We recently discussed the latest authoritarian move by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in rounding up dozens of academics who signed a peace petition. The move was denounced throughout the world, but Erdogan is clearly unmoved. Now, those who objected to the crackdown and loss of the freedom of speech are themselves being targeted by the government. Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu is facing arrest after saying that “Academics who express their opinions have been detained one by one on instructions given by a so-called dictator.” Prosecutors launched an investigation into Kilicdaroglu’s comments on charges of “openly insulting the president.”
Category: Criminal law
I recently wrote about the criminal case against Bill Cosby for his alleged sexual assault of one of a number of women accusing him of rape or other criminal conduct. Now there appears an added wrinkle: the defense is claiming that a key deposition of Cosby occurred with an understanding that it would not be used in a criminal prosecution. However, there does not appear to be a formal immunity agreement.
A former Taco Bell executive Benjamin Golden, 32, recently made himself into a national scandal after being caught on videotape slapping Uber driver Edward Caban repeatedly in a drunken haze. Golden later gave a tearful apology saying “It’s not me in the video. It’s not me. It was hard to watch and I’m ashamed.” That shame appears to have now passed since he is suing Caban for $5 million. However, if those statements are admissible, he may learn that “silence is Golden”
In another disturbing example of the abuses that occur in the absence of church (or mosque) and state separation, Pakistani lawmakers have yielded to the demand of Islamic clerics and killed a law that would have imposed real penalties for those who arrange forced child marriages, including raising the legal age of marriages. Clerics denounced the law as “blasphemous” and against Islam.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian rule is again evident this week with the rounding up of dozens of professors for simply signing a petition denouncing military operations against Kurds in the south-east of the country. The signatories of the petition included famous linguist Noam Chomsky and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Erdoğan responded angrily to the letter, which was denounced as “terror propaganda” and he called on the judiciary to act against their alleged treachery. Supporters of Erdoğan and nationalist students have been intimidating academics by marking their doors and threatening professors who signed the petition calling for peace.
China has conducted another round up of human rights lawyers, including Wang Yu, the country’s most prominent woman human rights lawyer. Adding an Orwellian element to this latest outrage was China’s state media which accused Wang last year of “blabbering about the rule of law and human rights.” Wang and her colleagues have long been symbols of courage in the face of authoritarian rule, including prior detentions designed to scare them into silence.
A nearly unanimous Supreme Court struck down part of Florida’s capital punishment system this week. It found that Florida had given judges part of the role of jurors in determining whether to impose the death penalty. Only Associate Justice Samuel Alito (who has a pronounced record opposing rights for criminal defendants) voted to uphold the law. The case is Hurst v. Florida, No. 14-7505.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Strikes Down Part of Florida’s Death Penalty”
The e-mail scandal involving former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has continued to unfold, as we have been discussing. The number of classified emails have now grown to 1340. While the vast majority have low level classification, a few contained information classified at the secret level. This is not the first such allegation of someone stripping classification headers in scandal. The mishandling of classified information is a crime and the level of gross negligence in the use of the private server by Clinton is staggering. However, there has long been a good-faith debate over whether Clinton is being given a pass on a criminal investigation by the Obama Administration or whether her actions (while negligent) were not criminal in nature. A recent story could change that debate considerably if critics are proven correct. One of the emails released recently reportedly shows Clinton instructing an aide to strip off classification markings from a document and to send by unsecure means. Such an act could be charged as a criminal offense under federal classification laws. However, it is not clear that any email was sent and the Clinton staff could claim that she was referring to clearly unclassified material contained in a document. There has been a suggestion that the material in question were “talking points” that were meant to be public or were clearly unclassified. [Update: Clinton says that the email was never sent and that she trusted her aide to make the right choices on what could be sent.]
Just when you thought that ISIS could not get more twisted in its perverted use of Islam to excuse rape and murder, it does. The BBC and other media outlets are airing a report that an Islamic State militant, Ali Saqr, 21, carried out a public “execution” of his own mother, Lena al-Qasem, 45, after she asked him to leave the group. The reported execution occurred in Raqqa, according to some activists. ISIS has also announced the execution of the first female journalist for reporting from ISIS territory.
The recent sexual assault in Cologne of women on New Year’s Eve has shocked the nation. As many as 1000 men, allegedly set upon women and made them run a gauntlet as they were grabbed, their clothes ripped, and their bodies groped. Police sources and witnesses have said that many were refugees — triggering renewed objections over a spate of rapes and assaults of women in the country attributed to recent immigrants. To make matters worse for the government, newspapers are reporting that one man told police “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me.” The result has been a rising tide of criticism of Merkel for her open-door policy. Yet, that criticism may now be muted by a move by the government to crackdown on anti-immigration comments as a form of “hate speech.” As we discussed today with the effort to ban Donald Trump, free speech is being rolled back in Europe under hate crime and anti-discrimination laws as an alarming rate. It is particularly worrisome when the government is under attack on an issue like immigration and responds by prosecuting people for such criticism. News reports indicate that 18 of the 31 known suspects from Cologne were asylum seekers, including “nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, five Iranians, four Syrians, an Iraqi, a Serbian, an American and two German nationals.
Continue reading “Germany Cracks Down On Anti-Immigration Speech”
Now this would make for a terrific case for teaching consent in battery for Torts. Israeli reporter Eitam Lachover donned a special vest made by a body armor company that is designed to protect against the increasing knife attacks of Israelis. Lachover was assured by Yaniv Montakyo, vice president of the manufacturing company, that “You have nothing to worry about, we are very confident in our product.” He then stabbed Lachover and said “I missed.”
Skateboarder Shawn Powers has started a firestorm with a video showing him breaking open a lobster tank and throwing the lobsters against a brick wall. Powers comes across as a senseless thug (who by the way cannot tell the difference between a lobster and a crab) as he smashes the tank on videotape, declaring “I’ll break it, and I’ll take the f–kin’ crabs out.”
Jackson, Mississippi Councilman Kenneth Stokes has unleashed a firestorm of controversy over his call for citizens to throw bricks and bottles at police who are trying to make arrests. Stokes declared “Let’s get rocks; let’s get bricks, and let’s get bottles. And we’ll start throwing them, and then they won’t come in here anymore.” (Notably, the Jackson sheriff agreed with the Stokes in opposing car chases in the city while Stokes himself remains entirely unapologetic for calling for violence against police.)
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
There is going to need to be a rethinking of how schools with their propensity toward zero-tolerance rules adjudicate students they suspect of marijuana use or possession. That issue was played out in over the course of recent months at a high school in Wenatchee, Washington where in October of last year school administrators suspended for five days a student based upon the odor of marijuana on his person. Washington is a state having legal recreational and medicinal marijuana possession and use.
Though marijuana possession or use is for those under twenty-one years of age is a status offense–a misdemeanor and violates school policy–having a odor of marijuana in itself is not indicative of violations of law. The student and his mother denied the student using or possessing marijuana, however the school district continued with the suspension. It turns out, as alleged by the mother and is the most probable explanation, the student had the aroma on his person as a result of her harvesting legal medical marijuana in the household. The mother has a prescription for medical marijuana.
The charges against Bill Cosby are now filed and Cosby is out on bail pending his aggravated assault trial. Below is my column on the trial and what will likely be a core question for the defense: should Bill Cosby testify? It is a common question in celebrity trials and many prefer silence to the stand.
Continue reading “The Cosby Charges: When Silence Speaks Loudly”