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  • June 18, 2013

    SF City Attorney on Securing Marriage Equality: ‘It’s About Being on the Right Side of History’

    by Jeremy Leaming

    As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to issue opinions in two cases involving questions of marriage equality, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera talked with me about his office’s role in challenging discriminatory laws in California that resulted in the federal constitutional challenge to the state’s Proposition 8.

    In Hollingsworth v. Perry, the high court is considering constitutional challenges to Proposition 8, which bars California from recognizing same-sex marriages. The justices could avoid the constitutional questions if it were to dismiss the case on procedural grounds.

    Herrera (pictured) during the 2013 ACS National Convention discussed why the San Francisco Attorney’s Office so aggressively challenged the state’s laws discriminating against lesbians and gay men and why he does not favor an incremental approach to securing marriage equality.

    In the interview Herrera explains how his office helped spark the legal battle that eventually put Proposition 8 before the high court.

    “It has been an honor and privilege for our office to have been involved in what is the civil rights issue of our time,” Herrera said. “And we like to think that our involvement at least played some role in really moving the debate and contributing to the tremendous progress that we have seen, with incredible rapidity over the course of the last several years on the issue of marriage equality.”

    When asked whether the Supreme Court should avoid an opinion that would make all state bans on same-sex marriage constitutionally suspect, Herrera strongly supported an approach that would more quickly lead to marriage equality from coast to coast.

    “I do not think we should be in the position of abiding discrimination,” he said. “And I think we’ve been quite clear that we think everybody is entitled to equal protection under the law irrespective of sexual orientation.”  

    Herrera continued, “It’s about being on the right side of history, it’s about making sure that everybody is entitled to equal protection under the law. And I think that while there’s a political process going on it was a direct result of strong legal arguments and views that were made known. So I’m not one who, at least at this point, thinks that an incremental approach is something we need to follow. I think it’s time we deal with this issue once and for all.”

    Watch entire interview below or visit this link.

    Tags:
    Supreme Court, LGBT issues, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Equality and Liberty, 2013 ACS National Convention, Dennis Herrera, Hollingsworth v. Perry, marriage equality, San Francisco City Attorney
  • June 18, 2013

    Following Contentious DIG in Boyer, Supreme Court Again Asked to Consider Case Involving Indigent Defense Failures in Louisiana

    Guest Post

    by G. Ben Cohen. Mr. Cohen is OF COUNSEL at The Capital Appeals Project. Cohen was VISITING LITIGATION COUNSEL at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute in 2011.

    On April 29, 2013, after briefing and oral argument on whether the State’s failure to fund counsel for a defendant should be weighed against the state for speedy trial purposes, five Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court turned a blind eye in Boyer v. Louisiana to the funding crisis in Louisiana’s public defender system and declined to address the seven year wait between Jonathan Boyer’s arrest and trial. On Boyer’s heels comes another case underscoring the unconscionable harms of the Bayou State’s decimated criminal justice system – which has depended on traffic tickets to fund the defense function.

    On June 20, 2013 the Supreme Court will decide whether to grant certiorari in Michael Garcia v. Louisiana.  The public defender office could not afford to adequately provide separate capital representation to Mr. Garcia and his two co-defendants.  By law, however, the Public Defender could not represent all three defendants himself.  Even the prosecutor informed the trial court at Mr. Garcia’s very first hearing that the multiple representation might pose a conflict of interest, but the judge left the Public Defender to work it out. 

    The Public Defender assigned all the capitally-certified attorneys from his office, including himself, to represent Mr. Garcia, and assigned lawyers who were not certified to represent defendants facing the death penalty to represent the two co-defendants. This refusal to hire outside counsel saved the public defender office from going bankrupt.  It also prevented the state from seeking death against the two other defendants.  But it meant that Mr. Garcia’s lawyer chose him as the only defendant against whom the State could seek the death penalty.

    More
    Tags:
    Access to Justice, Indigent defense, Legal services, Supreme Court, Criminal Justice, Boyer v. Louisana, G. Ben Cohen, Guest Post, Michael Garcia v. Louisiana, Right to Counsel, Sixth Amendent
  • June 18, 2013

    Sen. Leahy Fires Back at Proponents of Cutting D.C. Circuit Judgeships

    by Jeremy Leaming

    As some Senate Republicans continue to argue for removal of judgeships from the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Sen. Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is pushing forward for consideration of President Obama’s recent nominations to fill three vacancies on the Court.

    Sen. Leahy announced yesterday that he is planning for a July 10 hearing before the Committee to consider one of the president’s nominees Patricia Ann Millett, a longtime appellate attorney who has earned the ABA’s highest rating. In announcing the hearing, Leahy took on Republicans’ claims that the D.C. Circuit has a light caseload and that the three current vacancies do not need to be filled. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has introduced a bill to strip judgeships from the D.C. Circuit and move them to other federal appeals court circuits. As the Constitutional Accountability Center has noted, Grassley’s measure has nothing to do with careful restructuring of the federal appeals court bench, and everything to do with obstructionism.

