Monthly Archive: March 2020
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 2, 2020 3:59 pm
California’s Proposition 47 created a new offense of shoplifting to deal with the overreach of charging people with burglary when they only walked in the open door of an open store to steal something, a crime which should have been charged as theft.
A creative defendant charged with misuse of personal information tried to get his crime reclassified as shoplifting, and a Court of Appeal panel actually bought that. Today, the California Supreme Court unanimously reversed.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 2, 2020 1:42 pm
In oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court today, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said,
So that’s a vastly different question of whether the Suspension Clause –which predated the Due Process Clause by 100 years –the Suspension Clause, at the time, it was viewed as permitting anyone who had a legal claim to stay to file a habeas petition.
100 years?
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by Michael Rushford · Mar 2, 2020 1:36 pm
Almost 40 years ago, one-term President Jimmy Carter completely changed the balance on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the largest and most litigious circuit in the country. In 1978, after the Democrat majority in Congress expanded the 19-member court to 29, President Carter had the unprecedented opportunity to fill those 10 seats and replace another 5 judges who retired. Carter did not just appoint liberal judges. He appointed some of the most liberal judges ever to serve. These new appointments sharply tilted the once-conservative court to the left, creating a Valhalla for criminal defendants and litigants seeking to advance progressive social causes through the courts. Maura Dolan of the Los Angeles Times reports, that for the first time since 1981, 10 new appointments to the court by President Trump has significantly reduced the divide between Republican and Democrat judges. “Ten new people at once sends a shock wave through the system,” one unnamed 9th Circuit judge said.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 2, 2020 9:01 am
Today the U.S. Supreme Court released an orders list from last Friday’s conference. The Court took a new case on Armed Career Criminal Act sentencing to replace the deceased James Walker’s case. It relisted for this coming Friday cases to replace the withdrawn D.C. Sniper, Jr. case on juvenile life-without-parole sentencing. Finally, the Court passed, for now, on the question of whether bump stocks can be banned administratively without amending the relevant statute.
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