Last August, a woman in Josephine County called 911 and pleaded with dispatchers to send police — “my ex-boyfriend is trying to break into my house. I’m not letting him in but he’s like, tried to break down the door and he’s tried to break into one of the windows.” The woman had good reason to be afraid of this man, as she told the dispatcher on the other side of the phone, this same abusive ex had put her in the hospital just a few weeks before. But the dispatcher has no one to send. Because the local sheriff’s department recently lost millions in federal funds, it laid off 23 of its 29 deputies and limited their availability to eight hours on Mondays through Fridays. The woman’s call to 911 took place on a Saturday.

With no deputies available, the 911 dispatcher transferred the woman to the state police — but they would not come rescue the woman either. In the words of the state police dispatcher, “I don’t have anybody to send out there. You know, obviously, if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Do you know if he’s intoxicated or anything?”

Eventually, the ex-boyfriend, a man named Michael Bellah, pried open the woman’s front door. Choked her. And raped her. After he was caught, he plead guilty to kidnapping, assault, and sex abuse.

This woman’s situation was not a tragic outlier — while Sheriff Gil Gilberson declined to comment on this specific case, he noted to Oregon Public Radio “[t]here isn’t a day go by that we don’t have another victim” due to a law enforcement deficit caused by a budget cuts that went into effect last May.

The Josephine County’s Sheriff’s Office budget was cut after the the expiration of a multi-million dollar annual federal aid payment to timber-dependent counties, the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, originally passed in 2000. The federal government previously shared timber sale revenues from public lands with rural counties to offset the lack of property taxes from those lands, but as logging was reduced by 90 percent in federal lands since 1989, the aid program replaced that revenue source.

Without money from the program, the county was forced to lay off most of its deputies and close its entire major crimes division. Two of the remaining six deputies are limited to patrolling federal forest lands and a local river because of how their positions are funded.

After the cuts, Gilberson released a press statement suggesting victims of domestic violence “consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services.” The Grant Pass State Police Office usually has just two officers working per shift, but has become the only resource for local law enforcement on weekends. They’ve received about three times as many calls in as in the past.

But despite these dire circumstances, yesterday Josephine County voted 51 to 49 percent against a public safety levy for more law enforcement. The levy would have raised county property taxes from 59 cents per $1,000 of property value, the lowest in Oregon, to $1.48 for the next three years. It rejected a similar property tax levy increasing the rate to $1.99 per $1,000 shortly before the initial cuts 57 to 43 percent.

While clearly, the situation in Josephine County is an extreme example of a community failing to live up to public safety needs of its residents, the community is not alone in struggling to recover from revenue lost with the expiration of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act. Nationwide more than 700 counties in 41 states benefited from the program, including 33 of the 36 counties in Oregon.

The idea that some racial groups are, on average, smarter than others is without a doubt among the most discussed (and debunked) “taboos” in American intellectual history. It is an argument that has been advanced since the days of slavery, one that helped push through the draconian Immigration Act of 1924, and one that set off a scientific firestorm in the late 60s that’s hardly flagged since.

Yet every time the race and IQ hypothesis reclaims the public spotlight, we are caught slackjaw, always returning to the same basic debates on the same basic concepts.

The recent fracas sparked by Dr. Jason Richwine’s doctoral dissertation is a case in point. The paper is a dry thing, written for an academic audience, yet its core claim, that Latino immigrants to the United States are and will likely remain less intelligent than “native whites,” has proved proper tinder for a public firestorm. The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst in Empirical Studies is now a former Senior Policy Analyst — Heritage could not risk further tainting an immigration report it hoped would be influential by outright defending its scholar’s meditations on the possibly genetic intellectual inferiority of immigrants from Latin America.

It might seem like the book is closed on l’affaire Richwine: he’s left his job, Heritage is left with a black eye, and not a single mind has been changed about the value of research into race and IQ. But there’s still one major unanswered question.

If the dissertation was bad enough to get him fired from the Heritage Foundation, how did it earn him a degree from Harvard?

A popular answer among Richwine’s defenders is that, quite simply, it was exemplary work. Richwine’s dissertation committee was made up, by all accounts, of three eminent scholars, each widely respected in their respective fields. And it is Harvard.

But dozens of interviews with subject matter experts, Harvard graduates in Richwine’s program who overlapped with him, and members of the committee itself paint a somewhat more textured picture. Richwine’s dissertation was sloppy scholarship, relying on statistical sophistication to hide some serious conceptual errors. Yet internal accounts of Richwine’s time at Harvard suggests the august university, for the most part, let serious problems in Richwine’s research  fall through the cracks.

