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Justice Dept. moves to cancel police reform settlements reached with Minneapolis
Legal News Digest |
2025/05/22 12:34
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The Justice Department moved Wednesday to cancel a settlement with Minneapolis that called for an overhaul of its police department following the murder of George Floyd, as well as a similar agreement with Louisville, Kentucky, saying it doesn’t want to pursue the cases.
Following a scathing report by the Justice Department in 2023, Minneapolis in January approved a consent decree with the federal government in the final days of the Biden administration to overhaul its training and use-of-force policies under court supervision.
The agreement required approval from a federal court in Minnesota. But the Trump administration was granted a delay soon after taking office while it considered its options, and on Wednesday told the court it does not intend to proceed. It planned to file a similar motion in federal court in Kentucky.
“After an extensive review by current Department of Justice and Civil Rights Division leadership, the United States no longer believes that the proposed consent decree would be in the public interest,” said the Minnesota motion, signed by Andrew Darlington, acting chief of the special litigation section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The United States will no longer prosecute this matter.”
The Justice Department announced its decision just before the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. Then-officer Derek Chauvin used his knee on May 25, 2020, to pin the Black man to the pavement for 9 1/2 minutes in a case that sparked protests around the world and a national reckoning with racism and police brutality.
However, no immediate changes are expected to affect the Minneapolis Police Department, which is operating under a similar consent decree with the Minnesota Human Rights Department.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara reiterated at a news conference Tuesday that his department would abide by the terms of the federal agreement as it was signed, regardless of what the Trump administration decided.
The city in 2023 reached a settlement agreement with the state Human Rights Department to remake policing, under court supervision, after the agency issued a blistering report in 2022 that found that police had long engaged in a pattern of racial discrimination.
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Arizona prosecutors ordered to send fake elector case back to grand jury
Law News |
2025/05/20 12:34
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Arizona prosecutors pressing the case against Republicans who are accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election results in President Donald Trump’s favor were dealt a setback when a judge ordered the case be sent back to a grand jury.
Arizona’s fake elector case remains alive after Friday’s ruling by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers, but it’s being sent back to the grand jurors to determine whether there’s probable cause that the defendants committed the crimes.
The decision, first reported by the Washington Post, centered on the Electoral Count Act, a law that governs the certification of a presidential contest and was part of the defendants’ claims they were acting lawfully.
While the law was discussed when the case was presented to the grand jury and the panel asked a witness about the law’s requirements, prosecutors didn’t show the statute’s language to the grand jury, Myers wrote. The judge said a prosecutor has a duty to tell grand jurors all the applicable law and concluded the defendants were denied “a substantial procedural right as guaranteed by Arizona law.”
Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat whose office is pressing the case in court, said in a statement that prosecutors will appeal the decision. “We vehemently disagree with the court,” Taylor said.
Mel McDonald, a former county judge in metro Phoenix and former U.S. Attorney for Arizona, said courts send cases back to grand juries when prosecutors present misleading or incomplete evidence or didn’t properly instruct panel members on the law.
“They get granted at times. It’s not often,” said McDonald, who isn’t involved in the case.
In all, 18 Republicans were charged with forgery, fraud and conspiracy. The defendants consist of 11 Republicans who submitted a document falsely claiming Trump won Arizona, two former Trump aides and five lawyers connected to the former president, including Rudy Giuliani.
Two defendants have already resolved their cases, while the others have pleaded not guilty to the charges. Trump wasn’t charged in Arizona, but the indictment refers to him as an unindicted coconspirator.
Most of the defendants in the case also are trying to get a court to dismiss their charges under an Arizona law that bars using baseless legal actions in a bid to silence critics.
They argued Mayes tried to use the charges to silence them for their constitutionally protected speech about the 2020 election and actions taken in response to the race’s outcome. Prosecutors said the defendants didn’t have evidence to back up their retaliation claim and that they crossed the line from protected speech to fraud.
Eleven people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claimed Trump had carried the state in the 2020 election.
President Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document later was sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.
Prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme. |
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Supreme Court could block Trump’s birthright citizenship order
Law Firm News |
2025/05/15 11:59
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The Supreme Court seemed intent Thursday on keeping a block on President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship while looking for a way to scale back nationwide court orders.
It was unclear what such a decision might look like, but a majority of the court expressed concerns about would happen if the Trump administration were allowed, even temporarily, to deny citizenship to children born to people who are in the United States illegally.
The justices heard arguments in the Trump administration’s emergency appeals over lower court orders that have kept the citizenship restrictions on hold across the country. Nationwide, or universal, injunctions have emerged as an important check on Trump’s efforts to remake the government and a mounting frustration to the Republican president and his allies.
