THE CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT WILL CONSIDER WHETHER TO RULE ON CRUCIAL PROP 8 ISSUE ON WEDNESDAY

The LA Times has the story.

The California Supreme Court will decide Wednesday whether to plunge back into the legal battle over same-sex marriage.

The state high court, meeting in closed session, will review a request by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to determine whether Proposition 8’s sponsors have legal authority to defend the ballot measure.

Depending on the court’s ruling, the 9th Circuit could either dismiss the Proposition 8 appeal on procedural grounds — limiting the case’s effect to California — or rule on federal constitutional questions that would affect same-sex marriage throughout the country.

UPDATE: THE SUPREMES SAID YES, THEY’RE GOING FOR IT.

LARA LOGAN IS BEATEN AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTED IN CAIRO & THE LA WEEKLY REPORTS BADLY

Could the LA Weekly’s reporting on Lara Logan’s beating and horrific sexual assault possibly be any more staggeringly insensitive?

This is not the time for a hip, snappy tone, people. Good lord. The post felt creepily assaultive itself.

@GOOD ASKS WHAT THE ROLE OF THE PRISON SYSTEM SHOULD BE

Go and quickly tweet your answer to @GOOD, aka Good Magazine, and they’ll post the best of the answers later today.

A FRIEND OF BRADLY MANNING, SUSPECTED WIKILEAKS SOURCE, ALLEGES TORTURE

Torture comes in many forms, some of it legal.

Democracy Now has the story.

AFTER CUIDAD JUAREZ POET IS HERSELF FOUND DEAD, POETS RESPOND

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez writes:

It took the death of a poet for me to sit up and wonder what the hell is going on in Ciudad Juarez. I’d talked to the L.A. painter Victoria Delgadillo at length over the years about the unsolved murders of women in Juarez. She’d told me about the local artist she’d taken to Juarez and the art they’d created to memorialize the women and to stop the killings.

About a month ago a friend from San Diego emailed me a Mexican newspaper article detailing that Susana Chavez – the 36 year old Ciudad Juarez poet and activist who’d coined the phrase “Not one more death!” in outrage at the unsolved murders – had been found dead, her hand severed and a plastic bag around her head. That’s one of the signatures left in drug killings.

….They’re killing poets in Juarez???!!! WTF! It reminded me of the maddening story in Murder City by Charles Bowden. The cartels begin dumping bodies in a neighborhood park. A resident puts up a sign urging the killers to stop dumping bodies in the park. That resident is killed. The drug dealers know fear works.

What can we do? I asked the writer Gloria Alvarez when I ran into her a few days after hearing of the poet’s killing. Let’s organize a reading, we agreed. Eastside Café, the 8-year old El Sereno storefront community center hosted it last Saturday night….

Click here to read the rest—including much of the poetry presented Saturday night.

Photo by Raquel Salinas

Here is the video for Wednesday night’s segment of The Filter with Fred Roggin.

On this show, Fred asked me about two issues:

1. The first topic had to do with a case that reached the California Supreme Court on Tuesday in which 42 out-of-state students challenged the right of undocumented California kids to attend the state’s public universities—not for free—but to pay only in-state tuition as opposed to out-of-state tuition, which those who live OUT-OF-STATE have to pay. (Duh.) (For more background see the report by the SF Chronicle.)

For me this is a no-brainer. (Among other things, denying smart, high achieving California kids—legal or illegal—the possibility of affordable entry to college, is—as my mother would say—penny wise and pound foolish to the max. (Okay, she wouldn’t say “to the max.”)

But even if the 42 out-of-staters do not prevail with the California Supremes, the case will likely go to SCOTUS, which is more conservative than the California high court.

Anyway, watch the segment.

2. The second topic was a set of remarks that South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint made six years ago in which he said that gays and unmarried pregnant women should not be allowed to teach in public schools.

At a rally on Friday he was confronted with the remarks, and rather than walking them back, astonishingly, he reaffirmed them. (Fox news has a story on the incident.)

Everything one needs to know about DeMint’s vile and arrogant bigotry can be summed up by the fact that at least 6–possibly as many as 9—American teenage boys killed themselves in the month of September because they had been harassed and bullied for their sexual preferences. Two of those boys were 13-years old.

How are boys and girls struggling to come to terms with their sexuality supposed to react when US senators are unapologetically vocal about their belief that gays and lesbians are somehow less than fully human?

So what do I think of what Jim DeMint said? I think he has blood on his hands. And the blood belongs to American kids. Our kids.

