Defense funding

2/25/13

By Dan Brillman

A federal court will rule this week on the extent to which public officials can use campaign money for legal defenses, reports McClatchy Newspapers.

The case involves former Idaho senator Larry Craig, who was arrested in 2007 after allegedly soliciting sex from an undercover cop in a Minneapolis airport bathroom. According to the suit, Craig's campaign allotted $480,000 for his defense, including more than $200,000 used to try and withdraw an initial guilty plea.

The Craig campaign argued that the senator was traveling on official business at the time of the alleged misconduct, but the Federal Election Commission claims that the actions he was arrested for had nothing to do with his office and were thus a violation of election law. 

Thcase could have implications for future rulings, McClatchy reports, but it is not without some precedent. Former congressman Gary Condit, who was investigated by the Washington police in the disappearance of his former intern, Chandra Levy, spent over $100,000 of campaign money for attorneys during the incident. In 2007 an FEC panel looked into Arizona Representative Jim Kolbe, who was criticized for not making public accusations that Congressman Mark Foley had inappropriate communications with teenage interns. The FEC concluded that Kolbe's use of campaign money for lawyers during investigations of the Foley scandal was in line with the law. 

Musical shares 

2/26/13

By Caitlin Tremblay 

Illegal music downloads decreased across the board in 2012, with significant drops in peer-to-peer sharing, copying tracks from CDs (known as ripping) and sharing from hard drives, according to a new study from The NPD Group, a market research company (hat tip: cnet). 

Downloading from peer-to-peer sharing services dropped 26 percent, while the number of people using those services dropped 17 percent, according to the study. At the peak of file sharing, in 2005,20 percent of Internet users over the age of 13 used a peer-to-peer service, but now only 11 percent or roughly 21 million people do. CD ripping fell 44 percent and hard drive swapping decreased 25 percent. 

The study said the main reason less people are sharing music and downloading illegally is because of the abundance of new, free streaming sites, like Pandora and Spotify, that put whole artist catalogues at users’ fingertips … legally. 

Censored testimony  

2/26/13

By Suhrith Parthasarathy  

A group of civil liberty and media organizations have appealed an order by a Guantanamo military judge to censor testimony about 9/11 defendants allegedly tortured in U.S. custody, The Miami Herald reports. Fourteen media organizations, including The Miami Herald, and the American Civil Liberties Union filed their appeal to the Pentagon’s Court of Military Commissions Review, arguing for more transparency at the war court. 

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and his four accused co-conspirators were held captive in 2002 and 2003 before being sent to Guantanamo. All of the defendants have said they were tortured while in custody, but the U.S. governmentfiled a request seeking that any testimony pertaining to the defendants’ interrogation be classified, as it might expose the CIA’s detention program. Last December, Army Colonel James Pohl, the chief judge overseeing the court, signed a protective order maintaining secrecy over the experiences of the defendants in the CIA’s clandestine prisons, as Reuters reported. 

Now, in an appellate brief filed Feb. 14, the news organizations allege that the order violates First Amendment rights by declaring anything that the accused have said about the CIA’s treatment as automatically “classified.” The ACLU, in a separate appeals brief filed Feb. 21, has argued that “the public has a constitutional right to hear defendants’ testimony” and that the protective order could hardly be more “extraordinary” or “draconian.” The appeals panel has given prosecutors until March 6 to respond to the briefs. 

Staying put  

2/26/13

By Anna Louie Sussman 

A ruling from the New Mexico Supreme Court that was designed to protect the attorney-client relationship could end up curbing lawyers' ability to hop firms, the Albuquerque Journal reports.

The case revolves around a lawyer, Lisa Ford, who was working for landowner Roy Mercer. In 2010, Ford left Mercer and joined the law firm of Riley, Shane & Keller, which represented BNSF Railroad, which along with its contractor was in a dispute with Mercer.

Mercer sought to disqualify Riley Shane as the firm for BNSF on grounds that Ford had a conflict of interest. While a state district court agreed, it ruled that the contractor would be "severely harmed" by having to hire a different firm. The New Mexico Supreme Court has reversed and ordered BNSF and its contractor to fire Riley Shane.

In a unanimous opinion Justice Richard Bosson wrote, "not only can an individual lawyer be prevented from participating in a case if he or she was once an attorney for the opposing side in that case, but the lawyer's firm can be ordered to withdraw from the case as well."

Bosson wrote that "our ruling may result in limiting the lateral movement of attorneys between law firms" because firms may be reluctant to lose clients as a result of hiring a lawyer, according to the Journal. But the "relationship of an attorney and client" must be "inviolate," he wrote.

Summary Judgments for February 25 

Summary Judgments for February 22 

Summary Judgments for February 21 

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