Judges have issued 40 nationwide injunctions since Trump began his second term in January, Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court at the start of more than two hours of arguments.
Birthright citizenship is among several issues, many related to immigration, that the administration has asked the court to address on an emergency basis.
The justices are also considering the Trump administration’s pleas to end humanitarian parole for more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and to strip other temporary legal protections from another 350,000 Venezuelans. The administration remains locked in legal battles over its efforts to swiftly deport people accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador under an 18th century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term that would deny citizenship to children who are born to people who are in the country illegally or temporarily.
The order conflicts with a Supreme Court decision from 1898 that held that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment made citizens of all children born on U.S. with narrow exceptions that are not at issue in this case.
States, immigrants and rights group sued almost immediately, and lower courts quickly barred enforcement of the order while the lawsuits proceed. The court’s liberal justices seemed firmly in support of the lower court rulings that found the changes to citizenship that Trump wants to make would upset the settled understanding of birthright citizenship that has existed for more than 125 years.
Birthright citizenship is an odd case to use to scale back nationwide injunctions, Justice Elena Kagan said. “Every court has ruled against you,” she told Sauer.
But if the government wins on today’s arguments, it could still enforce the order against people who haven’t sued, Kagan said. “All of those individuals are going to win. And the ones who can’t afford to go to court, they’re the ones who are going to lose,” she said
Several conservative justices who might be open to limiting nationwide injunctions also wanted to know the practical effects of such a decision as well as how quickly the court could reach a final decision on the Trump executive order. |
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Trump Seeks Supreme Court Approval to End Protections for Venezuelans
Legal Career News |
2025/05/12 12:00
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The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to strip temporary legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans, potentially exposing them to being deported.
The Justice Department asked the high court to put on hold a ruling from a federal judge in San Francisco that kept in place Temporary Protected Status for the Venezuelans that would have otherwise expired last month.
The status allows people already in the United States to live and work legally because their native countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife.
A federal appeals court had earlier rejected the administration’s request.
President Donald Trump’s administration has moved aggressively to withdraw various protections that have allowed immigrants to remain in the country, including ending TPS for a total of 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians. TPS is granted in 18-month increments.
The emergency appeal to the high court came the same day a federal judge in Texas ruled illegal the administration’s efforts to deport Venezuelans under an 18th-century wartime law. The cases are not related.
The protections had been set to expire April 7, but U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ordered a pause on those plans. He found that the expiration threatened to severely disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and could cost billions in lost economic activity.
Chen, who was appointed to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama, found the government hadn’t shown any harm caused by keeping the program alive.
But Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the administration that Chen’s order impermissibly interferes with the administration’s power over immigration and foreign affairs.
In addition, Sauer told the justices, people affected by ending the protected status might have other legal options to try to remain in the country because the “decision to terminate TPS is not equivalent to a final removal order.”
Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife.
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Jury begins deliberating in UK trial of men accused of felling Sycamore Gap tree
Headline Legal News |
2025/05/09 12:58
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Jurors began deliberating Thursday in the case of two men charged with cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree that once stood along the ancient Hadrian’s Wall in northern England.
Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, have pleaded not guilty to two counts each of criminal damage. The former friends each testified that they were at their separate homes that night and not involved.
Justice Christina Lambert told jurors in Newcastle Crown Court to take as long as they need to reach unanimous verdicts in the trial that began April 28.
The tree was not Britain’s biggest or oldest, but it was prized for its picturesque setting along the ancient wall built by Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 122 to protect the northwest frontier of the Roman Empire.
The tree was long known to locals but achieved international fame in Kevin Costner’s 1991 film “Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.” It sat symmetrically between two hills along the historic wall and was a draw for tourists, landscape photographers and those taking selfies for social media.
Prosecutors said the tree’s value exceeded 620,000 pounds ($830,000) and damage to the wall, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was assessed at 1,100 pounds. Andrew Gurney, a lawyer for Carruthers, said Graham’s story didn’t add up and he was projecting his guilt on his former friend.
“Is that a plausible chain of events or is that the desperate story of a man caught out?” Gurney said.
Wright mocked the duo’s defense, saying common sense and a trail of evidence should lead jurors to convict them for their “moronic mission.”
Prosecutors showed grainy video from Graham’s phone of the tree being cut down — a video sent shortly afterward to Carruthers’ phone. Metadata showed it was taken at the tree’s location in Northumberland National Park. Data showed Graham’s Range Rover had traveled there.
Wright said he couldn’t say who cut the tree and who held the phone, but the two were the only people in the world who had the video on their devices.
Text and voice messages exchanged the following day between Carruthers and Graham captured their excitement as the story went viral.
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