What do you think?

AND IN OTHER NEWS……THE FUNERAL PROTESTERS CASE/FREE SPEECH CASE BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT

Nearly everyone who could pack into the SCOTUS courtroom was busy reporting on Wednesday’s hearing involving the hate-mongering funeral protesters.

But for my money, if you have to read only one bout of coverage on yesterday’s hearing (in which the court seemed to be siding, at least to some degree, against the Westboro Baptist Church), I’d opt for Dahlia Lithwick’s in Slate.

(And, if you have time for more than one report, there’s also Adam Liptak of the NY Times and David Savage of the LA Times.

Here are some clips from Lithwick:

Quick constitutional pop quiz: What do you hate? (And by you, I mean you.)

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THIS WEEK SCOTUS DECIDES WHETHER A MAN EXONERATED OF CAPITAL MURDER CAN SUE THE PROSECUTOR WHO HID EVIDENCE TO CONVICT HIM

John Holloway at Slate has the sobering tale behind the case involving John Thompson, who was nearly executed for the crime of capital murder, his conviction based on paid-off “witnesses,” and evidence made to vanish, all under the watch of a dapper New Orleans district attorney and sometimes singer named Harry Connick Sr. (And, yes, the DA’s son is that other Harry Connick.)

Here’s one of the better paragraphs from the Holloway story.

How is new evidence uncovered? This is how: a private investigator hired by lawyers looking for a miracle charms her way into a lab and flips through thousands of pieces of microfiche looking for a blood test whose existence has been repeatedly denied by the DA’s office. She doesn’t blink, or wander, or doze off at the wrong time. And when she finds it, she makes several copies of it and gets the hell out of Dodge to call the lawyers.

Tenacity, boobs, and luck.

The Supremes will hear arguments in Connick v. Thompson, on Wednesday.

SECOND SUICIDE IN LA COUNTY JAIL IN TWO DAYS

What in the worlds is going on? Here’s a link to the LA Times story.

An inmate killed himself Tuesday at Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, the second suicide at the facility in as many days.

In Tuesday’s incident, the 29-year-old was pronounced dead at the jail after he was discovered around 5:20 a.m., the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said.

The man, described as a gang member, pleaded guilty last year to assault with a deadly weapon and received a 21-year sentence. He was also found guilty of robberies and carjacking and was scheduled to be sentenced Friday for those crimes, the department said. His name was not released…..

These back-to-back jail suicides call to mind a July 2010 report by the Office of Independent Review, which noted there was an uptick in suicides in the county’s jail system and, while many suicides were prevented by deputy vigilance, the OIR documented a terrible case of neglect and falsified records that arguably allowed a young man named John Horton to kill himself last year, when it was well known he was at risk.

It is hard to know what if anything these two suicides signify. But the issue bears watching.

LA TIMES ENDORSES COOLEY FOR AG AND MAKES AN INTERESTING CASE AS TO WHY.

The endorsement is here. As much as have disagreed with Cooley on certain issues, I think they have a point.

NY TIMES’ DAVID CARR WRITES ABOUT A “BANKRUPT CULTURE” AT ZELL’S TRIBUNE CO, AND BOOB-GAWKER, RANDY MICHAELS, FIRES BACK WILDLY AT THE MESSENGER

Okay, first the opening of David Carr’s devastating story about the Tribune Co, which runs in Wednesday’s NY Times (and which many say shows only the tip o’ the iceberg in terms of the cringe-making craziness of Zellworld):

In January 2008, soon after the venerable Tribune Company was sold for $8.2 billion, Randy Michaels, a new top executive, ran into several other senior colleagues at the InterContinental Hotel next to the Tribune Tower in Chicago, David Carr writes in The New York Times.

Mr. Michaels, a former radio executive and disc jockey, had been handpicked by Sam Zell, a billionaire who was the new controlling shareholder, to run much of the media company’s vast collection of properties, including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, WGN America and The Chicago Cubs.

After Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, “watch this,” and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts. The group sat dumbfounded.

“Here was this guy, who was responsible for all these people, getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew,” said one of the Tribune executives present, who declined to be identified because he had left the company and did not want to be quoted criticizing a former employer. “I have never seen anything like it.”…

Now read Randy Michaels’ whacked-out preemptive memo about the Carr story, courtesy of LA Observed.

