Free Republic

A three-judge panel in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has delivered a critical decision affirming Fourth Amendment protections and the right to keep and bear arms.On November 12, 2018, Basel Soukaneh’s life was significantly disrupted. Soukaneh was looking for a house he was considering purchasing, but the GPS on his phone, held in a holder on the dash of his car, had frozen. He was unfamiliar with the area. Soukaneh pulled over to correct the problem, left the engine running, and had the interior lights on. A Waterbury police officer quickly knocked on his window and demanded...

That conduct, as alleged by Plaintiff-Appellee Basel Soukaneh, is that in the course of a routine traffic stop, Andrzejewski unlawfully and violently handcuffed and detained Soukaneh in the back of a police vehicle for over half an hour and conducted a warrantless search of Soukaneh’s vehicle after Soukaneh presented a facially valid firearms permit and disclosed that he possessed a firearm pursuant to the permit. On appeal, Andrzejewski argues we should reverse the district court’s denial of qualified immunity because the presence of the lawfully owned firearm in the vehicle gave him the requisite probable cause to detain Soukaneh, search...

From the very beginning of his tenure at the White House, questions about how resident Biden’s Catholic faith square with most of his policy and personnel choices have been met with the response: “the President is a devout Catholic.” To paraphrase Inigo Montoya in the classic movie The Princess Bride: “You keep using that phrase, I do not think it means what you think it means.” Few personnel choices stand out for their record of hostility towards the Catholics more than Beth Robinson, Joe Biden’s nominee to be a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second...