After seeking adopting Bush positions on unlawful surveillance last week, President Obama has adopted another controversial Bush policy: opposing basic legal rights for detainees held in U.S. military prison in Afghanistan. Some of the most egregious allegations of torture and abuse have focused on such prisons as the one at Bagram Air base. President Obama is now claiming that access to courts and review in such cases would threaten national security.
Category: Criminal law
Both leading Shiite and Sunni religious leaders have come forward to defend the infamous Afghan law that legalized spousal rape. Mohammad Asif Mohseni, a top Afghan cleric and one of the law’s main drafters, insists that the law is actually a progressive reform and proudly notes that the law was a major reform of women’s rights by allowing wives to decline soon after giving birth, fasting for Ramadan, or preparing for a pilgrimage.
Continue reading “Shiite and Sunni Religious Leaders Support Afghan Law Legalizing Marital Rape”
Wisconsin prosecutors are considering perjury charges against their own witness in the prior murder trial of Douglas Plude, 42, in Wisconsin while planning a new trial that will seek conviction on the basis of a new expert on alleged use of a toilet as a murder weapon.
Continue reading “The Lupe Vélez Defense: Husband Faces Second Trial Over Toilet Murder”
Happy Easter to Everyone on the Turley Blog. The Easter Bunny came as expected this morning, bringing sugarly foodstuffs . . . and even edible grass this year!
While many of us think little of the level of effort needed for a single bunny to bring candy to all of the Goyim boys and girls each year, this picture shows that the holiday takes its tool on Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha.
Religious yeshiva student Aryeh Yerushalmi had a novel way of protesting a decision of an Israeli court to allow the sale of leavened grain products. The Court ruled last year that the Israeli law only prohibits the sale of hametz (bread and leavened grain products) in public on Passover. By ruling that stores are closed spaces and not public in that sense, the court loosened up the law. Yerushalmi decided, therefore, to strip in a supermarket in Tel Aviv since it cannot be viewed as “public indecency.”
Here my column in Sunday’s Washington Post on the increasing prosecutions in the West for insulting religion. The rise of international blasphemy prosecutions (and the proposal of the international criminalization of blasphemy) has sacrificed free speech in the name of free exercise.
Continue reading “International Blasphemy: The Free World Bars Free Speech”
A Fort Worth, Texas police officer broke the nose of a deaf man when he failed to heed warnings at a routine traffic stop. As shown in the video below, Christopher Ferrell, 43, was reaching for his card explaining that he was deaf when Officer J.A. Miller slammed him into his car.
Illinois police have been accused of violating religious sensitivities by forcing Nour Hadid, a 26-year-old woman accused of beating her 2-year-old niece Bhia Hadid to death over four days. She demanded to be photographed wearing her veil covering her face and her husband Alaeddin Hadid has announced an intention to sue the police for the “insult against our religion.”
British police are facing many question over the death of Ian Tomlinson, 47, who died of a fatal heart attack during the April 1st protests. While police insisted that they had no contact with police after witnesses accused them of attacking him without provocation, new pictures and the video below have emerged that seem to contradict their claims and showing police hitting Tomlinson from behind with a baton. The case should focus the English people on the abusive law to make it a crime to film police. Absent these films, this case would have been buried by the Metropolitan Police Service.
Britain’s leading counterterrorism, Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick of the Metropolitan Police Department, has resigned after being photographed holding a classified document in the open that revealed details of an anti-terror operation.
Continue reading “Latest Weapon in The War On Terror: Manila Envelopes”
Under the common law, one of the more controversial rules is the “no duty to rescue rule” that says that, if you were not responsible for placing someone in danger or risk, you have no obligation to help them even when it would cost little to save their life. A New York judge has shown how far this rule extends in clearing two transit employees would did nothing but call their superiors while a woman was raped in their station.
In the same week as a teenager who was injured at a mall by a falling suicide jumper, bodies are also flying in Russia and China in an expanding area of body torts. In Russia, a man repeatedly through himself out of a high window without success while in China a teenager was hit by a flying corpse.
Continue reading “Legal Forecast: Overcast With a Chance of Falling Bodies”
Former Sen. Ted Stevens (R., Alaska) and his allies are continuing their implausible campaign to rehabilitate the disgraced Senator and portray the Justice Department’s gross negligence as a vindication of the ethically challenged Stevens. Alaskan legislators in the House passed a resolution demanding not only an apology from the federal government but a lawsuit to recoup his fees and costs in defending himself.
Continue reading “Alaska Legislators Demand Apology to Stevens And Federal Lawsuit”
There is an interesting potential torts case in New York. A woman in her fifties apparently decided to commit suicide at a Mall by jumping from an upper level. She landed on 17-year-old Derrick MuInoz who was knocked unconscious and suffered a large gash on his head.
Continue reading “Teenager Hurt After Suicide Jumper Lands On Top of Him at New York Mall”