Tag Archives: Supreme Court

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NewsHour: New Supreme Court Session – October 7, 1996

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CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: It’s the first Monday in October, and that means the beginning of a new term for the U.S. Supreme Court. On the docket are a wide spectrum of cases ranging from physician-assisted suicide to sexual harassment. We get a preview now of the term ahead from NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor, correspondent for the American Lawyer and Legal Times. Stuart, it’s nice to see you again after a summer’s respite. How would you characterize the court docket for the coming term? STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: It’s a very full docket with a great range of very important cases, but I think the ones that tower above the others, the ones that will maybe ten years from now really look like seminal cases are the two physician-assisted suicide cases from the states of Washington and New York in which lower courts struck down laws that bar doctors from helping patients hasten death when the patients are suffering.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Mm-hmm. And so what are they considering here?

MR. TAYLOR: Uh, the issue for the Supreme Court is whether there’s a constitutional right for a patient who is terminally ill, who is competent, and who wants to hasten death because the patient’s in pain or otherwise suffering, for that patient to ask his doctor to give him or her a lethal injection, for example, and for the doctor to go ahead and do it, because the problem, as perceived by those who support this, is that it’s illegal almost everywhere for doctors to do that, and has been since time immemorial. The Hippocratic Oath bars it.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And the constitutional principle that’s being–that is at issue here–

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NewsHour: Supreme Court Rulings – June 28, 1996

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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It was a busy day at the court. We get more on today’s rulings from NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor, correspondent with the "American Lawyer" and "Legal Times." Welcome, Stuart.

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Nice to be here.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We have four cases to deal with in three broad areas. Let’s start with cable TV and indecency. What did the court rule?

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NewsHour: Supreme Court Decision on Women at VMI – June 26, 1996

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MARGARET WARNER: Tonight we examine two of the day’s high court rulings. The first involves the all-male Virginia Military Institute. On a seven to one decision, the court ruled that the state of Virginia may no longer exclude women from admission to VMI. We get more on that from NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor, correspondent for the "American Lawyer" and "Legal Times." Welcome, Stuart. What was the basic–what was the basis for the court’s ruling in this case?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: The court ruled that it violates the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment for VMI–for the state of Virginia, I should say, to deny to women what it called the unique and extraordinary benefits that men get from attending Virginia Military Institute, a 150-year-old institution with a unique prestigious role in Virginia life.

MS. WARNER: And what was the majority’s reasoning in coming to this, the majority opinion written by, I gather, Justice Ginsberg?

MR. TAYLOR: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who was a crusader for equal rights for women before she came on the court, basically reasoned that women should have all the opportunities men do in Virginia and elsewhere unless there’s what she called an exceedingly persuasive justification why they should not. She reviewed all the justifications Virginia had advanced for keeping VMI all male and rejected them. In particular, she said there are some women who could benefit from a VMI type education, which is sort of a boot camp style approach to education. Even if there aren’t many, there are some, and they should have that opportunity. She also rejected the state’s argument that it would destroy the boot camp style approach VMI uses to admit women.

MS. WARNER: And so VMI, of course, had tried to start a separate program for women at a nearby women’s college. What did the court say about that?

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NewsHour: Supreme Court on Double Jeopardy – June 24, 1996

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CHARLES ARLT, Defendant: They took everything we had. We didn’t hide a dime, every transaction was done by the law.

JAMES WREN, Defendant: The government took vehicles, automobiles, and they took aircraft, they took–

MR. KAYE: After the men were indicted on criminal charges, the government filed a civil forfeiture suit in order to confiscate their property. Wren’s lawyer, Shawn Perez, says the government punished the men twice for the same crime. That was double jeopardy, says Perez, a violation of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

SHAWN PEREZ, Lawyer: I see nothing wrong with punishing a person once, and the Constitution says, yes, we can punish you once, but we cannot punish you twice for the same offense in two separate proceedings. Arlt and Wren were punished twice by the forfeiture of their property. After they had already been prosecuted and convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, the government came back and said, we’re taking everything you own–resulted in a second punishment.

