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Conn. court declines to address email warrants
Headline News |
2013/06/10 17:26
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The Connecticut Supreme Court has declined to address whether state judges can issue search warrants for email accounts maintained by out-of-state companies like Google.
The court took up the issue in the case of former Monroe youth minister David Esarey, who was sentenced in May 2010 to six years in prison for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl and trading nude photos with her.
Justices upheld Esarey's convictions Friday. But they decided not to address his appeal argument that a state judge had no authority to issue a search warrant for his Google Gmail account because Google is based in California.
The court ruled instead that the issuing of the search warrant didn't affect the jury's verdict. |
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Intel chair says NSA court order is renewal
Court Feed News |
2013/06/07 04:12
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The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence committee says the top secret court order for telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon is a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice.
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California spoke to reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference on Thursday after the Obama administration defended the National Security Agency's need to collect the records.
Other lawmakers have said previously that the practice is legal under the Patriot Act although civil libertarians have complained about U.S. snooping on American citizens. |
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Court: Police can take DNA swabs from arrestees
U.S. Legal News |
2013/06/03 20:52
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A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.
"Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court's five-justice majority.
But the four dissenting justices said that the court was allowing a major change in police powers.
"Make no mistake about it: because of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason," conservative Justice Antonin Scalia said in a sharp dissent which he read aloud in the courtroom.
At least 28 states and the federal government now take DNA swabs after arrests. But a Maryland court was one of the first to say that it was illegal for that state to take Alonzo King's DNA without approval from a judge, saying King had "a sufficiently weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches."
But the high court's decision reverses that ruling and reinstates King's rape conviction, which came after police took his DNA during an unrelated arrest. Kennedy wrote the decision, and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer. Scalia was joined in his dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. |
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Court won't hear challenge to copyright board
U.S. Legal News |
2013/06/01 18:21
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The Supreme Court won't hear a challenge to the authority of the board that sets royalty rates for musical works.
The high court refused Tuesday to hear an appeal challenging the Copyright Royalty Board, a panel of three copyright judges appointed by the Librarian of Congress.
Intercollegiate Broadcast System Inc. said the board should be appointed instead by the president and confirmed by the Senate. They want to have overturned a decision by the board that noncommercial educational webcasters pay an annual fee of $500 per channel for a license authorizing the webcasting of unlimited amounts of music.
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit refused to hear their appeal, and the Supreme Court did as well. |
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Oil leasing dispute heads to federal court
Business Law Info |
2013/06/01 18:21
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Attorneys for the government and the oil industry will square off against environmental groups Friday in federal court in Montana in a dispute over greenhouse-gas emissions from oil and gas drilling.
The Montana Environmental Information Center and two other groups want U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon to cancel Bureau of Land Management oil and gas leases covering almost 80,000 acres in Montana.
They argue the agency did not fairly consider that greenhouse gas emissions from drilling activities could make climate change worse.
The BLM counters that the emissions from machinery and the venting of excess natural gas are insignificant.
Several industry groups have intervened in the case. They say the environmentalists behind the 2011 lawsuit cannot prove they suffered any specific harm from the lease sales. |
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Court Upholds Rifle Sales Reporting Requirement
Lawyer Blog News |
2013/06/01 18:21
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A federal appeals court panel has unanimously upheld an Obama administration requirement that dealers in southwestern border states report when customers buy multiple high-powered rifles.
The firearms industry trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and two Arizona gun sellers argued that the administration overstepped its legal authority in the 2011 regulation, which applies to gun sellers in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
But the three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the requirement was "unambiguously" authorized under the Gun Control Act of 1968.
The challengers argued that the requirement unlawfully creates a national firearms registry, but the court said because it applies to a small percentage of gun dealers, it doesn't come close to creating one. |
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