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Under both the influence of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and corporate spending in state courts around the country, procedural wins have imposed new onerous hurdles on individuals aiming to hold businesses accountable for their wrongdoing. Two new analyses out this week point to the real costs of these losses for individuals. In one study, researchers found that dismissals of housing and employment discrimination claims spiked from 62 percent before two major Supreme Court cases made it harder to state a claim, to 71 percent afterwards. Even more noteworthy, that spike in dismissals fell largely on Republican-appointed judges, whose dismissal rate spiked from 61 percent to 74 percent in cases where defendants disputed the legitimacy of the plaintiffs’ initial filing.

In a second analysis, two antitrust lawyers point to the “scant recognition” of the costs imposed on attorneys, courts, and experts when new decisions make the requirements at each stage of litigation increasingly more onerous, meaning these new barriers and corporate-driven “tort reform” make the legal system more expensive. J. Douglas Richards and Michael Eisenkraft write:

Contrary to widely propagated but fictitious notions unlike many corporate defendants and most corporate defense counsel, plaintiffs generally want to get their case before a fact-finder as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Helping them attain this end without repetitive prior evaluations of a case’s merits would promote judicial efficiency and reduce litigation expenses for all parties as well as for the courts.

In spite of these findings and increasingly business-friendly rulings both at the Supreme Court and in the state courts, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce came out with a study finding that the U.S. “liability system” is the most expensive of 13 countries analyzed because of so-called “lawsuit abuse” in which too many claims are filed that cost too much.

While this Chamber study was painted in a Corporate Counsel report as ranking the U.S. legal system overall the most costly, its only measure is the cost of liability insurance for businesses. The study seems to acknowledge that these costs are simply “liability costs” that affect businesses. But whether the Chamber is griping about costs to the legal system or costs to businesses, recent statistics show that individuals filing tort lawsuits that the Chamber has dubbed “frivolous” in a long-running PR campaign are not to blame. Statistics from the National Center for State Courts show that between 1999 and 2008, the tort caseload decreased by 25 percent, while the number of contract cases – primarily cases between one business and another – spiked by 63 percent.

As of 2008, the number of incoming contract cases was six times the number of tort cases. This means that it is actually other businesses that are filing more cases against each other, and potentially (though not necessarily) driving up their own price of liability insurance. So-called “tort reform” movements in the states that seek to limit corporate liability and cap damage amounts rely upon the assumption that frivolous civil lawsuits alleging injuries and wrongdoing flood our courts. But it is actually business-to-business cases whose numbers are growing.

There are no doubt other factors that make our legal system more expensive, as is pointed out by the Chamber’s study. The costs of our common law system, for example, in which each case is argued on the basis of precedent and lawyers are required to navigate an impenetrable web of case law and statutes, make the costs of legal counsel sometimes astronomical. And, as compared to the European countries with more robust social safety nets, Americans must turn to the court system to recover for more types of losses (for example, in countries where health care is public, private corporations do not have liability in that area).

But however expensive an increasingly onerous litigation system is for businesses, it is that much more expensive for individuals, particularly when procedural hurdles and damage caps prevent them from ever recovering their losses.

Summer has not even begun and children across America have barely gotten bored with last year’s Christmas presents. Yet Texas is already gearing up for the season when conservatives accuse liberals like the two people pictured above of waging a War on Christmas.

A measure labeled the “Merry Christmas bill,” which is currently awaiting Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) signature, provides that public school staff may “offer traditional greetings” including “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Hanukkah” to their students, and it permits school districts to “display on school property scenes or symbols associated with traditional winter celebrations, including a menorah or a Christmas image such as a nativity scene or Christmas tree” so long as the display includes either a “secular scene” or symbols from more than one faith. The bill’s lead sponsors also put up a website promoting the bill, where they warn about a world where children ask “Daddy, why do we have a Christmas tree at home and a Holiday tree at school?”

Religious displays that merely comply with the minimum requirements of this bill are likely unconstitutional under existing law — although the law in this space is quite garbled. Although the Supreme Court did uphold a government-sponsored display that included a nativity scene in its 5-4 decision in Lynch v. Donnelly, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cast the key fifth vote upholding that display, and her opinion made clear that government cannot take action whose “actual purpose is to endorse or disapprove of religion” or which “conveys a message of endorsement or disapproval.” Subsequent decisions make clear that a religious displays which violate the Constitution do not always cease to do so just because they appear alongside non-religious icons. A crucifix is still a crucifix, even if it is displayed next to the Golden Arches.

