Free Republic

BURLINGTON - It began with an inaccurate local television news report, with the errors repeated by Vermont print and broadcast media. The story was quickly picked up by Internet bloggers and right-wing talk radio and soon reached at least three sensationalist national cable shows. Within a week, bloggers were posting ever more extreme comments, calling for vigilante action against a longtime Vermont judge and posting his home address and phone online. State politicians jumped at the chance to be on national television, repeating the errors and adding to them. Nationwide, there were calls for boycotts of Vermont if the judge...

BREAKING ON THE AP WIRE: WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has upheld Oregon's one-of-a-kind physician-assisted suicide law, rejecting a Bush administration attempt to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die.

Seattle -- A federal judge who struck down a Bush administration decision to ease logging restrictions last summer issued an injunction Monday blocking as many as 144 timber sales in three states. The sales in Washington, Oregon and northern California had been approved under the administration's decision to stop requiring that the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management look for and protect rare plants and animals before logging on 5.5 million acres covered by the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. The Bush administration eliminated the so-called "survey and manage" rule in spring 2004 as part of a legal settlement with...

A former Broward County man has been ordered to continue to pay child support for a child he did not father. He said his wife cheated on him; she denies it.Richard Parker said he never suspected that his wife had been cheating on him when she got pregnant seven years ago.When the Hollywood couple divorced in 2001, he agreed to pay her $1,200 a month in child support.But less than two years later, when his son was 5, he says he learned the awful truth: The boy he had raised as his own wasn't his.Parker sued his ex-wife, Margaret Parker,...

January 05, 2006, 3:59 p.m. Now Judges Are Leaking FISA judges discuss NSA surveillance with the Washington Post. On Thursday morning, the Washington Post published an article ("Surveillance Court Is Seeking Answers — Judges Were Unaware of Eavesdropping") that is jaw-dropping in the matter-of-factness with which reports on an outrageous impropriety by at least two FISA court judges. The backdrop is that of the eleven judges who sit on the special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, only one, Chief Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, was briefed by administration officials about the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping program prior to its...

BURLINGTON, January 5, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) -  According to a Vermont judge, serious crime should not be subject to punishment. “The one message I want to get through is that anger doesn't solve anything. It just corrodes your soul.” So said Judge Edward Cashman who then gave a 60-day jail sentence to a man who raped a little girl repeatedly for four years starting when the girl – the child of a friend - was six and ending when she was ten.Mark Hulett, 34, pleaded guilty in District Court in Burlington to two counts of aggravated sexual assault and one...

Official handling radio host's drug probe gets appointed to bench The Florida prosecutor investigating radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh will soon be weighing cases rather than prosecuting them. Gov. Jeb Bush has announced Assistant State Attorney James Martz has been appointed a Palm Beach County judge, filling a vacancy left after this year's legislative session. "He leaves shoes that will be difficult to fill," state attorney spokesman Mike Edmondson told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, noting Martz was "quite cool, quite calm and quite elated" when told of the appointment. Martz has been accused by Limbaugh of going on a fishing...

SAN DIEGO -- A sexually violent predator with a 20-year history of assaulting male hitchhikers can be released from a mental hospital into the community as long as a treatment plan is in place, a judge ruled Tuesday. Douglas Badger, 63, shook hands with his attorney, Richard Gates, as Superior Court Judge David Gill made his ruling. The judge scheduled a Jan. 27 status hearing to start a process for placing Badger back into San Diego County, where he can be supervised in an outpatient setting. No such plan currently exists, according to court testimony. Assemblyman Juan Vargas, D-Chula Vista,...

A federal judge Friday ordered the Legislature to spend more money on education for students learning English and said he will impose fines starting at $500,000 a day late next month if deadlines aren't met. U.S. District Judge Raner C. Collins also ruled that the estimated 160,000 Arizona students learning English will be able to get high school diplomas without passing the state's graduation test until they've had time to prepare in adequately funded programs. Plaintiffs claim the state's AIMS test is unfair to students learning English because of shortcomings in programs intended to improve their skills in the language....

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) A federal judge struck down Virginia's ban on a type of late-term abortion Monday, saying the law violated privacy rights and failed to make an exception for the health of the woman. U.S. District Judge Richard L. Williams called the ban on what opponents call partial-birth abortion ``impermissibly void for vagueness.'' The judge blocked the law last July, the day it went into effect, calling it a ``no-brain case.'' He also has challenged the use of the term ``partial birth infanticide'' by the law's backers, saying it was an attempt to alarm the public. Virginia's law outlawed...

MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH Jeb Bush: No intervention for Schiavo Case 'in court's hands' on eve of woman's judge-ordered starvation Posted: October 14, 2003 2:30 p.m. Eastern By Art Moore © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com One day before Terri Schindler Schiavo's court-ordered starvation is set to begin, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's office says it can do nothing more to save the brain-disabled woman's life. "This is in the court's hands," Bush's press secretary Alia Faraj told WorldNetDaily. "Our government has committed these decisions to the judicial branch, and we must respect that process." Faraj noted Bush presented his opinion on this...