by Corinne Murdock | Apr 5, 2022 | News
By Corinne Murdock |
On Monday, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) announced that he would vote to approve Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the vacant Supreme Court (SCOTUS) seat. Kelly said that he supported all of Jackson’s record on case rulings, which likely included the slew of controversial criminal judgments that gave lenient sentencing to violent criminals.
“After speaking with Judge Jackson and reviewing her record and approach to deciding cases, I believe her to be very well qualified and having demonstrated a commitment to fairly interpret and uphold the Constitution on our nation’s highest court,” said Kelly.
On Sunday, a day before Kelly’s announcement, the New York Post reported that one of the convicted child rapists who’d received lowered sentencing twice from Jackson had been arrested for assault. Sex offender Leo Weekes received one year in prison with credit for time served for failing to register as a sex offender, a classification he earned for raping his 13-year-old niece four years earlier. Jackson’s sentence allowed Weekes to be released five months later. The federal guideline minimum for Weekes’ crime would have been two years in prison. A year later, Weekes was arrested for the attempted sexual assault of his sister-in-law, though she dropped the charges; prosecutors claimed that Weekes paid her off. Several years later, Weekes was back in court for failing to register as a sex offender and violating multiple stipulations of his probation, again coming before Jackson. Again, Jackson gave Weekes a punishment lower than what the guidelines suggested: a 24-month sentence overlapping with his punishment for the previous assault conviction.
As the New York Post report noted, the Weekes case was not included among the seven cases given to the Senate Judiciary Committee for consideration. The requested cases were to clarify Jackson’s habit of sentencing below federal guidelines and the requests of prosecutors.
A day prior, the New York Post also broke the story that Jackson gave lenient sentencing to those convicted of multiple counts of child torture during hearings on eight child porn cases. For those cases, Jackson argued against applying recommended sentencing because she disagreed with the relevance, severity, and logic of child pornography law. Like with Weekes, Jackson reduced one defendant’s original sentence of 60 months, the mandatory minimum that fell under the average sentence of 81 months for similar cases, by giving him credit for time served, thereby reducing his sentence to 38 months.
To another defendant last year charged with child porn distribution, Jackson expressed sympathy and called family members’ letters portraying the defendant in a positive light, “mitigating factors.” Jackson said she wasn’t persuaded by the prosecution’s display of the more “egregious or extreme” child porn distributed by the defendant.
Jackson also advocated for the release of all those imprisoned in Washington, D.C., at the start of the pandemic. She managed to grant several releases to those charged with or convicted of major crimes, such as the member of a fentanyl trafficking ring and a serial bank robber.
Despite this track record, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats portrayed Jackson as tough on crime.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
by Corinne Murdock | Mar 19, 2022 | News
By Corinne Murdock |
The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) announced earlier this month that it would consider the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), federal law that determines when states can rescue abused or neglected Indian children, as well as foster rules. This law applies to tribal children and those eligible to live on a tribe but living off of a reservation. Essentially, ICWA does all it can to keep Native American children within their own families or with other Native Americans, and requires state officials to apply a higher degree of scrutiny over abuse to determine whether abuse exists. While other children’s cases need only present “clear and convincing evidence” of abuse, Native American children’s cases would need to present “without a reasonable doubt.” ICWA was enacted to prevent the government from taking Native American children from their families.
Phoenix’s nationally-acclaimed public policy research and litigation organization, the Goldwater Institute, requested SCOTUS to review ICWA; they’ve challenged the federal law for years. In light of the SCOTUS announcement, Goldwater Institute Vice President of Litigation Timothy Sandefur discussed ICWA on the “Andy Caldwell Show.”
Sandefur described the law as unconstitutional and depriving children of fair treatment. He noted that Native American children are at greater risk for molestation, abuse, gang membership, and suicide, arguing that already-vulnerable children were only hurt more by ICWA.
“The rules that [ICWA] sets for child protection are actually less protective for a child than the laws that apply for every other racial group,” said Sandefur.
The case SCOTUS will consider, Brackeen v. Haaland, comes from a culmination of different cases brought by several parents desiring to adopt Native American children but were denied due to not being Native American themselves.
Sandefur described one case that the Goldwater Institute worked on, in which a mother wanted to terminate the rights of her abusive husband so that her new husband could legally adopt her son. If the child had been any other race, the rights could’ve been terminated. However, ICWA applied. Under ICWA, it was “prohibitively difficult” to terminate an abusive parent’s right, even in the case of a mother requesting that action.