Yesterday, however, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could easily give Texas free reign to tear down much of the wall between separation of church and state. Admittedly, conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy has balked in the past at efforts to make public school students to attend religious ceremonies, so it is possible that he would balk at similar efforts by public schools to endorse a religious viewpoint. At the very least, however, the law is likely going to become much more permissive of lawmakers who wish the government to broadcast their religious beliefs to others.

In March, Colorado came close to becoming the 19th state to abolish the death penalty, but the bill failed after Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) voiced opposition and suggested a possible veto. A few months later, Colorado’s death penalty is still firmly in place, and the state is poised to complete what would be only the second execution in 45 years (the last was in 1997). Few dispute that Nathan Dunlap committed a horrific crime and murdered several people at a Chuck E. Cheese. But judges, university professors, and other prominent state leaders are urging Gov. Hickenlooper to commute Dunlap’s sentence, both because crucial errors that defined his trial may have led him to get a harsher sentence than others, and because killing anyone under the perverted state system would be a miscarriage of justice. According to letters filed with Hickenlooper’s office:

• All three people on death row are black men. In a state that is only 4.3% African American, Colorado’s death row is 100% African American.
• All three men on death are from the same one county, out of Colorado’s 64.
• All three men committed their crime when they were under the age of 21.
• Two law professors who studied Colorado’s application of the death penalty concluded it was unconstitutional, after finding that prosecutors pursue the death penalty in less than one percent of the cases where it is an option, and that the state failed to set “clear statutory standards for distinguishing between the few who are executed and the many who commit murder.”

“It appears that race, geography and youth largely determines who gets the death penalty in Colorado,” wrote a group of NAACP leaders in a letter urging Gov. Hickenlooper to grant clemency. They note that not a single black juror served on the panel that sentenced Dunlap to death.

In addition to the injustices that define the Colorado system, a group of former Colorado judges also point out that Dunlap’s bipolar disorder and psychotic tendencies were not even mentioned at trial. In fact, according to their letter, Dunlap’s lawyer told the jury that there was no explanation for his violence.

The judges add that “no clear evidence exists that the death penalty deters violent crime. What it does in our current system, as in this case, is to drain our judicial system of millions of dollars as mandatory appeals drag on for decades.” Studies have shown that the death penalty does not lower the homicide rate. In fact, the murder rate is lower in states without the death penalty. Hickenlooper says he continues to wrestle with the death penalty, and whether to commute Dunlap’s sentence.

A Berkeley truck driver is suing the California High Patrol for a brutal assault that brought him to the brink of death — provoked, according to a report by the local NBC affiliate, only by the man’s request to read the ticket he was being given before he signed it.

 

On September 2nd, 2011, Russian immigrant Olegs Kozacenko was driving his truck when he was pulled over by Officer Andrew P. Murrill of the California Highway Police. Murrill attempted to ticket him for driving too many hours in the truck. Kozacenko refused to sign the ticket before reading it.

At this point, NBC Bay Area reporters learned, Murrill decided he needed to make a “forcible arrest.” He and his partner, Officer Jim Sherman, claim that Kozacenko was “actively resisting” and “exhibiting extraordinary strength” in doing so. The consequences were “life-threatening injuries including a crushed left orbital eye socket, multiple facial fractures, a broken left arm, a concussion, unconsciousness and possible neurological damage.”

Kozacenko nearly died, as the nearest hospital did not have an emergency room advanced enough to treat his injuries.

According to court testimony obtained by NBC, Murrill concedes that Kozacenko was not even guilty of the offense he was attempting to ticket the driver for:

In his testimony during an evidentiary hearing on a defense motion to suppress evidence gathered after the ticket was written, officer Murrill admitted that he was confused, either by the law governing the hour limits for truck drivers or by reading the truck driver’s log book. Murrill also admitted on the witness stand that he was not a trained commercial vehicle specialist and did not call to ask for a commercial vehicle specialist to help at the scene. And he admitted on the stand that the hours Murrill was reading on Kozacenko’s truck driver log book were recorded two days earlier when Kozacenko was driving through Nebraska, Iowa and Wyoming.

NBC reports that “the Valley Division, where Murrill works, led the state in the number of disciplinary actions against officers for 2011, the same year of Kozacenko’s arrest.” Police officials claim that there is no video of the altercation and that all associated radio logs have been deleted by system malfunctioning for this time period.”

Murrill and Sherman remain employed by the CHP. Olegs Kocazenko is currently unemployed and seeking legal redress from both the Highway Patrol and the state of California.

