Free Republic

Washington D.C., Feb 3, 2021 / 01:00 pm MT (CNA).- A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed an Indiana county to display a nativity scene at its courthouse. A three-judge panel of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that a nativity display in front of the Jackson County courthouse is constitutional. The ACLU of Indiana had sued the county in 2018 over the display, on behalf of county resident Rebecca Woodring. She said the display “conveys the county’s endorsement of a religious message.” In their majority opinion on Tuesday, Judges Diane Wood and Amy St. Eve said that...

Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced to 12 months probation and 400 hours of community service

President Donald Trump's last-minute legal bid to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia was denied by a federal judge on Tuesday. Ruling from the bench, U.S. District Judge Mark Cohen rejected the president's request for an emergency injunction to order the state legislature to choose a new slate of electors before the mandated congressional count takes place on January 6. The lawsuit was filed by Trump on New Year's Eve and accused Georgia officials of violating the state's election code in the handling and counting of mail-in ballots. The lawsuit also alleged state leaders conducted an "improper certification of...

Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the Wisconsin Department of Corrections cannot deny transgender surgery to a man convicted of raping his 10-year-old daughter. The ruling also means Wisconsin will put the man in a women’s prison. U.S. District Judge James Peterson approved the request of Mark Allen Campbell, a 49-year-old Wisconsin man who identifies as female and goes by the name “Nicole Rose,” to undergo transgender surgery at taxpayer expense, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported. Campbell has identified as female since 2013, when he first requested the operation. The Journal-Sentinel mentioned that Campbell began serving a 34-year prison...

Federal Judge Steve C. Jones, a Barack Obama appointee, is set to decide whether some 200,000 people purged from the Georgia voter rolls in 2019 can be put back on, allowing them to cast a ballot in the January 5 runoff election for two Senate seats. The Law 360 website reported on the consequential case: U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones said at the end of a three-hour hearing Thursday that he’ll decide “pretty quickly” whether to grant a request by four multi-state voter and civil rights organizations to re-register the purged voters. Voter registration for Georgia’s senatorial runoffs, which...

GA law states that a runoff election is a continuation of a primary election; therefore only persons who voted in the primary can vote in the runoff less than a month from now. I contend that the knowledge exists to state the maximum number of votes possible in the coming runoff. All the Secty of State has to do is report the names of the voters from their vote history of who voted in the primary. From that list you delete the voters with address changes out-of-state. Clearly anyone recently registered is double-checked not to be on the runoff list...

Dec. 11 (UPI) -- The U.S. government on Friday plans to execute a man convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter nearly two decades ago. Alfred Bourgeois, 55, is set to receive lethal injection at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. He's awaiting a Supreme Court decision on his request for a stay. His attorneys said Bourgeois' execution would be unconstitutional because he is intellectually disabled and can't understand his punishment. They submitted evidence of IQ test scores of 70 and 75, as well as assessments by experts. The Eighth Amendment bans executing people with such impairments as cruel and...

A federal judge in Michigan has issued yet another withering opinion dismissing an effort by legal allies of President Donald Trump to overturn millions of votes in battleground Michigan. In a 36-page ruling, federal Judge Linda V. Parker finds the suit filed by Sidney Powell as part of her 'Kraken' lawsuits, lacks standing, proposes a remedy it is far too late to enforce – and critically undermines 'faith in the democratic process.' 'For these reasons, the Court finds that Plaintiffs are far from likely to succeed in this matter,' she wrote in a scathing concluding passage.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has rejected a request from a Louisiana pastor who’d sought emergency relief from criminal charges he faces for the apparent crime of holding large church services in contravention of the state’s coronavirus rules. ... As the months passed, Spell wound up accruing three additional charges, making for a total of nine. Now fast-forward to last week, when he filed a motion with Justice Alito requesting an injunction against the charges he faces. ... For reasons that remain unclear, Alito outright rejected the request — meaning it won’t receive a full hearing in the Supreme Court...

The president's campaign will continue pushing their legal fight toward the Supreme Court The Trump 2020 campaign's legal team suffered another blow in court on Friday, as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia rejected the attorneys' effort to contest the results of the presidential election in Pennsylvania. Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel that reviewed the appeal, "Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here." Trump's attorneys have vowed...

Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here. The Trump Presidential Campaign asserts that Pennsylvania’s 2020 election was unfair. But as lawyer Rudolph Giuliani stressed, the Campaign “doesn’t plead fraud. . . . [T]his is not a fraud case.” Instead, it objects that Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State and some counties restricted poll watchers and let voters fix technical defects in their mail-in ballots. It offers nothing more. This case is not about whether...

A federal judge ruled Friday that the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees Voice of America (VOA) and other networks, unconstitutionally interfered with the news service when he went after its journalists for alleged bias against President Trump, NPR reports. Five suspended officials from the USAGM sued CEO Michael Pack in early October, accusing him of violating the "firewall" that protects international broadcasters from political interference. The officials alleged that Pack and others investigated and punished journalists for negative stories about the president, as well as stories about now President-elect Joe Biden and the racial...

<p>Pennsylvania officials can certify election results that currently show Democrat Joe Biden winning the state by more than 80,000 votes, a federal judge ruled Saturday, dealing U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign another blow in its effort to invalidate the election.</p>

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals granted a motion to stay regarding a lower court decision allowing Jackson County to include the Nativity scene in its annual holiday display this year in front of the courthouse while the judges decide on the case. Liberty Counsel represents Jackson County, Indiana against the ACLU. Liberty Counsel recently presented oral argument before the three-judge panel defending the Nativity scene display at the Jackson County Courthouse. The holiday display which includes the Nativity has been ongoing for many years. After the 2019 display, the lower federal court ruled against the display. In addition to...

I went looking for an article or tweet on this and did not find anything so I am just posting a vanity.Kirkland Ellis, one of the law firms representing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Secretary of State has stepped down. They are no longer representing the SoS. This comes after employees of Kirkland Ellis threatened members of President Trump's legal team and their families.The Trump Campaign asked a court for sanctions against Kirkland Ellis earlier in the day. The Marxist Judge did not find in favor of the Trump Campaign. I suspect that the evidence of physical threats was so great...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a Trump Administration rule that opponents said would have harmed the bargaining rights of more than 500,000 home healthcare workers in California and several hundred thousand additional workers across the nation. San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria found that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services rule changing Medicaid state payment requirements would have made it tougher for states to deduct employee benefits and union dues from workers’ paychecks... ...The agency had said it was required to make the change because the old system was barred by federal...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge is temporarily blocking the federal government’s plan to execute the first female death row inmate in almost six decades after her attorneys contracted the coronavirus visiting her in prison. The order, handed down Thursday by U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss in Washington, prohibits the federal Bureau of Prisons from carrying out Lisa Montgomery’s execution before the end of the year. She was scheduled to be put to death on Dec. 8 at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. Montgomery’s attorneys had sought to delay the execution in order to file a clemency...

President Trump's campaign on Monday replaced its entire legal team arguing his key federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania, naming conservative Harrisburg talk show host Marc Scaringi the lead lawyer in the case. The two Texas lawyers Scaringi replaced had been appointed Friday, taking over for the law firm Porter, Wright Morris & Arthur, which bowed out.On Monday night, Scaringi asked U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann to move back Tuesday's make-or-break hearing in the case, and Brann said no, "Scarinigi is aware of the schedule set by the court in this matter" and "counsel for the parties are expected to be prepared...

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos just got to the official end of the line with her efforts to divert $16 million in public school COVID-relief funding to private schools. U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California James Donato signed a permanent injunction–made public Monday–that will formally end litigation begun last summer against the Department of Education (DOE). In July, Judge Donato, a Barack Obama appointee, quoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia when he called DeVos’s justification of the DOE’s pro-private school policy “interpretive jiggery-pokery in the extreme.” The Congressional CARES Act earmarked approximately $16 billion to help elementary...

The recent scene in Clark County, Nevada, has become increasingly common in courthouses around the country as President Donald Trump continues to push thinly supported allegations of election misconduct and fraud. When Republican lawyers in Nevada complained their observers were not close enough if they could not hear everything poll workers were saying, U.S. District Judge Andrew Gordon pushed back. "At what point does this get ridiculous?" the exasperated judge, an appointee of President Barack Obama, asked before ruling against the Republicans. In court hearings and opinions around the country, judges are voicing similar frustrations with the Trump campaign's legal...