Tag: Legal

Resistance to Change, Example of

BEND, Ore. — If you’ve visited Oregon (as I am currently), you have likely had the moment of cognitive dissonance in which you hop out of your vehicle at a gas station to fill your tank just as you do anywhere else, then discover (or remember) that you must yield the pump handle to an earnest or sometimes surly gas station attendant who intercepts you and really doesn’t want you stealing their job.

That’s about to change. Oregon lawmakers last week gave final approval to a bill that ends the state’s ban on self-service gas pumps, a prohibition that has been in place since 1951.

Oregon ends its 72-year ban on self-service gasoline
You can pump your own, but the state will still require attendants as an option
Greg Rasa

Senate confirms Ketanji Brown Jackson

The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Thursday in a historic vote that paves the way for her to become the first Black woman to serve on the highest court in the nation.

The tally was 53-47, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joining Democrats to vote in favor.

Senate confirms Ketanji Brown Jackson to be first Black woman to sit on Supreme Court
CNN

Trucker Sentenced to 110 Years for Accident

DENVER — An online petition has gathered millions of signatures calling for leniency for a 26-year-old truck driver who was sentenced to 110 years in prison for vehicular homicide in an explosive accident at the base of a Colorado mountain highway that killed four people in 2019.

More than 4.5 million people had signed the change.org petition urging Gov. Jared Polis to grant clemency or commute Rogel Aguilera-Mederos’ sentence by Tuesday, The Denver Gazette reports. Truckers nationwide have voiced outrage over the sentence on Twitter, using the hashtags #NoTrucksToColorado and #NoTrucksColorado, among others.

Leniency calls grow for trucker sentenced in Colorado crash
An online petition has gathered millions of signatures calling for leniency for a 26-year-old truck driver who was sentenced to 110 years in prison for causing a crash that killed four people in Colorado

Police Arrest Elementary School Girls in Tennessee

Source:
Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.
Judge Donna Scott Davenport oversees a juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, with a staggering history of jailing children. She said kids must face consequences, which rarely seem to apply to her or the other adults in charge.
by Meribah Knight, Nashville Public Radio, and Ken Armstrong, ProPublica

Unequal Justice, Example of

Judge Les Hayes once sentenced a single mother to 496 days behind bars for failing to pay traffic tickets. The sentence was so stiff it exceeded the jail time Alabama allows for negligent homicide.

Marquita Johnson, who was locked up in April 2012, says the impact of her time in jail endures today. Johnson’s three children were cast into foster care while she was incarcerated. One daughter was molested, state records show. Another was physically abused.

“Judge Hayes took away my life and didn’t care how my children suffered,” said Johnson, now 36. “My girls will never be the same.”

Fellow inmates found her sentence hard to believe. “They had a nickname for me: The Woman with All the Days,” Johnson said. “That’s what they called me: The Woman with All the Days. There were people who had committed real crimes who got out before me.”

In the past dozen years, state and local judges have repeatedly escaped public accountability for misdeeds that have victimized thousands. Nine of 10 kept their jobs, a Reuters investigation found – including an Alabama judge who unlawfully jailed hundreds of poor people, many of them Black, over traffic fines.

Michael Berens And John Shiffman
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-judges-misconduct/

If You’re Going to be a Duck You Need to Learn to Quack – One L Quote

Out of class, school became an environment of legal talk, almost all of it well-spoken. I reported to Annette each night my general wonder at how enormously articulate everybody seemed. And people were beginning to inject that new vocabulary into their conversation, speaking Legal to each other. It was strange at first to hear classmates saying in the hallways, “Quaere if that position can be supported?” or employing Legal in other contexts—“Let me add a caveat” to mean “Let me give you a warning.” People were self-conscious about how oratorical and windy they sounded. They uttered a little hiccup or a laugh when they tried out their Legal, but most of us persisted, practicing on each other.

It was Nicky Morris who most neatly summed up what we were all trying to do in using legalisms. In the last meeting of Civil Procedure that week, a woman answered a question Morris had posed. “The court does not have subject matter jurisdiction over the person,” she said.

“I’m not sure I know what that means,” Morris told the woman, “but I’m still glad to hear you talking that way. After all,” he said, “you can’t be a duck until you learn to quack.”

Turow, Scott. One L 
Amazon

Lindsey Graham Is Quietly Preparing a Mess of a Bill Trying to Destroy End-to-End Encryption – Gizmodo

The draft version of the EARN IT Act, which has not yet been formally introduced but is reportedly being circulated by Graham and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, bills itself as a way to fight the distribution of child sex abuse material (CSAM) on major platforms. But it does so by threatening Section 230, a core building block of the modern internet that shields tech platforms from liability for user-generated content (for example, it’s why Gizmodo is insulated from libel lawsuits stemming from what happens in the comments section). The EARN IT Act would threaten tech companies like Facebook, Google, and WhatApp’s Section 230 immunity regarding CSAM unless they comply with a set of so-called “best practices” determined by a 15-member commission.

Dell Cameron and Tom McKay, Gizmodo