In a press release, Sandefur also noted that ICWA also violates the separation of the federal and state governments by requiring states to enforce federal law and interpret their own laws differently.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
by Andrew Gould | Feb 15, 2022 | Opinion
By Andrew Gould |
The recent US Supreme Court decisions around mask mandates have understandably generated a great deal of media coverage and comment. Many conservatives have praised the Supreme Court’s decision to affirm the stay on the nationwide OSHA vaccine mandate. But as a lifelong prosecutor and judge, I can assure you the true and most significant factor has been overlooked. Specifically, based on the Court’s decision to vacate the stay regarding the vaccine mandate for healthcare workers (the “CMS Mandate”), the President, with no constitutional or legal authority, has been allowed to order ten million healthcare workers to receive a vaccine or risk losing their jobs and their livelihood. And while state legislatures, exercising their police powers, have imposed vaccine requirements on healthcare workers in the past, no President has imposed a nationwide mandate involving such a permanent, personal healthcare decision. Simply put, as Judge Sutton recently stated in In re MCP No. 165, unlike masks or gloves, “vaccines cannot be removed at the end of the shift.”
The underlying legal justification for overturning mask mandates on businesses is the same legal basis that should have driven a decision to roll back a mask mandate for our health care workers. In both the OSHA and the CMS cases, the issue was not whether vaccines were a wise or effective measure against the spread of COVID-19. Rather, the issue was simply whether the President has the constitutional authority, through executive branch administrative agencies, to impose nationwide vaccine mandates. In the OSHA case, the Court held, by a vote of 6-3, that because Congress never clearly delegated such authority to the President, he lacked the authority to impose such a mandate. However, in the CMS case, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh switched their votes on the grounds that Congress had delegated such authority to the President based on a hodge-podge of Social Security statutes. But these statutes provide no such authority. Indeed, the purported delegation for the CMS mandate was less clear and more strained than the statutes offered to justify the OSHA mandate. So, what explains the puzzling switch of two purportedly conservative Justices on essentially the same issue?
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Roberts and Kavanaugh, at least at some level, sought to appease the public’s concern over COVID. Thus, in effort to “soften” the public’s reaction to the OSHA decision, they justified the switch by relying on the purportedly stronger policy arguments for mandating vaccines for healthcare workers to protect hospital patients from COVID. But while politics and the will of the public has rightfully driven decision-making in our Executive and Legislative branches of government, our Judiciary was set up by our Founding Fathers to make judgements based on the law and precedent. The Supreme Court does not have the authority to determine whether vaccine mandates are good policy, nor may the Court violate the Constitution in the interests of promoting political harmony or the popularity of the Court. As Justice Scalia once stated, “If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.”
With these recent decisions around mask mandates, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh have dangerously broken through that critical differentiation, opening the Court up to the influence of the day’s ever-changing political environment. Judges must have the courage and resolve to enforce the Constitution, even when the results may be unpopular. It may appease some that the OSHA stay was upheld, but it was denied for healthcare workers. But either way, the result is the same: a precedent has been set by the Court allowing the President to use any crisis labelled a “medical emergency” to expand his power. The consequences of this decision will inflict grave damage to the rule of law. As Justice Jackson stated in his dissent in Korematsu v. United States, when the Court permits another branch to set aside constitutional protections to address emergencies, such decisions lie “about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”
Of course, looming in the background is the Supreme Court’s pending abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. There are sound legal grounds set forth in Dobbs for modifying, if not overruling Roe v. Wade, and allowing the legislative branch to decide the abortion issue. But mark my words, the Supreme Court, led by Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh, will land on a more muddled, middle of the road, politically crafted decision that attempts to please everyone. They have shown their hand in the CMS case.
Andrew W. Gould was appointed as a Justice to the Arizona Supreme Court in 2017 after serving 5 years on Division One of the Arizona Court of Appeals. He retired from the Supreme Court in March 2021. Prior to his appointment to the Court of Appeals, Justice Gould spent 11 years as a Judge of the Superior Court in Yuma County, where he served as both Associate Presiding Judge and Presiding Judge.
Andrew received his J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law in 1990. He began his legal career in Phoenix, Arizona, practicing in the field of civil litigation. In 1994, he became a Deputy County Attorney, prosecuting major criminal cases for Yuma and Maricopa Counties. He served as Chief Civil Deputy for the Yuma County Attorney’s Office from 1999-2001. Justice Gould has previously served on the Arizona Supreme Court Commission on Technology, as the President of the Arizona Judges’ Association, and has taught at the Judicial Conference and New Judge Orientations.
by Corinne Murdock | Dec 1, 2021 | News
By Corinne Murdock |
State Senator Nancy Barto (R-Phoenix) shared that she was the sole state legislator from Arizona in attendance at the rally outside the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) on Wednesday. Inside, the justices held a hearing for a watershed case in abortion law: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Their ruling is anticipated in the spring.
Barto told AZ Free News that the hearing was historic, as was the gathering outside the SCOTUS building advocating for an end to abortion. She said the rally was peaceful, and recounted how diverse their rally was: individuals reportedly represented from all across the political spectrum, the religious and non-religious, and a generational attendance from tikes to older adults such as herself.
