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Cyprus court finds 19 year-old British woman guilty
Legal Interview |
2020/01/01 09:31
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Cyprus' attorney general said Tuesday he couldn't suspend the trial of a 19 year-old British woman found guilty of lying about being gang raped by as many as dozen Israelis because she had leveled “grave accusations” against police investigators that had to be adjudicated in court.
Costas Clerides said the woman's allegation that police coerced her into retracting her rape claim “could not have been left to linger” so he could not move to suspend the trial.
Clerides also said the woman's insistence that she didn't get a fair trial is “essentially a legal-constitutional matter" that a courtof law must rule on.
“Any intervention on the part of the attorney general, either for reasons of public interest or any other reasons, would have constituted nothing more than an obstacle to ascertaining the true facts of the case, as well as interference in the judiciary's work," Clerides said in a statement.
The woman, who hasn't been named was found guilty on Monday on a charge of public mischief and is due to be sentenced Jan. 7. The charge carries a maximum of a year in prison and a fine of 1,700 euros ($1, 907).
She insists that she was raped in a hotel room at a coastal resort town on July 17 and that she was forced to sign the retraction 10 days later while under police questioning. Her lawyers said they would appeal the decision, citing the judge's refusal to consider evidence that she had been raped. |
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Supreme Court considering whether Trump must open tax returns
Legal Interview |
2019/11/05 18:09
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California’s Supreme Court is considering Wednesday whether President Donald Trump must disclose his tax returns if he wants to be a candidate in the state’s primary election next spring.
The high court is hearing arguments even though a federal judge already temporarily blocked the state law requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns in order to be included in the state’s primary.
The justices’ consideration comes the same week that a federal appeals court in New York ruled that Trump’s tax returns can be turned over to state criminal investigators there, although that ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The California Republican Party and chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson filed the state lawsuit challenging Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signing in July of the law aimed at the Republican president.
It’s a clear violation of the California Constitution, opponents argued, citing a 1972 voter-approved amendment they said guarantees that all recognized candidates must be on the ballot.
Previously, “California politicians rigged the primary election, putting up ‘favorite son’ nominees for partisan political advantage,” they wrote, suggesting that Democratic lawmakers are doing the same thing now by different means.
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Bulgarian court to eye revoking parole for Australian man
Legal Interview |
2019/09/23 22:49
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Bulgaria's highest court says it will look into a petition by the chief prosecutor to revoke the parole by a lower court to an Australian man convicted of fatally stabbing a Bulgarian student during a 2007 brawl.
The Supreme Court of Cassation announced Thursday it will hold a hearing Oct. 23 to review a lower court's ruling to grant parole to Jock Palfreeman. The Australian man had served 11 years of his 20-year prison sentence when a three-judge Court of Appeals panel unexpectedly ordered him freed last Thursday.
The 32-year-old left prison but was transferred to an immigration detention facility to await a new passport from the nearest Australian Embassy, in Athens.
The release of the Australian has sparked angry reactions among Bulgarians, who accused the judiciary of double standards and a leniency toward foreigners.
Palfreeman's lawyer, Kalin Angelov, said he had advised Australian authorities to speed up the passport and put Palfreeman on a plane home.
The new development, however, means that Palfreeman has to remain in custody pending the supreme court's ruling and "for his personal security," according to Deputy Interior Minister Stefan Balabanov.
Dozens of relatives and friends of the slain student rallied Thursday in downtown Sofia to protest Palfreeman's parole. |
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High court rejects appeal of killer of 4 people in Omaha
Legal Interview |
2019/07/20 12:15
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The Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday upheld the convictions and death sentence of a man who killed four people in Omaha, seemingly at random, shortly after his release from prison in 2013.
Nikko Jenkins pleaded no contest in 2014 to four counts of first-degree murder and multiple weapons counts for three separate, deadly attacks around Omaha. He was sentenced to death in 2017 after years of delays over concerns regarding his mental health. The high court’s opinion addressed combined direct appeals on Jenkins’ behalf.
Among the arguments Jenkins’ attorneys made is that the trial court abused its discretion in accepting his no-contest pleas in a death penalty case. In a no-contest plea, a defendant does not admit guilt, but concedes there is enough evidence for a conviction. The plea has the same effect as a guilty plea.
The Douglas County Public Defender office also argued that the court was wrong to allow Jenkins to represent himself and that, because it believes Jenkins is mentally ill, sentencing him to death violated the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. |
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Court to Trump: Blocking Twitter critics is unconstitutional
Legal Interview |
2019/07/11 11:21
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President Donald Trump lost a major Twitter fight Tuesday when a federal appeals court said that his daily musings and pronouncements were overwhelmingly official in nature and that he violated the First Amendment whenever he blocked a critic to silence a viewpoint.
The effect of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision is likely to reverberate throughout politics after the Manhattan court warned that any elected official using a social media account “for all manner of official purposes” and then excluding critics violates free speech.
“The government is not permitted to ‘amplify’ favored speech by banning or burdening viewpoints with which it disagrees,” the appeals court said.
Because it involved Trump, the ruling is getting more attention than a January decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found a Virginia politician violated the First Amendment rights of one of her constituents by blocking him from a Facebook page.
Still, the appeals court in New York acknowledged, not every social media account operated by a public official is a government account, and First Amendment violations must be considered on a case-by-case basis.
“The irony in all of this is that we write at a time in the history of this nation when the conduct of our government and its officials is subject to wide-open, robust debate,” Circuit Judge Barrington D. Parker wrote on behalf of a three-judge panel.
The debate generates a “level of passion and intensity the likes of which have rarely been seen,” the court’s decision read.
“This debate, as uncomfortable and as unpleasant as it frequently may be, is nonetheless a good thing,” the 2nd Circuit added. “In resolving this appeal, we remind the litigants and the public that if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the best response to disfavored speech on matters of public concern is more speech, not less.”
The Department of Justice is disappointed by the ruling and is exploring possible next steps, agency spokesperson Kelly Laco said. |
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