    Leahy’s June 17 statement noted that some of the same Republicans now calling for judgeships to be stripped from the D.C. Circuit argued during George W. Bush’s administration the Circuit “should have 11 judgeships” and they voted to confirm his nominees for the “ninth, tenth, and eleventh seats ….” Leahy then ticked off a number of judicial nominations to other federal appeals courts that Republicans slow-walked, showing no concern about caseloads for those courts.

    “The American people are not fooled,” Leahy said. “Senate Republicans are playing by different rules. In the past 30 years, Republican presidents have appointed 15 of the last 19 judges named to the D.C. Circuit. Now that these three vacancies exist during a Democratic presidency, Senate Republicans are trying to use legislation to lock in their partisan advantage.”

    That advantage has served the interests of the Republican Party. As the D.C. Circuit is currently situated, it has a decisively right-wing tilt and has issued opinions harmful to workers’ rights, the environment and one widely panned opinion on the president’s power to use recess appointments to fill judicial and executive branch vacancies. That opinion, in Noel Canning v. NLRB, has been appealed by the administration.

    More
    Tags:
    Executive power, Other courts, Judicial Nominations, Patricia Ann Millett, President Obama, Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Patrick Leahy, Senate obstructionism, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
  • June 17, 2013

    New Report Bolsters Perception that 'Justice is for Sale'

    Guest Post
    by Liz Seaton, Acting Executive Director, Justice at Stake. Justice at Stake is a nonpartisan, nonprofit campaign working to keep America’s courts fair and impartial.

    With its new “Justice at Risk” report, the American Constitution Society documents a correlation between big judicial election spending by U.S. businesses and favorable rulings from elected state courts. The report raises questions that are familiar, and they are troubling.
     
    The American public insists that courts be impartial, with no special favors for campaign spenders, so that everyone gets a fair day in court. But confidence in the impartiality of our courts has eroded as business and special interest spending on judicial elections soared in the last decade.
     
    “Justice at Risk” offers a statistical analysis that updates what we know about business interest donations to state supreme court candidates and judicial decisions that followed, specifically in the years since Citizens United:
     

    - “The more campaign contributions from business interests justices receive, the more likely they are to vote for business litigants appearing before them in court.”

    - If a justice’s campaign gets half of its contributions from business groups, then the justice would be expected to favor business interests by voting their way almost two-thirds of the time.

    - The empirical relationship identified in the study between campaign contributions and justices’ voting exists “only in partisan and nonpartisan systems; there is no statistically significant relationship between money and voting in retention election systems,” when a justice stands in a yes-or-no contest with no opponent.

    - For justices affiliated with the Democratic Party, the relationship between business contributions and voting is stronger than for justices affiliated with the GOP.

     
    These results add to the debate about the critical need for reforms to keep the influence of campaign cash out of the courtroom.
     
    More
    Tags:
    Campaign finance, Judicial campaigns and elections, Judicial independence, Judicial Nominations, Campaign Finance, Guest Post, Justice at Risk, Justice at Stake, Liz Seaton, Sandra Day O'Connor, The New Politics of Judicial Elections 2000-2009
  • June 17, 2013

    Supreme Court Tosses Arizona’s Strict Voter ID Law … For Now

    Editor's note: This post has been updated to include comment from UC Davis School of Law Professor Gabriel "Jack" Chin.

    by Jeremy Leaming

    The U.S. Supreme Court voting 7-2 dealt a setback to Arizona’s rigid voter ID law, saying the state’s additional citizenship requirements were preempted by federal elections laws.

    The setback could be seen as a victory of sorts for opponents of state efforts aimed at crafting and implementing more hurdles to voting, ones that disproportionately impact minorities, poor people, the elderly and students. Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion, however, left the door open for Arizona and other states to try to alter the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, also known as motor-voter) to impose stricter requirements to vote. 

    In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, the majority led by Scalia found that Arizona’s Proposition 200 provision requiring elections officials to “reject any application for registration that is not accompanied by satisfactory evidence of United States citizenship” must “give way” to the federal form created by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The NVRA requires states to “accept and use” that federal form. As Scalia noted, the federal form “does not require documentary evidence of citizenship; rather it requires only that an applicant aver, under penalty of perjury, that he is a citizen.” Scalia was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

    The NVRA and the EAC were created pursuant to the Constitution’s Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4), which states, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations ….”

    Scalia wrote that the “textual question” in the case centered on whether the NVRA’s requirement that states “accept and use” the federal form preempts Arizona’s state-law requirement that officials reject “the application of a prospective voter who submits a completed Federal Form unaccompanied by documentary evidence of citizenship.”

    Arizona officials argued that its reading of the federal law allowed it to reject a federal form if it failed to include the additional information set out in the state law.

    Scalia said it “is improbable” that the federal law “envisions a completed copy of the form it takes such pains to create as being anything less than ‘valid.’”

    He continued, “States retain the flexibility to design and use their own registration forms, but the Federal Form [created by the EAC]  provides a backstop: No matter what procedural hurdles a State’s own form imposes, the Federal Form guarantees that a simple means of registering to vote in federal elections will be available.”

    More
    Tags:
    Election law, Supreme Court, Voting rights, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Democracy and Voting, Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, Justice Antonin Scalia, voter ID laws, voting
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