After months of evidence from more than 100 witnesses suggesting the New York Police Department sets quotas on the number of stop-and-frisks, instructs officers to target black men, and taunts young teens, federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin ended the trial by expressing considerable alarm about the “high error rate” of the controversial stop-and-frisk program, and questioned whether police racially profile. The New York Times reports:

“A lot of people are being frisked or searched on suspicion of having a gun and nobody has a gun,” Judge Scheindlin, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said on Monday during closing arguments in the trial. “So the point is: the suspicion turns out to be wrong in most of the cases.” […]

Observing that only about 12 percent of police stops resulted in an arrest or summons, Judge Scheindlin, who is hearing the case without a jury, focused her remarks on Monday on the other 88 percent of stops, in which the police did not find evidence of criminality after a stop. She characterized that as “a high error rate” and remarked to a lawyer representing the city, “You reasonably suspect something and you’re wrong 90 percent of the time.”

“That is a lot of misjudgment of suspicion,” Judge Scheindlin said, suggesting officers were wrongly interpreting innocent behavior as suspicious.

Scheindlin was referring to the constitutional standard — “reasonable suspicion” —  required for a police stop. She also questioned whether NYPD officers who make the “worrisome” argument that a higher stop and frisk rate among blacks and Hispanics mirrors higher crime rates in those populations are therefore using race as a basis for making otherwise inexplicable stops.

Plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit now underway allege an expansive and racist use of police stops has been applied without legal justification, subjecting vast swaths of the city’s young African American and Hispanic men to invasive frisks, unwarranted searches, and detention at police centers for alleged minor crimes, often marijuana possession. Scheindlin has already ruled in another stop-and-frisk case that police stops in the Bronx are likely unconstitutional.

The aggressive stop-and-frisk program has been justified as reducing crime, but new figures show that the crime rate went down with a drop in the number of stop-and-frisks under public pressure.

Last Friday the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled a warrantless search of a cell phone during the arrest of a Boston man that contributed to his conviction on drug and weapon charges was unconstitutional. The decision adds to a growing court divide on whether access to digital devices and the personal information they often contain requires judicial oversight.

The court concluded:

Since the time of its framing, “the central concern underlying the Fourth Amendment” has been ensuring that law enforcement officials do not have “unbridled discretion to rummage at will among a person’s private effects.” Gant, 556 U.S. at 345; see also Chimel, 395 U.S. at 767-68. Today, many Americans store their most personal “papers” and “effects,” U.S. Const. amend. IV, in electronic format on a cell phone, carried on the person. Allowing the police to search that data without a warrant any time they conduct a lawful arrest would, in our view, create “a serious and recurring threat to the privacy of countless individuals.”

Brima Wurie was convicted by a jury in February 2010 of distribution of crack cocaine, possessing additional crack cocaine with intent to distribute, and being a felon-in-possession of a firearm. Officers allegedly observed Wurie engaging in a drug sale in a car, picked him up, and used information from one of the two cell phones on his person to discover his home address and obtain a warrant to search it, resulting in the additional weapon and drug charges. The government argued that Wurie’s phone was “indistinguishable from other kinds of personal possessions, like a cigarette package, wallet, pager, or address book” which are subject to the search incident to arrest exception to Fourth Amendment protections.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled searches at the time of arrest without a warrant are permissible in United States v. Robinson, but that was before advent of mobile computing technology. There is significant legal question surrounding whether digital devices like cell phones and laptops can be searched in the course of an arrest because, as the opinion in the Wurie case notes, “individuals today store much more personal information on their cell phones than could ever fit in a wallet, address book, briefcase, or any of the other traditional containers” and the Fourth Amendment specifically guarantees papers and effects not be subject to warrantless searches.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that a similar police search of an arrested person’s phone without a warrant was unconstitutional earlier this month, but four other federal appeals court have ruled searching a cellphone found on someone arrested is fair game. In 2012 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit shut down suspicionless unwarranted searches of computers and other similar digital devices at the border, noting they served as “simultaneously offices and personal diaries.”

A series of posters appeared around the Washington State Capitol in the last several days linking gay rights and opposition to gun laws. One poster even suggests that laws intended to prevent gun violence are the moral equivalent of discrimination:

Another poster proposes armed vigilantism to “defend” the right to marry:

The source of these posters is unclear, although the QR code on the posters leads to a pro-gun website featuring an elaborate quiz on gun rights.

Eight years ago, in an opinion warning of the “violent consequences of the assumption of religious authority by government,” retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor offered a challenge to her fellow conservative justices eager to weaken the wall of separation between church and state: “[t]hose who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”

Today, there are five justices on the Supreme Court who would trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly. And they just announced that they will hear a case that gives them the opportunity to make this swap a reality.

