Category: Legal

  • Ninth Circuit: Not safe for students to wear US flag shirts on May 5th

    Thank goodness, sanity has been restored in the Ninth Circuit. A few rational decisions in the last few months made me think that the appeals court was turning conservative, but they restored their “Ninth Circus” moniker when they decided that schools can forbid the wearing of US Flag shirts on the pretend Mexican holiday that people of Mexican heritage celebrate on the 5th of May.

    Originally, the day marks the Mexican victory over the French invaders at the Battle of Puebla on May 5th, 1862. I guess the French were trying to collect debts that the Mexican government owed them, so a tiny Mexican force repelled the repo men. What that has to do with modern day people of Mexican heritage in the US Southwest, I have no idea.

    But anyway, Eugene Volokh wrote a piece in the Washington Post about the 9th Circuit’s decision;

    The court points out that the rights of students in public high schools are limited — under the Supreme Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Comm. School Dist. (1969), student speech could be restricted if “school authorities [can reasonably] forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities” stemming from the speech. And on the facts of this case, the court concludes, there was reason to think that the wearing of the T-shirts would lead to disruption. There had been threats of racial violence aimed at students who wore such shirts the year before:

    […]

    This is a classic “heckler’s veto” — thugs threatening to attack the speaker, and government officials suppressing the speech to prevent such violence. “Heckler’s vetoes” are generally not allowed under First Amendment law; the government should generally protect the speaker and threaten to arrest the thugs, not suppress the speaker’s speech.

    […]

    And this is especially so because behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. The school taught its students a simple lesson: If you dislike speech and want it suppressed, then you can get what you want by threatening violence against the speakers. The school will cave in, the speakers will be shut up, and you and your ideology will win. When thuggery pays, the result is more thuggery. Is that the education we want our students to be getting?

    Yeah, well, not rewarding thuggery in this day and age is called racism, so we really couldn’t expect anything different from the panel of judges on the West Coast. And I guess it was too much to ask of the panel to impress upon the school officials to ban all flags if they’re going to ban one.

  • Ninth Circuit; Bloggers are Americans, too

    Since TSO is somewhere over the North Atlantic headed for another grueling embed, it’s up to me to write your boring-ass legal post for the week. A friend sent us a link to the USAToday which proclaims that the Ninth Circuit determined that bloggers and other Americans have First Amendment protections when they’re being sued for defamation;

    Crystal L. Cox, a blogger from Eureka, Mont., now living in Port Townshend, Wash., was sued for defamation by Bend attorney Kevin Padrick and his company, Obsidian Finance Group LLC, after she made posts on several websites she created accusing them of fraud, corruption, money-laundering and other illegal activities. The appeals court noted Padrick and Obsidian were hired by Summit Accommodators to advise them before filing for bankruptcy, and that the U.S. Bankruptcy Court later appointed Padrick trustee in the Chapter 11 case. The court added that Summit had defrauded investors in its real estate operations through a Ponzi scheme.

    A jury in 2011 had awarded Padrick and Obsidian $2.5 million.

    “Because Cox’s blog post addressed a matter of public concern, even assuming that Gertz is limited to such speech, the district court should have instructed the jury that it could not find Cox liable for defamation unless it found that she acted negligently,” judge Andrew D. Hurwitz wrote. “We hold that liability for a defamatory blog post involving a matter of public concern cannot be imposed without proof of fault and actual damages.”

    The appeals court upheld rulings by the District Court that other posts by Cox were constitutionally protected opinion.

    According to the legal expert quoted in the article, the decision means that all Americans are entitled to their opinion and are protected by the First Amendment when they express that opinion publicly – that it’s not a right exclusive to the press.

    But, then, I’m not a lawyer. I had two semesters of ConLaw twenty years ago and that concluded my legal studies. All I know is that I can’t have a 40-acre wheat field that the government doesn’t know about.

    ADDED: For those of you lawyers out there who are interested in Blog Law, it seems that Ace is facing off with Brett Kimberlin. Kimberlin is trying to sue to learn Ace’s real name and actual address. Of course, Kimberlin has a poor record against bloggers, so it should be interesting to watch. Ace has the most unlikely legal team.

  • Navy Yard gunman, Aaron Alexis, duped VA docs

    Dave sends us a link to MSN which reports that Associated Press FOIA’d Aaron Alexis’ medical records which show that the Navy Yard shooter had complained several times to Veterans’ Affairs doctors, and even though he had been screened each time for mental defects, the doctors had cleared him;

    Alexis told a VA emergency room doctor in Providence that he couldn’t sleep, the doctor wrote that his speech and thoughts seemed “clear and focused” and noted that he “denies flashbacks, denies recent stress.”