“America has lived this lie long enough. Our laws need to be modernized to recognize [the science]: viability is different now, women are not burdened by pregnancy anymore. The greater standard is, of course, that our constitution needs to fit our laws and protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” observed Barto. “We will wait and see and keep praying for these justices to really follow the changing hearts in America, hearts that really have turned. People no longer support abortion through nine months; the more that they learn about what abortion does to women and the unborn in terms of pain, and how the development of an unborn child is trackable from the earliest moments in utero.”
The case brought by Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a Mississippi abortion clinic challenging the constitutionality of Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks. On behalf of the defense, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch countered that SCOTUS should leave abortion law to individual states. A SCOTUS ruling in favor of Mississippi would overturn the precedent set by the 1973 case that legalized abortion nationally, Roe v. Wade, which was upheld in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The crux of the plaintiff’s arguments during the hearing concerned the need for SCOTUS to stand by precedent set in previous rulings, discussed as the question of “stare decisis.” They also insisted that the interests of the woman outweighed those of the state, especially prior to the viability of the unborn child.
The plaintiffs also admitted that they were arguing a constitutional right to abortion under the constitutional guarantee of liberty when pressed by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas as to what right they were arguing needed protecting. Previous SCOTUS rulings on abortion considered concepts entailing rights under the Constitution and various amendments, such as personhood, undue burdens, and privacy.
Founding Father James Wilson warned of licentiousness, a concept conflated with liberty but truly its antithesis. “Licentious,” or “license,” comes from the Latin term “licentia”: an unbridled, wanton, chaotic freedom. The distinction between liberty and license wasn’t made by anyone in the hearing. Wilson was one of the original SCOTUS justices, serving from the onset of its establishment by the Judiciary Act of 1789 until his death in 1798.
“Liberty and happiness have a powerful enemy on each hand; on the one hand tyranny, on the other licentiousness. To guard against the latter, it is necessary to give the proper powers to government; and to guard against the former, it is necessary that those powers should be properly distributed,” asserted Wilson.
After the hearing, Congressman David Schweikert (R-AZ-06) shared one of his floor statements from earlier this year describing how his life was saved when his birth mother chose life over abortion and gave him up for adoption.
“I was born in an unwed mother’s home – so was my brother, so was my sister. You’ve all met my little girl that came to us as a gift out of nowhere. But I’m 38 years old [at the time] and through a series of accidents, I get the phone number for my birth mother – and I call her. And the first words were just through the tears and this high-pitch almost – she was struggling, you could hear her almost hyperventilating – is: ‘I prayed for you every morning. Are you okay? Are you healthy, are you happy?’ And I’m crying on my side, saying, ‘I have a great life. Thank you for letting me live.’ […] My little girl’s third generation adopted, now. […] And we will get together with our birth moms and our moms. The amazing thing is my mom became best of friends with my birth mom. This is the American family of today – let’s love it and respect it.”
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
by Corinne Murdock | Oct 30, 2021 | News
By Corinne Murdock |
The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) accepted Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s petition to defend previous President Donald Trump’s updates to a rule limiting green cards and citizenship to those who haven’t and won’t become dependent on welfare programs. Brnovich announced this update in a press release Friday.
“When other federal officials won’t defend the law, I will,” asserted Brnovich. “The Public Charge Rule is a commonsense policy based on a real inconvenient truth. Overrunning our welfare programs right now would be like pulling back the last safety net for Americans who need it most.”
Congress first enacted the “Public Charge Rule” in 1882: a concept that officials could deny immigrants entrance, visas, and even citizenship if officials deemed they were likely to become a “public charge.” The definition of “public charge” varied over the years. In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) defined “public charge” as illegal immigrants who received one year’s worth of welfare benefits in the aggregate within a three-year period. Under that definition, two benefits received in one month counted as two months.
According to the latest available data analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies, about 55 percent of noncitizens relied on welfare in 2018. Noncitizens in their study included both green card holders and illegal immigrants. While the law does prohibit illegal immigrants from receiving welfare benefits, noncitizens may receive benefits on behalf of any children they have born in the U.S.
In April, SCOTUS rejected a previous petition from 14 states attempting to revive Trump-era litigation that the Biden Administration halted. Texas led the charge on that petition. The states claimed that dropping the Trump rule would force them to provide millions of dollars of government benefits to illegal immigrants.
SCOTUS determined that states would have to work through lower courts before they’d take up the case, if at all.
Their recent acceptance means that Arizona and 12 other states – Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia – may be eligible to defend the rule even though the Biden Administration has decided against doing so.
SCOTUS will not be deciding on the legality of the rule, and oral arguments haven’t been scheduled.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