O’Connor was the Court’s leading supporter of the view that government cannot endorse a particularly religious belief or take action that might convey such a “message of endorsement to the reasonable observer,” and this view put her at odds with the four other members of the Rehnquist Court’s conservative bloc. When she left the Court, she was replaced by staunchly conservative Justice Samuel Alito, and most Court observers expected decades of precedent protecting against government endorsements of religion to fall in very short order.

Instead, the Roberts Court’s majority has thus far been content to chip away at the wall between church and state a piece at a time. In Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Court immunized many Executive Branch actions from suits claiming they violate the Constitution’s ban on “law[s] respecting an establishment of religion.” And in Arizona Christian School v. Winn, they empowered government to subsidize religion so long as those subsidies are structured as tax benefits and not as direct spending. But the core question of whether the government can “demonstrate . . . allegiance to a particular sect or creed” likely still must be answered in the negative.

The case the Court agreed to hear today, Town of Greece v. Galloway, is likely to change that. The ostensible issue before the Court is whether a municipal legislature violated the Constitution’s ban on separation of church and state when it began its meetings with overtly Christian prayers roughly two-thirds of the time. Yet the case also explicitly tees up the question of whether a government “endorsement” of religion of the kind rejected by O’Connor is permitted under the Constitution. If you’re placing bets, the odds are overwhelming that five conservative justices will say that such an endorsement is permitted.

With O’Connor gone, the much more conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy becomes the swing vote on questions of church/state separation. Kennedy has held that “government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise,” but it is not clear that he would forbid much else under the Constitution’s ban on government establishment of religion. By the end of the next Supreme Court term, however, it is very likely that his views will carry the day.

In the wake of calls from several Latin American leaders to end the failed war on drugs, a new report by an international alliance of major Western Hemisphere nations flags the potential benefits of decriminalization and/or legalization. Although the 200-page Organization of American States report shies away from drawing conclusions, it definitively states that “a public health approach is needed to address drug use” and that “decriminalization of drug use needs to be considered as a core element in any public health strategy,” while incarceration “runs counter to this strategy.” In a cost/benefit analysis, the report also identifies the significant potential benefits of legalization, while noting that countries seem poised at this point only to legalize marijuana:

Legalization could substantially reduce the criminal justice costs of enforcement of prohibitions, which has dominated estimates of total spending on drug control in countries as different as the United States and the Netherlands. The costs of crime itself, generated primarily by illegal status and enforcement, dominate estimates of the social costs of drugs. Enforcement costs, however, would not disappear entirely. Ensuring that sellers comply with regulatory restrictions, for example of not selling to youth, requires law enforcement efforts, though these costs are likely to be smaller than amounts currently spent in many countries on drug enforcement.

Morbidity and mortality could also decline for legalized drugs. The illegal status of the drugs is a primary cause of overdoses, both because it creates uncertainty about the purity of what is being purchased and because it encourages use of adulterants that can themselves have dangerous effects. In a regulated legal regime, the drugs sold would be of known purity and ingredients would be listed on the label. HIV, long associated with heroin injecting, might be substantially reduced if heroin users no longer had to conceal their habits and share needles. Increased use and dependence would cut into these gains, as these drugs still present health risks even when purity is known and use does not have to be clandestine.

Additional consequences of legalization could include reductions in market-related disorder and criminal violence, as well as reductions in corruption of the criminal justice system and of political authority more generally. This assumes that countries are capable of putting into place and implementing effective regulatory regimes that do not result in a large parallel black market for drugs, an assumption that is somewhat doubtful in light of Chapters 6 and 8 of this Report, which note the linkage of violence in many countries in the region to weak institutions subject to penetration by drug trafficking organizations. […]

Negative consequences must also be taken into consideration. It is impossible to know with certainty how much drug use and dependence would increase in a legalized regime, but it is reasonable to assume that greater availability, under conditions of legality and especially if commercialized, would lead more people to use drugs.

The report goes on to explain why legalization is likely to lead to increased experimentation and possibly drug dependency. These issues, however, could be separately addressed through public health policies that would better address drug dependency whether or not a legalization regime is in place.

The group makes explicit that the report is not intended to be conclusory, but only to present information and options. But the objective tone makes all-the-more compelling the report’s identification of numerous potential benefits and significantly fewer costs. As Drug Policy Alliance Executive Director Ethan Nadlemann points out, “it would have been inconceivable just two years ago that the OAS – or any multilateral organization – would publish a document that considers legalization, decriminalization and other alternatives to prohibitionist policies on an equal footing with status quo policies.” He cites evolving U.S. views, as well as strong calls from Latin American leaders to end the drug war that prompted plans for a United Nations summit, as key to this shift, and predicts that the report “is sure to have legs in a way that few reports by multilateral institutions ever do.” The report has already been endorsed by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and will be presented to the 35 member states in June.