    The medical records said Alexis, 34, was found sleeping in the VA waiting room in Providence on Aug. 23 while waiting to see a doctor. During that visit he was prescribed 50 milligrams of trazodone, an antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication that in such low doses can be used to treat insomnia.

    As Dave points out, it’s pretty strange that Alexis complained about insomnia, but they found him sleeping in the waiting room. Then gave him a bunch of drugs to help him sleep.

    He directly denied having suicidal or homicidal thoughts when government doctors asked him about it just three weeks before the shootings.

    I don’t blame the docs – I blame that prosecutor in Seattle in 2004 when he shot the tires of some construction workers in his neighborhood. That prosecution probably would have kept him out of the Navy and prevented the purchase of the shotgun a few days before the shooting. I understand that the VA docs are limited in what they can do, but prosecutors who don’t prosecute criminals because they don’t see a personal value in doing their job really piss me off. Where’s the sense in writing laws that you don’t intend to enforce?

  • Regarding That Latest Postal Rate Increase . . . .

    . . . idiocy like this might have something to do with it.

    Seems that in 1988, a guy left active duty.  He went to work for the US Postal Service.

    In 1990, he rejoined the National Guard.  He was active in the Guard.

    So active, in fact, that in 2000 the USPS fired him for “job abandonment”.  They thought he’d neglected his job at USPS and had taken off too much time for Guard matters.

    During a 7-year period, the matter went to court multiple times.  Courts ruled repeatedly in the soldier’s favor.  But for some reason, the USPS apparently simply refused to reinstate the man in his former job.

    The matter finally went to the Merit Systems Protection Board – again – late last year.  And in it’s latest ruling, the board clearly was not amused with the USPS’s antics.

    The board ordered the man reinstated – and also ordered the USPS to pony up for 12 years back pay and other costs.  The total could come to roughly $2 million.

    The USPS is reportedly appealing the latest MSPB decision.  Hey, interest rates are low – what have they got to lose, right?

    Sheesh.  Talk about being too dumb to stop digging . . . .

    Details are found here, and here.  (The second link is from this guy’s union, so it’s hardly an unbiased source – IMO, lotsa spin there – but it does provide a few pertinent details not present in the first.) I’ve heard a couple of other stories of government agencies (both Federal and state) treating members of the Reserve Components quite shabbily, so I can believe this wasn’t just an accidental “Oops” on someone’s part.  And the fact that multiple Federal judges and boards have ruled in this guy’s favor leads me to believe the facts are overwhelmingly on his side.

    If that’s the case – and it appears indeed to be the case – this is long overdue.

    It’s also good to see the USPS get absolutely body-slammed here.  Government entities aren’t exempt from the Uniformed Services Employment/Reemployment Rights Act.

    Hopefully those individuals at the USPS who are responsible for this idiocy end up with the same problem they foisted on this guy – unemployment.  But in their case(s), it would IMO be fully deserved.

  • The Holder Effect

    In spite of the best efforts of the liberal media to first suppress news reports about the Knockout Game phenomenon, and then, when that failed, to poo-poo the idea that any such thing as this violent and obviously race-based crime even existed, the truth will out. Thanks to the internet, the liberal elites who censor the output of the major news organizations can no longer cover up events that fail to depict contemporary life as they wish it to be. But even if you don’t hear about it or read about it from one of their publications or networks, your chances of learning about these crimes are much better today than just a few years ago when the so-called mainstream media could effectively bury what was unfavorable to their vision of fit to print.

    This inability to totally control the dissemination of news now causes the media establishment to put even more than their normal amount of spin on their output when they are forced to cover an issue or risk looking foolish for the outright denial of an ongoing crime wave that everyone knows is growing. For instance, when they are forced to cover this offense, they still will not use the actual name of Polar Bear Hunting because of its all too obvious racial implications. Unable to ignore it any longer, they play it down — especially the racial aspects of it, because that may put our black president, his black attorney general, and all those black and liberal white lawyers in Holder’s civil rights division in a bad light because they aren’t investigating what appears to be serial hate crime.

    Which of course is true; our president is silent on what is a matter of growing public concern primarily among white Americans, who constitute, to date, all but one of the victims of this criminal game. That he remains silent when it is a particularly supportive and primarily Democrat demographic, white Jewish Americans, who appear to be the most at-risk group, offers even greater testament that the Obama administration and the Holder justice department are deliberately disinclined to prosecute hate crimes where blacks are the perpetrators and whites are the victims. Jewish Democrats should take heed of this policy where race trumps ideological loyalty.

