Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder <\/em>(consolidated)<\/p>\nDate: Tuesday February 23, 2010<\/p>\n
Issue: Is a law that prohibits the “material support” of a foreign terrorist organization unconstitutional? This is a challenge to a 1996 antiterrorism law (later amended by the Patriot Act) by people who support separatist groups in Turkey and Sri Lanka. These are groups identified by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations. The law prohibits American citizens from knowingly providing “material support or resources” to terrorist groups.<\/p>\n
Two Americans and some non-profit groups contend the law is too broad and filed suit saying they have no interest in helping terrorists but want to move forward with their human rights agenda. Since 2001, about 150 people have been charged under this law including people who’ve allegedly helped al Qaeda and Hezbollah.<\/p>\n
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Case: United States v. O’Brien<\/em><\/p>\nDate: Tuesday February 23, 2010<\/p>\n
Issue: Federal sentencing laws allow criminals to receive enhanced sentences if their crimes involve certain aggravating factors. Sentencing enhancements are often part of cases where criminals use firearms during the commission of their bad acts. In this case, Martin O’Brien and Arthur Burgess entered guilty pleas after they were busted for trying to rob an armored car in Boston. Because the men used a machine gun during their crime, prosecutors wanted an enhanced sentence of 30 years behind bars. But that didn’t happen because the trial court judge determined that only a jury can rule on a sentence enhancement. The ruling was later upheld by an appellate court and now the government is appealing to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
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Case: Carr v. United States<\/em><\/p>\nDate: Wednesday February 24, 2010<\/p>\n
Issue: A 2006 federal sex offender registration law requires newly convicted offenders to register in an updated national database. In 2007, the Justice Department issued a requirement that people convicted of sex offenses before 2006 also register in the new database. Earlier in the decade, Thomas Carr was convicted in Alabama of improperly touching a 14 year old girl. He then moved to Indiana where after getting into a fight (with no sexual connection) Carr was arrested and convicted for failing to register under the new law. He has appealed the conviction claiming the after-the-fact requirement violates the Constitution’s Ex Post Facto Clause.<\/p>\n
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Case: United States v. Marcus<\/em><\/p>\nDate: Wednesday February 24, 2010<\/p>\n
Issue: Glenn Marcus, aka the S&M Svengali, was convicted of sex trafficking and sentenced to nine years in prison. But an appellate court that included now Justice Sonia Sotomayor set aside the verdict saying some of the alleged bad acts took place before the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act went into effect. Marcus encouraged women to participate in what the government describes as “violent sexual activity” and used images from the encounters on a for-profit website called “Slavespace.”<\/p>\n
In her brief to the high court, Solicitor General Elena Kagan says the conviction should be reinstated because Marcus never objected at trial to the admission of evidence presented against him and failed to show any plain error affecting his right to a fair trial. As noted, Sotomayor agreed with the decision to overturn the conviction but did so in fealty to Second Circuit precedent. In her concurring opinion in the case she cautioned that “where there is no reasonable possibility that an error not objected to at trial had an effect on the judgment, the Supreme Court counsels us against exercising our discretion to notice that error.” Because of her prior involvement in the case, Sotomayor is not expected to take part in this review.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here’s a quick look at the cases that will be argued in front of the Supreme Court this week: Case: Astrue v. Ratliff Date: Monday February 22, 2010 Issue: Whether an “award of fees and other expenses” under the Equal Access to Justice Act, is payable to the “prevailing party” rather than to the prevailing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5152,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-346117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5152"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}