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NewsHour: Supreme Court on Gay Rights – May 20, 1996

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MARGARET WARNER: Today’s most notable rulings came in two very different cases. The first struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment that forbid any city or the state from adopting laws or ordinances to protect homosexuals from discrimination. The second struck down a $2 million punitive damages award won by an Alabama doctor unhappy with the paint job on his new BMW. For more on today’s decisions, we’re joined by NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor, a correspondent with The American Lawyer and Legal Times. Stuart, start by telling us what exactly did this Colorado constitutional amendment say and how did it end up in the state constitution?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: The amendment wiped out several local ordinances that towns in Colorado — Aspen, Denver, and Boulder — had adopted protecting gays against discrimination and further said that from here on no town in the state itself cannot adopt any gay rights ordinances protecting gays against discrimination or giving them preferences. That is what the Colorado voters adopted by referendum in 1992.

MARGARET WARNER: And so in striking down this amendment, what was the reasoning of the majority of the Supreme Court?

MR. TAYLOR: The court ruled 6-3 that it violates the equal protection cause of the 14th Amendment by denying equal protection of the laws to homosexuals. It stressed that this is a very broad and undifferentiated disability applied on homosexuals across the board, that they cannot seek the protection of the laws in the ordinary way for any form of discrimination against them as homosexuals.

MARGARET WARNER: So just to be clear here, they weren’t upholding a specific gay-rights law; rather, they were simply saying gays could not be precluded from seeking such laws.

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NewsHour: Supreme Court Review – May 13, 1996

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CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: It was an also all-over-the-lot day for the high court as they handed down opinions in a series of controversial cases. In a unanimous decision, the court struck down the Rhode Island ban on liquor advertising aimed at promoting sobriety. Also, in an eight to one decision, the court ruled against five black defendants on the issue of racial disparity in a California crack cocaine case, and finally the court refused to review Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczinsky’s appeal for fast action to avoid prosecution. For more on these cases, we turn to NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor, a correspondent for the "American Lawyer" and "Legal Times." Stuart, thank you for coming tonight. Tell us first about the 44 Liquor Mart vs. Rhode Island case. What was it all about?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Rhode Island had a law that bans all price advertising of liquor, except in the store itself. You can’t advertise in a newspaper, on a billboard, for an example, and the issue in the Supreme Court was whether that violates the First Amendment, freedom of speech, and the court was unanimous in holding that it did, although it took them four separate opinions in order to explain all the differences in their analysis, and that confuses the process of figuring out what this means for other laws and future laws and for such matters as the Clinton administration’s proposed limits on cigarette advertising, for example.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: So what are you saying, that this is not dispositive in terms of that–in terms of the cigarette advertising?

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NewsHour: Supreme Court review – May 13, 1996

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CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: It was an also all-over-the-lot day for the high court as they handed down opinions in a series of controversial cases. In a unanimous decision, the court struck down the Rhode Island ban on liquor advertising aimed at promoting sobriety. Also, in an eight to one decision, the court ruled against five black defendants on the issue of racial disparity in a California crack cocaine case, and finally the court refused to review Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczinsky’s appeal for fast action to avoid prosecution. For more on these cases, we turn to NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor, a correspondent for the "American Lawyer" and "Legal Times." Stuart, thank you for coming tonight. Tell us first about the 44 Liquor Mart vs. Rhode Island case. What was it all about?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Rhode Island had a law that bans all price advertising of liquor, except in the store itself. You can’t advertise in a newspaper, on a billboard, for an example, and the issue in the Supreme Court was whether that violates the First Amendment, freedom of speech, and the court was unanimous in holding that it did, although it took them four separate opinions in order to explain all the differences in their analysis, and that confuses the process of figuring out what this means for other laws and future laws and for such matters as the Clinton administration’s proposed limits on cigarette advertising, for example.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: So what are you saying, that this is not dispositive in terms of that–in terms of the cigarette advertising?

