.

It’s the same problem that undocumented domestic violence victims face as well. The re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, but with unanimous GOP opposition for the first time since 1994. Republicans oppose it because the act “expands the availability of visas for undocumented immigrants who have been victims of domestic violence.” There is no reason for the GOP to oppose a measure that would better protect abuse victims. And the horrible abuse at Miramonte Elementary that parents are afraid to report because of their immigration status is another reason to offer protection so that undocumented immigrants will feel safe coming forward to police.

Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer authored that state’s death penalty law when he served in the state senate 30 years ago. After spending three decades deciding death penalty appeals, however, Pfeifer’s views have changed dramatically:

“I have concluded that the death sentence makes no sense to me at this point when you can have life without the possibility of parole,” Pfeifer said in his most recent public comments, testifying in December in favor a bill to abolish Ohio’s law. “I don’t see what society gains from that.” . . .

In January 2011, Pfeifer made his strongest statements to date, calling on Gov. John Kasich to empty death row.

Pfeifer says he’s required as a judge to take positions to make laws better, hence his current stand. He’s also required to rule according to the law and the Constitution, which he says he does. Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor says she’s comfortable Pfeifer is following the law and not showing bias.

The law that Pfeifer originally sponsored in 1981 was enacted after the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty nationwide, and then later allowed it provided states comply with certain procedures.

Eleven men who claimed immigration agents violated their rights in 2007 raids on their New Haven, Connecticut neighborhood have won a $350,000 settlement from the U.S. government, attorneys representing the men announced. The government has also agreed to stop deportation proceedings against the men.

The settlement appears to be the largest the U.S. has ever paid in a lawsuit over residential raids, and it is the first to include compensation as well as immigration relief. The men were among 30 people arrested in a raid the day after New Haven began offering identification cards, so critics including New Haven’s mayor claimed the federal sweep was retaliation for the new policy. U.S. immigration officials denied the retaliation claims, saying planning began the year before.

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, who put the ID program into place, said the settlement highlights faulty immigration policies in the U.S. “Today’s settlement is bigger than a lawsuit. It is about who we are as a nation,” DeStefano said.

For nearly three decades, Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson has been one of the leading conservative minds on the federal bench. A former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, Wilkinson was one President George W. Bush’s five finalists for the Supreme Court seat that eventually went to Chief Justice John Roberts.

Wilkinson is also the author of a new book, Cosmic Constitutional Theory:Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance, which leaves little doubt that he would vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act if he had been appointed Chief Justice of the United States. Although Wilkinson’s position as a sitting federal judge precludes him from outright saying how he believes the health care case should be decided, his book expresses tremendous skepticism about the idea that the law can be struck down:

Conservatives . . . may understandably regard the 2010 health care reform bill as a leviathan crammed with unknown mischiefs, but to invalidate it on originalist grounds will require analysis that had best be better than good. The idea that Congress is constitutionally disabled under the commerce power from regulating activity affecting one-sixth of the national economy strikes me as a heavy judicial lift. Any decision that is less than bulletproof will be seen as a purely political undertaking, a revival of Lochner‘s freedom of contract theory in originalist guise.

Better to let the democratic process formulate a superior alternative to this most complex of national problems, something the Supreme Court is particularly ill equipped to do.

Wilkinson is hardly alone with his admirable ability to separate his conservative politics from his ability to faithfully apply the Constitution. Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a former law clerk to conservative Justice Antonin Scalia who spent much of his pre-judicial career looking for ways to undermine federal power, nonetheless wrote an opinion rejecting a challenge to the Affordable Care Act. Judge Laurence Silberman, a leading conservative who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush, also upheld the ACA because the case against it “cannot find real support . . . in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”

So Wilkinson is far from alone among conservatives, and his views are likely to be predictive of a least one of the conservative justices the ACA needs to pick off in order to survive the Supreme Court.

Ultimately, though, there is reason to fear that restrained conservatives like Wilkinson are a dying breed. Almost as soon as the Roberts Court majority proved its willingness to cast aside longstanding understandings of the Constitution in cases like Citizens United, conservative lawmakers began testing the waters to see just how much of the Constitution the new majority is willing to ignore. Leading conservative lawmakers have now claimed that everything from Social Security to Medicare to national child labor laws to national education and anti-poverty programs to food safety laws to federal disaster relief all violate the Constitution. If the Supreme Court does the wrong thing in the health care case, and refuses to follow Wilkinson’s advice, these conservatives will only become more emboldened to challenge the foundations of our democracy.

Earlier this month, a bill requiring women to receive an ultrasound before they can receive an abortion passed the Virginia senate, and it recently cleared a state house committee with an overwhelming majority. As Dahlia Lithwick explains, the effect of this bill would be to force most women to undergo a stunningly invasive procedure for no medical reason whatsoever. “Because the great majority of abortions occur during the first 12 weeks, that means most women will be forced to have a transvaginal procedure, in which a probe is inserted into the vagina, and then moved around until an ultrasound image is produced.”

In case Lithwick’s description doesn’t completely drive home what this means, here is a depiction of the procedure that women would be forced to endure under the Virginia bill:

Simply put, it is difficult to distinguish a law requiring women to be vaginally penetrated by a long metal object from state-sponsored rape. Worse, discussions among lawmakers leave little doubt that its supporters understood just what they were trying to write into law — they just didn’t care. As an unnamed lawmaker told a fellow Virginia delegate, a woman already consented to being “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.”