The Fifth Circuit — which covers federal courts in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas — would be the first federal appeals court to adopt an AI rule, if implemented.
The proposed rule, floated last year, would require lawyers to certify that no generative AI program was used to draft the document, or if an AI program was used, that all text, including citations, “has been reviewed for accuracy and approved by a human.”
In highly unusual en banc news, the Tenth Circuit has decided following panel argument that, rather than issue a panel opinion, it will sit en banc to decide in the first instance whether a pretrial detainee's Sixth Amendment rights were violated when the United States Attorney's Office obtained a recording of a phone conversation with his attorney.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the architect of the legal fight for equality and women's rights in the 1970s who subsequently served 27 years on the nation's highest court, died Friday, September 18, 2020 (view full article). The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.
As we commemorate Black History Month, it is crucial to reflect on landmark legal cases that have significantly contributed to the ongoing struggle for racial justice. One such pivotal case is Batson v. Kentucky.
At James K. Batson's 1982 state-court trial for burglary and receiving stolen property, the prosecution used “peremptory strikes” to remove four possible jurors who, like Batson, were black. The resulting all-white jury convicted Batson; he received a 20-year sentence.
Forty-three (!) Pennsylvania State Police SWAT team officers execute a pre-dawn, no-knock raid on the home of a Bangor, Penn. family. In legal parlance, they beat the snot out of the family—most egregiously striking a 76-year-old woman in night clothes in the face with a shield, breaking multiple teeth and a vertebra. Family sues under Fourth Amendment for excessive force. Third Circuit: "Policing can be rough business.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked Georgia's attempt to again prosecute a man who was acquitted for one charge in the murder of his adoptive mother despite conflicting verdicts on other charges, finding that "an acquittal is an acquittal" regardless of a simultaneous guilty verdict for the same offense.
In an effort to resume Louisiana’s death row executions that have been paused for 14 years, lawmakers on Friday advanced a bill that would add the use of nitrogen gas and electrocution as possible execution methods (view full article).
Oklahoma police stop car for traffic violations, search it, and discover 29 pounds of meth stashed in secret compartments (which carried a wholesale value of about $75k). The driver-husband knew, but there's no evidence that the passenger-wife did. Nevertheless, a jury convicts her of conspiracy to distribute meth and interstate travel in aid of drug trafficking. Tenth Circuit: The prosecution needed to prove that the wife at least knew about the meth, and speculation doesn't substitute for evidence.
The execution of Thomas Eugene Creech, 73, one of the nation's longest-serving death row inmates was put on hold Wednesday, the latest in a number of botched lethal injections across the country (view full article).
For nearly an hour, Thomas Eugene Creech lay strapped to a table in an Idaho execution chamber as medical team members poked and prodded at his arms and legs, hands and feet, trying to find a vein through which they could end his life.
Wherein the Tenth Circuit gives some side-eye to a Colorado prison's "troubling" DEI programming—warning that "race-based training programs can create hostile workplaces when official policy is combined with ongoing stereotyping and explicit or implicit expectations of discriminatory treatment"—but holds that in this particular case it wasn't so bad as to violate a white former officer's Title VII suit. The court also declined to reinstate his equal protection claim.