By Carlyn Kolker
40 years in the desert
4/17/12
For two prisoners in Louisiana, today marks a tragic day:
the 40th anniversary of their detention in solitary confinement.
Herman Wallace, 70, and Albert Woodfox, 65, have spent 40 years in solitary confinement, reports Mother Jones, much at the
notorious Angola Prison. Known as part of the "Angola 3" (a
third man was released in 2001 after his conviction was
reversed), Wallace and Woodfox were imprisoned after the murder
of a prison guard. The men have spent decades appealing their
conditions (they have both been transferred from Angola but
still remain in solitary in other Louisiana prisons), and though
a federal district judge in 2008 overturned Woodfox's
conviction, an appeals court reinstated it.
"Over the past decade, as news of their situation spread,
the Angola 3 has become an international cause célèbre," Mother
Jones says. "They have thousands of supporters and their case
has been taken up by several major human-rights and
civil-liberties organizations including Amnesty International,
which intends today to deliver a 65,000-signature petition to
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, demanding that Wallace and
Woodfox be released from solitary into the general prison
population." Two people who have fought to keep the two from any
release: Burl Cain, the warden of Angola, and Buddy Caldwell,
the state's attorney general.
Jailhouse prose
4/17/12
Arthur Longworth, prisoner #299180 at a facility in Monroe,
Washington, is a long-time inmate and grade school drop-out. He
was 21 when he was convicted of murdering a 25-year old woman
and has been serving his mandatory life-without-parole sentence
since 1986. Among some left-leaning writers and university
students, Longworth is also something of a literary sensation,
according to the Seattle Times (Hat tip: ABA Journal). He's
written short stories, non-fiction and an award-winning memoir
about life in prison, all of which have focused on his solitary
confinement (he's been there more than a dozen times) and
life-without-parole prison sentences. His writers' voice came to
him gradually. First, Longworth racked up a 4,791-page prison
disciplinary record, then set himself on the road to reform. He
became a Buddhist and married a nurse in 1994, whom he sees for
conjugal visits. Longworth now has petitioned the Washington
State governor for clemency, but the application is seen as a
long shot, according to the Seattle Times. An aunt of
Longworth's victim declined to speak about Longworth's literary
achievements and told the newspaper she'd oppose the clemency
request.
Tweet things
4/17/12
Well folks, yesterday you got your Pulitzers; today you get
your list of appellate Tweeters. Circuit Splits (Twitter handle
@CircuitSplits), a blog specializing in news and analysis on
so-called circuit splits, provides a list of 100 attorneys and
reporters and their Twitter handles covering the U.S. appeals
courts and appellate matters. (The blog makes no claim about the
superiority of these Twitterers.) Some notable entries: Adam
Liptak, the New York Times' Supreme Court correspondent (Twitter
handle: @AdamLiptak); Jerry Goldman, of the Oyez Project at
Chicago-Kent College of Law, which posts audio recordings of
Supreme Court arguments (handle: @oyez); and my own colleague,
Joan Biskupic, who covers national legal affairs for Reuters
(handle: @JoanBiskupic).
Shameless self-promotion: @ReutersLegal provides
up-to-the-minute legal news, including appellate news; my
colleague Terry Baynes (handle: @tlbaynes) reports and tweets
frequently on appellate matters.
Creative lawyering
4/17/12
First write the complaints; then find the plaintiffs. That
is the secret recipe of some industrious plaintiffs' lawyers,
the New York Times reports. A handful of lawyers have filed such
lawsuits alleging that New York businesses - including local
groceries and flower shops -- are violating the federal
Americans with Disabilities Act by denying access to the
disabled. After filing, the lawyers usually get the defendants
to settle, fix the alleged problem and pay attorneys' fees. "The
practice has set off a debate about whether the lawsuits are a
laudable effort, because they force businesses to make physical
improvements to comply with the disabilities act, or simply a
form of ambulance-chasing, with no one actually having been
injured." In New York last year, lawyers filed about 300
lawsuits alleging ADA violations, about double the number five
years ago, the Times writes.
Pas de deux
4/17/12
What's in a headline? To one legal academic, quite a lot.
Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard law professor who has argued
some key constitutional copyright cases. He has been sparring in
online posts with Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor who
helped devise the legal strategy of the states challenging
President Obama's health care law. The duel started on April
13, when Lessig penned a column on the Atlantic's website called
"Why Scalia Could Uphold Obamacare." The piece argued that
"whether wise or not, Obamacare is plainly constitutional under
the Court's existing precedents." Much of the post centered on a
Supreme Court case, authored by conservative justice Antonin
Scalia, that upheld Congress's power to regulate home-grown
marijuana . (Lessig clerked for Scalia).
A day later, Randy Barnett posted a rebuttal to Lessig on
the popular legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy, with the headline
"Larry Lessig: If the Republican Justices Do Not Agree With Me
They Will Be Acting Politically." The first line of the post
read: "Well, that is not exactly what he says." Barnett's post
went on to critique Lessig's post, in particular his reading of
the medical marijuana case. Barnett was particularly familiar
with the case -- which centered on the scope of the Commerce
Clause, the linchpin in the healthcare case -- since he argued
it in the Supreme Court (and lost) on behalf of the plaintiffs.
A day later, Lessig sprang back on the Atlantic's website
(these law professors sure move fast), criticizing Barnett's
rebuttal. But it wasn't just jurisprudential issues that irked
Lessig. He also had a headline bone to pick with Barnett:
"Randy's essay is a nice example about how the ethics of writing
need to evolve in the Twitter age. He wrote his piece for a
blog. In the days when people would come to a blog as a whole,
the harm in titling a piece with a complete falsity is small -
at least when you correct the falsity in the very first sentence
of the piece. But in the age of Twitter, this behavior is not
harmless." Barnett's false characterization of Lessig spread
across Twitter, Lessig wrote.
"I'm sorry!" Barnett essentially said in a post later that
day on Volokh entitled "Blogging in the Age of Twitter: My
Apology to Larry Lessig." While continuing to note his
disagreement with the substance of Lessig's original post,
Barnett conceded the headline could have used some sharpening:
"Larry makes a very good point about Twitter dissemination.
Because I don't use Twitter, and I don't read Tweats, I
did not anticipate this secondary distribution of the title
alone," he wrote, adding that he would have used a different
title if he'd thought through the Tweet-ability.
Larry Lessig: we feel your pain. Not in the hammering you
got for your post on the Commerce Clause (we're not smart enough
to weigh in on issues like that) but in the horror of the Tweets
gone awry. I wrote Lessig to see if he had a comment on
Barnett's apology, and I didn't hear back right away, but if I
do hear from him I'll then ask for Barnett's take - at the risk
of perpetuating the back and forth.
Summary Judgments for April 16
Summary Judgments for April 13
Summary Judgments for April 12
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