Late last week, 21 year old Hofstra University student Andrea Rebello was shot and killed during an attempted robbery in a group house near the Uniondale, New York campus.

But the initial assumption — that Rebello was murdered by the suspected robber Dalton Smith during a shoot-out with police — now appears to be wrong. Nassau County police officials confirmed over the weekend that the victim was accidentally shot and killed by a responding police officer at the scene:

The Nassau County officer, a 12-year veteran whose identity was withheld, fired eight rounds. Seven struck Smith and one hit Andrea Rebello, 21, in the head. Rebello, of Tarrytown, shared the off-campus rental home with three other Hofstra students, including her identical twin sister, Jessica.

Rebello’s tragic death underscores the absurdity and danger of the NRA’s push for more vigilantism on city streets and inside classrooms — “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” in NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s words. Police officers in Nassau County are subjected to a battery of weapons trainings when they join the force, and yet even a 12-year veteran can make a mistake that ends with the loss of an innocent life.

And these kinds of incidents are far from anomalies either. Last summer, police officers in New York City opened fire on a gunman outside of the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan, accidentally shooting nine bystanders caught in the crossfire.

Tumblr announced on Monday it was being bought by tech giant Yahoo! for $1.1 billion in one of the largest social media buyouts in years, but while the purchase will make Tumblr’s founders rich, it may bode poorly for the privacy protections of Tumblr users.

In a recent report card from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), comparing which tech companies protect user’s data from government snooping, Yahoo received one of the lowest scores with only one out of five stars. Tumblr performed significantly better, receiving three stars for requiring a warrant for content, fighting for users’ privacy rights in Congress, and publishing law enforcement guidelines.

A Yahoo spokesperson told reporters in January that the company was requiring warrants for email content data on fourth amendment grounds, joining Google others tech giants. It’s not yet clear how Yahoo will integrate Tumblr into the company, although Yahoo has promised “not to screw it up” in a press statement and said Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business with David Karp remaining as CEO.

Online privacy law has lagged significantly behind technology advancements. Under the statute governing law enforcement access to digital communications — including private messages over Tumblr’s Fanmail and Yahoo email — the Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA) of 1986, content data over 180 days old stored remotely only requires an administrative subpoena to access, which has a lower threshold of proof than a probable cause warrant.

There are a number of current legislative proposals to update ECPA, one of which was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in late April. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled email providers cannot be compelled to turn over the content of messages without a probable cause warrant no matter how long the information has been stored in the cloud in United States v. Warshak. That ruling only applies to the four states in the court’s jurisdiction.

A gun that went on the market on Wednesday could transform anyone into the deadliest of snipers, even if they’ve barely shot a gun before obtaining this new rifle. NPR reported on the weapon in question:

“It’s called the TrackingPoint rifle. On a firing range just outside Austin in the city of Liberty Hill, a novice shooter holds one and takes aim at a target 500 yards away. Normally it takes years of practice to hit something at that distance. But this shooter nails it on the first try.

The rifle’s scope features a sophisticated color graphics display. The shooter locks a laser on the target by pushing a small button by the trigger. It’s like a video game. But here’s where it’s different: You pull the trigger but the gun decides when to shoot. It fires only when the weapon has been pointed in exactly the right place, taking into account dozens of variables, including wind, shake and distance to the target.“

The gun was developed by a Texas startup who likes to call it a “smart gun” and also features a wifi server and variety of automatic social media sharing options so hunters can brag about their prowess online. But the ability to lock on to targets from long distances is a dramatic departure from how sharp shooting has functioned in the past, when the ability to snipe targetes was largely limited by how few individuals had that skill set — be they serious hunters or military grade snipers.

The high cost of the rifle, which currently retails for over $20,000, will no doubt provide a limiting factor for the moment, plus ballistic forensics techniques mean that just because more people can make the shot doesn’t mean they will necessarily get away with murder. And it’s possible that if used responsibly by hunters, it could result in fewer accidental hunting deaths. But the fact remains that auto-aiming technology has the potential to make it significantly easier for bad actors to take out targets with a firearm at significantly less personal risk due to the distance between themselves and their victims.

Such a gun almost certainly could be banned, even under conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s expansive reading of the Second Amendment. While Scalia’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller disallowed handgun bans, it specifically noted “dangerous and unusual” weapons are not protected by the Constitution. Numerous federal circuit courts have upheld machine gun bans on similar grounds.

If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage without a doctor present, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that’s what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) had become law.

