The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board released a report last Friday that found that during the gubernatorial election in 2010, the Republican Party of Minnesota (RPM) intentionally circumvented campaign finance laws. The Board fined the Minnesota Republican Party nearly $30,000, and the former party chair Tony Sutton $3,000, for illegally accepting campaign contributions.

Mike Dean, a member of Common Cause Minnesota, the organization that filed the complaint to the Board, told the Star Tribune that the Republican Party “attempted to use a shell corporation to hide over a half million dollars in debt from the public.” The Board agreed with Dean, finding that the RPM had been illegally funneling contributions through the for-profit corporation Count Them All Properly, with the intention of avoiding campaign finance laws. The Star Tribune outlined the Board’s findings, saying:

Sutton said GOP lawyers Tony Trimble and Michael Tonor provided advice on how to structure the company and manage its arm’s-length relationship with the party.

The board found Sutton’s arrangement with Count Them All Properly to be an intentional way to maneuver around the state’s campaign finance reporting laws.

Since the board does not recognize Count Them All Properly as a political committee, its payment of $27,000 in legal fees amounted to an inappropriate and unreported campaign contribution, the board found.

Aside from finding that the RPM was illegally funneling campaign money, the Board also found that the Party had sloppy bookkeeping and “out of control” spending. This fine is not the first time RPM has had a run-in with the law this year. In April, the RPM was served an eviction notice after failing to pay their rent, owing the landlord $111,192.14.

– Nina Liss-Schultz

When a cousin of George Zimmerman, the killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, accused him of sexual molestation, Zimmerman’s lawyers were dismissive of the charge. Defense attorney Mark O’Mara immediately attempted to discredit the young woman, telling the Miami Herald she tried to sell her story to People magazine.

The Miami Herald reporter checked with People and tweeted today, “People magazine tells me Zimmerman’s cousin never approached them for money or a story.”

“Witness 9,” as the woman is named in evidence, detailed several incidents where Zimmerman allegedly touched her or forced her to touch him. The molestation started when she was 12 years old and continued for ten years. Trayvon Martin’s attorneys are attempting to get this evidence admitted into court, as the woman’s testimony could show Zimmerman has an alleged “history of violence and manipulation.” Zimmerman’s attorneys are trying to block the testimony, arguing that it would hurt his chances for a fair trial.

The Zimmerman defense has been plagued with dishonesty. Zimmerman’s wife was arrested for perjury in June after lying on the stand about the couple’s finances. Zimmerman himself also misled the court about his finances and hid the fact that he had a second passport, leading the judge to revoke his bond.

Our Guest Blogger is Billy Corriher, Associate Director of Research for Legal Progress.

Faced with data suggesting over a million eligible voters could be disenfranchised by a new Voter ID law, the state of Texas was grilled on Friday by the three-judge panel hearing its lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to “pre-clear” election law changes with DOJ, and Texas filed suit in a D.C. federal court after DOJ refused to approve the Voter ID law. The judges were skeptical that Texas had met its burden of showing that DOJ should have cleared the Voter ID law as non-discriminatory, with one judge arguing the statute’s “burden falls disproportionately on minorities . . . .”

Studies have shown that millions of Americans may be disenfranchised by new Voter ID measures pushed by Republican state legislators. These laws will have a disproportionate impact on the poor, the elderly, and minorities. As many as 25% of black voters could be disenfranchised by Voter ID laws, and Attorney General Eric Holder has called such measures a “poll tax.” Texas presented expert testimony to counter DOJ’s statistics, but even the one Republican-appointed judge on the panel said the state’s expert “took enormous hits” during cross-examination.

Texas’s Voter ID law was pushed through the legislature under a streamlined process “against a backdrop of huge Hispanic growth.” Roughly 90 percent of the state’s population growth in the last decade can be attributed to minorities. Attorneys for Texas voters argued this growth in minority voters prompted state legislators to pass the Voter ID bill.

Supporters of Voter ID laws say the requirement to show identification when voting will help prevent voter fraud. But even an investigation by the Texas’ attorney general could not point to any recent examples of proven voter fraud. True voter fraud is extraordinarily rare, and even proponents of Voter ID laws cannot provide examples. This is a solution in search of a problem.

These laws are appear to be motivated by a desire to keep certain groups, which often vote for Democrats, from casting their votes on election day. A Republican legislator in Pennsylvania said that Pennsylvania’s new Voter ID law would allow Mitt Romney to win the state. The political motives behind Texas’ law may be evidenced by the fact that the law designates a gun permit as an acceptable ID, but not a student ID. Whatever the motive, these laws clearly impact certain demographic groups more than others.

The court is expected to rule soon on the Texas statute, and its decision could be appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has hinted that the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” requirement could be unconstitutional. But unless the high court is prepared to throw out voting rights protections that have been renewed by Congress several times in the past 50 years, the state of Texas will face a high burden in proving that its Voter ID law does not rob black and Hispanic voters of their right to vote.

A day after 43 Senate Republicans unanimously voted to block the DISCLOSE Act from receiving an up-or-down vote, Democrats will try again for cloture at 3pm on Tuesday.