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The Debate: Judge Bashing Redux

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

We have collected all the presidential candidates’ statements about America’s recently discovered judge crisis, and fed them into a computer. The machine has peered six months into the future and projected some of the questions and answers in the Big Debate.

Q: I’d like to ask how each of you would change the federal judiciary. And Senator Dole, please explain whether you are here tonight as the Bob Dole who voted to confirm 98 percent of President Clinton’s judges, or the one who blames them for the crime problem and "the crisis in our courts."

Sen. Bob Dole: Bob Dole is here as the Bob Dole who lets Bob Dole be Bob Dole. And when Bob Dole is president, there will be no more liberal judges. No more moderates, either. Only Bob Dole judges-you know, here a Dole, there a Dole, everywhere a Dole Dole. No cowardly, craven, crime-coddling judges. No Democrat judges.

Bob Dole’s judges will be so tough,we won’t be able to build gas chambers and electric chairs and gallows and firing squads and lethal-injection get-ups fast enough. We’ll have to bring in Dr. Kevorkian to move things along.Bob Dole’s judges will pack guns under their robes and wear NRA membership cards like badges of honor.

President Bill Clinton: Me, too. Toughness and diversity, that’s what we want. But my judges will be tougher, and more vigorous and youthful too, and more supportive of Medicare and the minimum wage. And the problem is the Republicans not supporting these things, or our police, and not putting more cops on the beat-cops who can kill the criminals before they ever get to court, and I love it when they do that, I just want to hug them all.

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Life, Death, and Imperial Judges

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

As I started to read the recent rulings of two U.S. Courts of Appeals discovering that terminally ill patients have a constitutional right to kill themselves with lethal drugs prescribed by any willing physician, I was reminded of Judge Learned Hand’s line about "Platonic Guardians."

I looked it up: "Each one of us must in the end choose for himself how far he would like to leave our collective fate to the wayward vagaries of popular assemblies," Hand wrote in 1958. "For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not."

Some of the nation’s best minds think that a legal rule authorizing physician-assisted suicide "erases a fundamental ethical line and opens medical practice to unconscionable abuse," in the words of the columnist (and lapsed psychiatrist) Charles Krauthammer. He adds that any such rule would open the way for intolerable pressure from self-interested relatives and others for "the elderly and infirm to take drugs to hasten death."

On the other side, some of the nation’s best minds stress that thousands of suffering patients desperately want and need the kind of help in hastening the end that-under current law-some doctors cannot provide, and others will provide only in secrecy, for fear of being prosecuted as criminals.

It is an agonizing public policy dilemma, and one of vast importance. Both elite and popular values on the subject are evolving at warp speed, as one ethical line in the sand after another is washed away by racing medical technology and soaring medical costs, and as ever more diabolical choices are inflicted on us all.

So why should the ultimate decision on this matter come from a bunch of judges, in the guise of divining some fixed meaning for all time from a 128-year-old amendment that has nothing explicit to say about any "right to die"?

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Free the Rodney King Judge

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Could something good finally come from the brutal, racially charged, videotaped beating of Rodney King that shocked the nation five years ago?

That depends on whether the Supreme Court seizes the opportunity, in two cases that the King beating spawned, to restore some humanity and balance to the federal criminal sentencing process.

The Court could do this by making it clear that in cases like these, which involve extraordinary mitigating circumstances, federal district judges have enough leeway to show convicted defendants some mercy, and to treat them as individuals-rather than as numbers to be crunched through the arcane formulas of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

The irony is that the defendants appealing for mercy in the cases at hand are Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell, the two former Los Angeles cops who were convicted by a federal jury of violating King’s civil rights. The Court heard arguments in the cases, Koon v. United States and Powell v. United States, on Feb. 20.

Koon and Powell were released from federal confinement last December after serving the 30-month terms (minus time off for good behavior) ordered by U.S. District Judge John Davies. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held that Judge Davies had let the two off far too easily when he granted them "downward departures" that spared them more than half of the 70 to 87 months of imprisonment suggested by the sentencing guidelines. Unless they win their Supreme Court appeals, the ex-cops will apparently have to go back to prison for three more years.