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Court won't allow challenge to surveillance law
Legal News |
2013/02/27 08:24
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A sharply-divided Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out an attempt by U.S. citizens to challenge the expansion of a surveillance law used to monitor conversations of foreign spies and terrorist suspects.
With a 5-4 vote, the high court ruled that a group of American lawyers, journalists and organizations can't sue to challenge the 2008 expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) because they can't prove that the government will monitor their conversations along with those of potential foreign terrorist and intelligence targets.
Justices "have been reluctant to endorse standing theories that require guesswork," said Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for the court's majority.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was enacted in 1978. It allows the government to monitor conversations of foreign spies and terrorist suspects abroad for intelligence purposes. The 2008 FISA amendments allow the government to obtain from a secret court broad, yearlong intercept orders, raising the prospect that phone calls and emails between those foreign targets and innocent Americans in this country would be swept under the umbrella of surveillance.
Without proof that the law would directly affect them, Americans can't sue, Alito said in the ruling.
Despite their documented fears and the expense of activities that some Americans have taken to be sure they don't get caught up in government monitoring, they "have set forth no specific facts demonstrating that the communications of their foreign contacts will be targeted," he added. |
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Former Fla. GOP chief pleads guilty before trial
Legal News |
2013/02/15 22:35
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Former Republican Party of Florida chairman Jim Greer pleaded guilty to theft and money laundering charges Monday just before jury selection in his criminal trial was to begin.
Greer pleaded guilty to four counts of theft and a single count of money laundering for funneling money from the Republican Party of Florida to a company he set up with his right-hand man. He could be sentenced to a minimum of 3 ½ years and a maximum of 35 years in prison at his March 27 sentencing.
The plea deal avoids would could have been an embarrassing trial for the state GOP. Some of Florida's most powerful politicians were scheduled as witnesses, including former Gov. Charlie Crist, former U.S. Sen. George LeMieux, former Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum and several state House and state Senate leaders.
"There were a number of people who did not want this trial to go forward and the trial isn't going forward," said Damon Chase, Greer's attorney. "Once again, Jim Greer is falling on his sword for a lot of other folks."
Topics that were covered in pretrial depositions included allegations of prostitutes at a state GOP fundraiser in the Bahamas, lavish spending on fancy restaurants and luxury hotels by state GOP leaders, the drinking habits of Crist and party leaders stabbing each other in the back.
"He has acknowledged he is guilty. That is what the party has wanted since the case started," said Stephen Dobson, an attorney for the Republican Party of Florida. |
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Milan court convicts 3 Americans in CIA kidnapping
Court Watch |
2013/02/08 21:05
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A Milan appeals court on Friday vacated acquittals for a former CIA station chief and two other Americans, and instead convicted them in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street as part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.
The decision means that all 26 Americans tried in absentia for the abduction now have been found guilty.
The ongoing trials, which have dragged on for years, brought the first convictions anywhere in the world against CIA agents involved in a practice alleged to have led to torture. The case has been the source of diplomatic tensions, although three successive Italian leaders, including the technical government of Premier Mario Monti, have invoked state secrets, which has had the impact of limiting evidence in the successive trials and led to the acquittals of five Italians, including two spy chiefs.
An appeals court sentenced former CIA Rome station chief Jeffrey Castelli to seven years, and handed sentences of six years each to Americans Betnie Medero and Ralph Russomando. A lower court, while convicting 23 other Americans in November 2009, had acquitted the three, citing diplomatic immunity. |
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Iowa Tax Service Owner Pleads Guilty
Legal News |
2013/02/05 05:38
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An eastern Iowa woman has pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns.
Authorities say 60-year-old Regina Jimenez faces up to three years in federal prison. She entered her pleas on Friday in U.S. District Court in Davenport.
Federal prosecutors say Jimenez used her Clinton business from 2007 through 2011 to steal more than $200,000 from a client who believed that Jimenez would use the money to pay the client's taxes. Prosecutors say Jimenez instead used the money for her own expenditures and did not report the stolen funds on her tax returns. |
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Court says EPA overestimates biofuels production
Court Watch |
2013/01/30 06:59
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A federal appeals court has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency is overestimating the amount of fuel that can be produced from grasses, wood and other nonfood plants in an effort to promote a fledgling biofuels industry.
At issue is a 2007 renewable fuels law that requires a certain amount of those types of fuels, called cellulosic biofuels, to be mixed in with gasoline each year. Despite annual EPA projections that the industry would produce small amounts of the biofuels, none of that production materialized.
There have been high hopes in Washington that the cellulosic industry would take off as farmers, food manufacturers and others blamed the skyrocketing production of corn ethanol fuel for higher food prices. Those groups said the diversion of corn crops for fuel production raised prices for animal feed and eventually for consumers at the grocery store. Lawmakers hoped that nonfood sources like switchgrass or corn husks could be used instead, though the industry hadn't yet gotten off the ground.
The 2007 law mandated that billions of gallons of annual production of corn ethanol be mixed with gasoline, eventually transitioning those annual requirements to include more of the nonfood, cellulosic materials to produce the biofuels. As criticism of ethanol has increased, lawmakers and even Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have talked of the cellulosic materials as the future of biofuels. |
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