The measure, which lawmakers drafted in response to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, “would require independent groups to disclose the names of contributors who give more than $10,000 to independent groups for use in political campaigns.” Here is what you should know about the measure:

1) It’s all about disclosure. The bill’s sole purpose would be to require outside groups who can currently spend unlimited sums of money on “independent expenditure” ads attacking and supporting presidential and other candidates to identify who is paying for the ads. Under current law, a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt group like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS can spend millions of dollars on attack ads without citizens ever knowing who is paying for them. Under the DISCLOSE Act, if a group spends more than $10,000 on political ads in an election cycle, it would have to identify the donors funding the efforts.

2) The Supreme Court backed disclosure. In his 5-4 majority opinion in the Citzens United v. FEC case, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote “disclosure is a less restrictive alternative to more comprehensive regulations of speech.” By an 8-1 majority, every Justice but Clarence Thomas agreed that Congress had acted properly when it required that donors be identified for political ads that do not expressly advocate for or against a candidate. But, while these indirect ads come with disclosure, Congress did not anticipate that Citizens United would allow outside groups’s ads to directly tell voters to support or oppose candidates, leaving a major loophole.

3) Republicans used to support disclosure. When Congress considered the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law in the early 2000s, opponents consistently argued that complete disclosure, rather than regulation, was the best campaign finance law. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who now dismisses disclosure as government-supported “harassment and intimidation,” once endorsed the concept and asked “why would a little disclosure be better than a lot of disclosure?” Fourteen current Senate Republicans who now oppose the DISCLOSE Act voted in 2000 for similar disclosure for 527 committees, the forerunner to these 501(c)(4) outside spending groups. And even Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who this March warned the lack of disclosure for independent spending would lead to “huge scandals” still joined with the Republicans to stop the bill in 2010 and yesterday.

4) Republicans are moving the goal posts on disclosure. The 2010 version of the bill included an array of provisions aimed at mitigating problems created by Citizens United, including restrictions on foreign-owned corporations’ ads and government contractors. Republicans like McConnell criticized that version as “117 pages of stealth negotiations in which Democrats pick winners and losers, either through outright prohibitions or restrictions so complex that they end up achieving the same result.” This year, sponsor Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) is offering just a 20-page bill that contains solely the disclosure provisions, in hopes that Republicans would be more open to supporting it. None have.

In an attempt to save money, the Florida legislature recently approved a law altering the fashion in which private court-appointed defense attorneys for the poor were compensated. Unfortunately, now that the law is being implemented, its unintended consequences have become clear – indigent defendants are losing access to adequate legal representation:

A growing number of local criminal defense attorneys say new flat state fees for cases as complicated as rape and second-degree murder are so low that they either can no longer afford to take them or would have to cut drastically the number of the hours they work.

Both choices, these lawyers say, raise an issue that goes to the core of the nation’s legal system: the quality of defense the accused receive in court.

Joe Walsh is one of those attorneys. He spent about 40 hours on the aggravated battery case of Marcus Griffin after his court-appointed defender fell ill. He got Griffin a time-served sentence after discovering there was little evidence tying him to a convenience store stabbing because workers cleaned and poured bleach over potentially crucial evidence.

Normally, Walsh would have charged a fee for his work as a private attorney who takes court-appointed cases when other lawyers cannot. But now, because Florida this year created a small registry of court-appointed attorneys who will be paid flat fees, Walsh must split $1,000 with the previous attorney assigned to the case — taking home less than a third of what he would normally make.

The problem with the Florida legislation isn’t just that defense attorneys are paid less. The new law creates a “flat fee” model for attorney compensation that, according to a Palm Beach Post report, sets a cap on the amount of money that a defense lawyer may be paid with only very limited opportunities for special consideration in uncommonly difficult cases. The problem, as per the Post account, is that the caps are so low that defense attorneys will likely break even or lose money on any given case if they attempt a meaningful defense, giving lawyers a strong incentive to either refuse to take poor clients facing serious charges or end the cases as quickly as possible regardless of the consequences for defendants.

In essence, poor defendants accused of heinous crimes will be represented by lawyers who are losing money by defending them.

Similar laws around the country have had disastrous consequences. As the National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA) notes, “Because the lawyer will be paid the same amount, no matter how much or little he works on each case, it is in the lawyer’s personal interest to devote as little time as possible to each appointed case, leaving more time for the lawyer to do other more lucrative work.” Indeed, both the Iowa and Washington Supreme Court have struck down state flat fee laws as destroying poor citizens’ rights to a fair trial. NLADA researchers have found serious problems with the use of flat fees in some Utah counties and Tennessee’s move towards flat fee compensation last year sparked a public outcry. The Sixth Amendment requires lawyers present more than a token defense for their clients at trail, but flat fees make it extremely unlikely that lawyers will be able to do anything but that.

Budget cuts in Florida are also weakening the state’s ability to respond to public health crises amidst a serious tuberculosis outbreak while Governor Rick Scott works to disenfranchise voters.