    Liberals who do acknowledge the existence of the Knockout Game and who its perpetrators are, trot out all the old chestnuts about racist white America being responsible for troubled black youth. I’d like to see Obama, Holder, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other so-called black leaders and all their white liberal defenders watch this truly disgusting video and then tell us that we, white America, are responsible for such pathologies of black youth as the Knockout Game.

    The latest example of a Knockout Game attack is going to make this head-in-the-sand policy a bit difficult to maintain but they are trying their best. The Daily Caller’s lead article from that day has the goods on a young black thug who assaulted an elderly white woman in Rochester, NY recently — and I do mean the goods, with Facebook videos, photos, and audio boasting that should enable the Rochester Police Department to put him away for a stretch on charges of harassment. Harassment? Yep — according to the RPD spokesperson, Sgt. Elena Correia, the crime committed by the appropriately self-styled True Goon Tocool Sneekey, appears to be harassment, not felony assault, even though True Goon allegedly struck the woman full in the face with his fist at the end of a roundhouse left. That’s some fairly serious harassment by anyone’s definition. And this is not RPD’s first attempt to play down this despicable crime. I’d dearly love to see that portion of the New York criminal code that Sgt. Correia claims to define such an act of felonious assault as harassment, wouldn’t you? Makes you wonder that if some white gun-loving male punched his wife in the face with his fist if that would be handled by the politically correct Rochester Police Department as a case of domestic harassment, hmmm? Any bets?

    Update: New York Teen Arrested In Connection With Videotaped “Knockout Game” Attack On Elderly Woman

    It is becoming increasingly disturbing that it is not just the Obama administration and the brown-nosed media that have attempted to sweep this new criminal activity under the rug but these local police departments. It’s happening all over the country, and not just in the major urban centers. I call this racialization of the law and criminality the Holder Effect, for it was the relatively new attorney general who famously announced that his justice department would side with his people.

    Of course, the Holder justice department has not ignored the Knockout Game entirely. A recent such attack in Houston has been charged as a federal hate crime, and the perp is going to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Anyone care to guess the races of the perp and the victim? Mind you, I’m not defending the despicable behavior of this racist and probably mentally unbalanced jerk — just making the observation that out of the hundreds of these crimes that have occurred, the first Knockout Game perp to be charged by the justice department with a hate crime, and done so with great swiftness, is white.

    Holder Effect, indeed…

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Bet This Will P!ss Ya Off

    NY judge orders ‘compassionate release’ of terror lawyer Lynne Stewart

    What really bothers me is that the Bureau of Prisons asked for her early release on “compassionate grounds” due to her terminal illness.  Funny, but the last time I checked terrorist organizations just didn’t seem to be overly concerned with “compassion”.

    Stewart was convicted in 2005 of assisting terrorism by smuggling messages from “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman to his followers while acting as his defense attorney.  She was sentenced to serve 10 years for that crime.

    Do the crime, do the time.  IMO if you help terrorists you damn well deserve to die in prison, one way or another.  If that means you go the long, hard route via terminal cancer while behind bars – that’s OK by me.

    This seriously NSFW video is for everyone involved with this despicable turncoat’s release – but especially U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl, who ordered it.

    Justice is supposed to be blind, judge – and a judge is supposed to ensure justice.  Here, you proved you’re nothing more than another ideologue in a robe who sides with terrorists.

    I’d best not say anything else, as I’m kinda upset about this.

  • Bleeding Hearts . . . and Bloody Hands

    Today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings.  We’ll doubtless hear great hue and cry from our liberal “brethren” about that, and about how “evil guns” killed innocents.

    Yeah, they’re lying – and they know it.  But that won’t stop many clueless schmucks from lapping it up.  And the media will be there to broadcast the false outrage and tears.

    They’re using innocents murdered by a lunatic as political props. I wish I could say that shocks me. But coming from the “Progressive” side, it doesn’t.  They do crap like that all the time.

    The hypocrisy, though, disgusts me. Because if anyone besides the shooter, Adam Lanza, is to blame for Sandy Hook – it’s our Bleeding-Heart Liberal “Brethren”.

    (more…)

  • Another Bunch of New ObamaCare “Features”

    I ran across a few more “features” of that new law called the  Pathetic Plethora of Amazingly Cretinous Absurdity  Patent Protection and “Affordable” Care Act, AKA ObamaCare.  So I thought I’d share them with TAH’s readers.

    Not much new here, really. Anyone with a bit of common sense could see these coming.

    But just remember, folks – these aren’t “problems” with ObamaCare.  Oh, no.  There are no “problems”.  These are just “features” you don’t yet understand!

    Yeah, right.  And I’m the freaking Emperor of China.