And yet, the Virginia Republican Party wants to make Obenshain into the state’s top prosecutor. This weekend, Virginia Republicans selected Obenshain as their nominee to replace tea party stalwart Ken Cuccinelli (R) as the state’s attorney general.

Under Obenshain’s bill, which was introduced in 2009,

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion, the mother or someone acting on her behalf shall, within 24 hours, report the fetal death, location of the remains, and identity of the mother to the local or state police or sheriff’s department of the city or county where the fetal death occurred. No one shall remove, destroy, or otherwise dispose of any remains without the express authorization of law-enforcement officials or the medical examiner. Any person violating the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

Under Virginia law, a Class 1 misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of “confinement in jail for not more than twelve months and a fine of not more than $2,500,” so Obenshain’s bill could lead to a woman who decides to take a day to grieve the loss of a pregnancy she’d hoped to carry to term spending a year of her life in jail for that decision.

Even without Obenshain’s bill, Virginia law already treats many miscarriages as potential crimes. Under existing Virginia law, “[w]hen a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion or when inquiry or investigation by a medical examiner is required, the medical examiner shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall complete and sign the medical certification portion of the fetal death report within twenty-four hours after being notified of a fetal death.” Obsenshain’s bill, however, would treat many women as if they were criminal suspects at the moment they are confronted with a deep personal tragedy — and imprison them if they would rather deal with that tragedy privately with their family than share the vulnerable moment after a miscarriage with law enforcement.

Columbia University asked a Manhattan judge to allow them to change the requirements of a scholarship fund which limits recipients to members “of the Caucasian race.” The Lydia C. Roberts fellowship was created in 1920 when a woman donated her $500,000 estate to create the racially exclusive fund. Beyond limiting recipients to white people, the fellowship’s terms also require it to go to an Iowa resident, and it cannot be given to students who study “law, medicine, dentistry, veterinary surgery or theology.”

Columbia’s court filing argues that the terms of the fellowship should be altered because it is impossible to comply with its terms and also comply with laws banning race discrimination. The fellowship has not been awarded since 1997.

Since Congress recognized the gaping racial disparity between mandatory minimum sentences for crack offenses and cocaine offenses and reduced the ratio from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1, courts have grappled with when and how to apply the statute to already-decided cases. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the reductions in the Fair Sentencing Act applied to at least those cases decided before the law was passed, but not yet sentenced. But questions remain about whether the statute applies retroactively to tens of thousands of other inmates who might seek reduced sentences.

On Friday, a federal appeals court panel issued a sweeping decision that held the reduced sentencing ratio should apply retroactively to all cases, not just because that was the intent of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, but because failure to do so would be unconstitutional. In a powerful statement about the troubling history of drug sentencing, Sixth Circuit Judges Gilbert Merritt and Boyce Martin write:

The old 100-to-1 crack cocaine ratio has led to the mass incarceration of thousands of nonviolent prisoners under a law widely acknowledged as racially discriminatory. There were approximately 30,000 federal prisoners (about 15 percent of all federal prisoners) serving crack cocaine sentences in 2011. Thousands of these prisoners are incarcerated for life or for 20, 10, or 5 years under mandatory minimum crack cocaine sentences imposed prior to the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act. More than 80 percent of federal prisoners serving crack cocaine sentences are black. In fiscal year 2010, before the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act, almost 4,000 defendants, mainly black, received mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine. […]

The Fair Sentencing Act was a step forward, but it did not finish the job. The racial discrimination continues by virtue of a web of statutes, sentencing guidelines, and court cases that maintain the harsh provisions for those defendants sentenced before the Fair Sentencing Act. If we continue now with a construction of the statute that perpetuates the discrimination, there is no longer any defense that the discrimination is unintentional. The discriminatory nature of the old sentencing regime is so obvious that it cannot seriously be argued that race does not play a role in the failure to retroactively apply the Fair Sentencing Act. A “disparate impact” case now becomes an intentional subjugation or discriminatory purpose case. Like slavery and Jim Crow laws, the intentional maintenance of discriminatory sentences is a denial of equal protection.

