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Court rejects AG Kane's request to reinstate law license
Lawyer Blog Updates |
2016/02/08 14:54
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Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane's law license will remain suspended after the state's highest court on Friday denied her request to have it reinstated while she fights criminal charges of leaking secret grand jury material and lying about it.
The court's unanimous rejection could pave the way to an unprecedented vote in the state Senate on whether to remove her from office.
A Kane spokesman said the first-term Democrat was disappointed, but not surprised.
A Senate vote could happen in the coming weeks after a special committee spent about three months exploring the question of whether Kane could run the 800-employee law enforcement office without a law license. Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre, said senators will discuss the matter when they reconvene in the Capitol next week.
"It's an important issue," Corman said. "It's really unprecedented, so I think it deserves to be addressed."
In seeking to have her license reinstated, Kane argued that Justice Michael Eakin should not have participated in the suspension vote because of his involvement in a salacious email scandal.
In its one-page order, the Democrat-controlled court said Kane did not seek the recusal of Eakin "at the earliest possible time." As a result, the justices said, Kane gave up her ability to object on that basis to the court's unanimous decision in September to suspend her license.
Kane has released hundreds of emails, including some that Eakin sent and received through a private email account in the name of John Smith. Eakin, a Republican, has been suspended with pay by his fellow justices while he awaits trial before an ethics court that could result in his being kicked off the bench.
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Plagued by delays, California high-speed rail heads back to court
Legal Opinions |
2016/02/07 14:54
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California voters embraced the idea of building the nation's first real high-speed rail system, which promised to whisk travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours, a trip that can take six hours or more by car. Eight years after they approved funding for it, construction is years behind schedule and legal, financial and logistical delays plague the $68 billion project.
The bullet train's timeline, funding and speed estimates are back in the spotlight for a longstanding lawsuit filed by residents whose property lies in its path.
In the second phase of a court challenge filed in 2011, attorneys for a group of Central Valley farmers will argue in Sacramento County Superior Court on Thursday that the state can't keep the promises it made to voters in 2008 about the travel times and system cost. Voters authorized selling $9.9 billion in bonds for a project that was supposed to cost $40 billion.
In recent months, rail officials have touted construction of a viaduct in Madera County, the first visible sign of construction. Though officials have been working for years to acquire the thousands of parcels of land required for the project, they currently have just 63 percent of the parcels needed for the first 29 miles in the Central Valley.
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Ex-Illinois guardsman pleads guilty in Islamic State plot
Legal Career News |
2016/02/06 14:52
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A former Illinois National Guard soldier pleaded guilty Monday to charges alleging he conspired to provide material support to the Islamic State group.
Hasan Edmonds, 23, of Aurora, Illinois, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
The pleas in Chicago federal court came one week after his cousin, Jonas Edmonds, 30, of Aurora, pleaded guilty to similar charges.
"Hasan and Jonas Edmonds conspired to provide material support to ISIL," John P. Carlin, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a news release, using one of the alternative names for the Islamic State group. "They admitted planning to wage violence on behalf of ISIL in the Middle East and to conduct an attack on our soil."
Prosecutors say Hasan Edmonds devised a plan for Hasan Edmonds to travel to the Middle East and join Islamic State fighters overseas. After dropping his cousin off at Midway International Airport last March, Jonas Edmonds went to Hasan Edmonds' home and collected several National Guard uniforms that he planned to wear as a disguise during a planned attack at the Joliet armory, the plea agreement said.
Agents with the Chicago FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Hasan Edmonds before he could board his flight and arrested Jonas Edmonds at his home a short time later.
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High court takes up challenges to drunken-driving test
Legal Career News |
2016/02/05 14:52
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The Supreme Court will decide whether states can criminalize a driver's refusal to take an alcohol test even if police have not obtained a search warrant.
The justices on Friday agreed to hear three cases challenging laws in Minnesota and North Dakota that make it a crime for people arrested for drunken driving to refuse to take a test that can detect alcohol in blood, breath or urine.
At least a dozen states make it a crime to refuse to consent to warrantless alcohol testing. State supreme courts in Minnesota and North Dakota have ruled the laws don't violate constitutional rights.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that police usually must try to obtain a search warrant before ordering blood tests for drunken-driving suspects. The high court said circumstances justifying an exception to the warrant requirement should be decided on a case-by-case basis.
In the case from Minnesota, police arrested William Bernard after his truck got stuck while trying to pull a boat out of a river in South Saint Paul. Police officers smelled alcohol on his breath and said his eyes were bloodshot. After Bernard refused to take a breath test, police took him into custody.
Bernard was charged with operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol and a first-degree count of refusal to take a breath test, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of three years in prison.
He argued that the refusal law violated his Fourth Amendment rights by criminalizing his refusal to submit to a search. A divided Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the law, finding that officers could have ordered a breath test without a warrant as a search incident to a valid arrest.
The North Dakota Supreme Court upheld similar challenges to its test refusal law, ruling that motorists are deemed to consent to alcohol testing. The court called the law a reasonable tool in discouraging drunk driving.
One of the two North Dakota cases the high court will hear involves Danny Birchfield, who was arrested after he drove his car into a ditch and failed a field sobriety test and a breath test. He declined to take to additional tests and was convicted under the state's refusal law, which counts as a misdemeanor for a first offense.
A second appeal from North Dakota comes from Steve Beylund, a driver who was stopped on suspicion of drunk driving and consented to a chemical alcohol test. Beylund later tried to suppress the evidence from that test, but lower courts declined.
In all three cases, the challengers argue that warrantless searches are justified only in "extraordinary circumstances." They say routine drunk driving investigations are among the most ordinary of law enforcement functions in which traditional privacy rights apply. |
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Polish court convicts chemist of planning parliament attack
Legal News Digest |
2016/02/03 14:53
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A court in southern Poland has handed a 13-year prison term to a chemist found guilty of having plotted a bomb attack on parliament and other buildings in 2012.
The man, identified as Brunon Kwiecien, a university teacher in Krakow, was arrested in 2012 in a much publicized case that the prosecutors said was a successful foiling of a "terrorist" attack. The case involved undercover security officers pretending interest in Kwiecien's scheme.
On Monday a court in Krakow found Kwiecien guilty of preparing an attack on parliament, of trying to induce two students to carry out an attack and of illegal weapons possession.
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