The two-judge majority opinion also suggests the court would be inclined to strike down other deeply discriminatory and draconian sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenders, which even the Congressional Research Service has flagged as a cause of the United States’ overwhelming prison population. Unfortunately, the dissenting Judge Ronald Lee Gilman’s opinion may better reflect the view of either a full Sixth Circuit panel or the Supreme Court justices who would review this case on appeal. Gilman puts the onus on Congress to make its law explicitly retroactive, and points to the failure of pre-Fair Sentencing Act constitutional challenges to the crack-cocaine sentencing disparity.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) expects a showdown in July over a potential second round of filibuster reform, and he’s prepared to push for a sweeping change to the minority’s ability to unilaterally obstruct judges and other nominees. According to reporting by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, Reid “is eyeing a change to the rules that would do away with the 60-vote threshold on all judicial and executive branch nominations.” The test, according to Sargent, of whether Reid will push this reform is whether Senate Republicans lift their blockades on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, Labor Secretary nominee Tom Perez, and Environmental Protection Agency leader-in-waiting Gina McCarthy.

 

While Reid’s apparent willingness to press serious filibuster reform is welcome, he made similar statements during the lead up to a debate over filibuster reform last January. That debate ultimately led to a weak package of reforms and a victory for Republicans. A minority of Senate Democrats, lead by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), refused to support reforms that would enable the Senate to function in the face of a determined obstructionist minority.

This time around, however, there are two reasons why Reid may be successful in pulling together the 51 votes necessary to achieve real reform. The first is the simple fact that Levin is retiring, so he can no longer approach colleagues as a powerful committee chair who could potentially influence the fate of their bills for years. Beyond that, a key Democratic ally is now facing what could potentially be an existential threat. Two Republican courts held that President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are not valid, and if these decisions are upheld it will completely disable the NLRB’s ability to function. Without the NLRB, the backbone of federal labor law will become completely unenforceable — and with it, the right to organize could effectively cease to exist so long as Senate Republicans block new appointments to the Board. Unless, of course, Senate Democrats take away the ability to block confirmations via a filibuster.

The Illinois legislature sent a medical marijuana bill to Gov. Pat Quinn Friday, after the Senate passed a measure 35-21 largely along party lines. The measure would permit marijuana use with a doctor’s prescription for 33 specified ailments, require users, growers, and dispensaries to undergo fingerprinting and criminal background checks, and limit the number of growers and dispensaries.

The news comes as several new studies are released suggesting that marijuana may aid in post-traumatic stress disorder, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, and as a possible weight control remedy. All of these studies, however, were either performed in other countries or based on surveys or self-reporting from marijuana users, because federal agencies have blocked access to a legal supply of marijuana even for academic studies.

Earlier this month, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) signed Maryland’s much more limited marijuana law, which provides narrow access to medical marijuana for research purposes. If the bill is signed into law, Illinois would become the 20th state with a medical marijuana law, in addition to the District of Columbia. Gov. Quinn has said he is “open-minded” about the measure.

After President Obama opened the door to temporary legal status for more than a million young immigrants who came to the United States as children, Arizona and other states imposed their own hurdles to these deferred action beneficiaries living and working in the United States as the policy intended. On Thursday, a federal judge suggested he would likely find unconstitutional an Arizona policy denying driver’s licenses to these Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals beneficiaries. In a ruling declining to temporarily block Gov. Jan Brewer’s policy pending trial, U.S. District Judge David G. Campbell — a George W. Bush appointee and former clerk to the late conservative Justice Williams Rehnquist — said there is likely no rational justification for Brewer flouting federal immigration policy and treating deferred action beneficiaries differently than all other temporary legal residents:

The Governor’s disagreement with the DACA program may be a rational political or policy view in the broad sense – reasonable people certainly can disagree on an issue as complex and difficult as immigration – but it provides no justification for saying that an Arizona driver’s license may be issued to one person who has been permitted to remain temporarily in the country on deferred action status – say for an individual humanitarian reason – while another person who has been permitted to remain temporarily in the country on deferred action status under the DACA program is denied a license. … The Governor’s political disagreement with the DACA program as “backdoor amnesty” does not change the fact that both individuals have been allowed by the federal government to live and work here, nor does it identify a reason that one of the individuals presents less of a driver’s-license-related risk to the State.

The DACA program was intended to give young undocumented immigrants access to legal employment while they remain in the country, but depriving these beneficiaries of driver’s licenses of and other basic government services imposes major obstacles to achieving that goal. This hostility toward federal immigration policy should come as no surprise from the state that brought us SB 1070 and other discriminatory immigration laws, many parts of which have already been struck down by courts.

In opting not to block Brewer’s policy pending trial, Judge Campbell reasoned that the plaintiffs were not suffering irreparable harm, because most of them either continued to drive without a license out of necessity, or had other means of transportation. But this does not mitigate the risk that these immigrants incur every day they drive without a license, nor the public safety risks and hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance claims costs imposed by uninsured drivers. These factors will likely be a consideration in a final ruling by Campbell, and he appears poised to find Arizona’s policy a violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Campbell also rejected the state’s motion to dismiss the case.