CALIFORNIA SUPREMES HEAR FIGHT OVER UNDOCUMENTED STUDENTS AND STATE TUITION

The SF Chronicle has the story:

The issue of benefits for illegal immigrants landed at the state Supreme Court on Tuesday, as out-of-state students challenged a law allowing anyone who has graduated from a California high school to pay in-state tuition at a public university, regardless of immigration status.

The 2002 law, intended to encourage youngsters to attend college, enables undocumented students to pay the same lower fees as other state residents – at the University of California, $11,300 instead of $34,000 a year.

A lawyer for 42 non-Californians who pay the higher fees at UC, state university and community college campuses argued that the statute is discriminatory and violates federal immigration law…..

LA MAG HOSTS LAW & ORDER’S DICK WOLF FOR EARLY MORNING SALON/CHAT

I meant to be at this event but was horridly cold ridden so didn’t go at the last minute. Fortunately, Kevin Roderick has a report.

Los Angeles moved its periodic breakfast series to Kate Mantilini in Beverly Hills for this morning’s session with the creator of “Law and Order: Los Angeles.” Wolf regaled the likes of City Council president Eric Garcetti, exiting Bon Appetit editor Barbara Fairchild and NBC correspondent Josh Mankiewicz with behind-the-scenes stories from the show….

DOES TEA PARTY = POT PARTY?

Josh Harkinson from Mother Jones says it does.

Here’s a clip:

Last month in the nation’s capital, Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico and outspoken critic of big government, took the podium at Glenn Beck’s 9/12 rally to talk up economic issues. He warmed up the crowd of tea partiers with tales of how he’d fended off unnecessary state spending through liberal use of the veto stamp, and how he’d boosted educational competition through charter schools. Then Johnson dropped a bomb. “Half of what we spend on law enforcement, the courts, and the prisons is drug related,” he proclaimed. “I suggest that legalizing marijuana will make this country a better place.”

The crowd erupted in a clash of boos and applause—evidence, Johnson told me later, that the tea party is ripe for debate on the issue. “What the tea party talks about is wise spending,” he said, adding that the war on drugs was certainly no better a deal than Social Security or Medicare. The tea party’s libertarian elements, he noted, have already led to the unthinkable: “You find more Republican candidates right now espousing legalization of marijuana than you do Democrats.”

Should voters toss the chief justice in 2010?

It doesn’t take a legal scholar to point out the obvious reason why the California Supreme Court, led by Ron George, got it so wrong in their ruling that denied gays the right to marry. They saw the ghost of Rose Bird and feared the anti-gay-rights mob would recall them.

George et al continues to fool some of my better-informed friends and colleagues, including the editorial writers at the L.A. Times. For amusement — and motivation to act — check out today’s solo editorial, which seeks to draw lessons of a corrupt West Virginia high court jurist for California. We’re advised, of course, not to recall George in 2010 because it’s not like he was on the take from corporate interests when he bungled the gay-marriage ruling. Nice logic if you believe money trumps rights.

The cowardly George takes hero status in the editorial for bowing to the will of the people only months after upholding the legal foundation of same-sex unions. Maybe we should induct him into the Flip Floppers Hall of Fame when we vote to keep him on the high court next year.

In the gay-marriage cases, George’s votes demonstrated conscience, professionalism and restraint. He voted to uphold same-sex unions out of the strong conviction — which this page shares — that the Constitution does not allow society to deny the protection of marriage to gay couples any more than it once denied it to those united across race. The ruling was right on the law, and will certainly be validated over the long march of history.

Months later, voters tacked in the other direction, narrowly rejecting gay marriage and amending the Constitution to allow California to recognize only the unions of heterosexual couples… George subordinated his politics — as evidenced by his writing — to the weight of constitutional opinion. He voted to uphold the proposition, even though it undid his own work. Permitted latitude within the strictures of the Constitution in the first case, George was able to vote his conscience; bound by the Constitution in the second case, he yielded…

This is not West Virginia. Corporate interests are not knocking off justices who disagree with them and seating more accommodating replacements. But intimidation has no place in our judicial life any more than it does in Appalachia. The 1986 campaign against Bird and her colleagues now stands for many as a reminder that well-intentioned systems of accountability may be hijacked by special interests, a lesson learned too often and at great cost in California. It was misguided in its first iteration; it would be regrettable in its second.

In fact, maybe it’s worse — or at least as bad — as in West Virginia.

In light of Thursday’s California Supreme Court hearing on Proposition 8, articles and columns have been running all this past week about the issue of same sex marriage.

There are many good pieces but, so far, my favorite out of the batch is a story that ran in the LA Times on Thursday about Bob Claunch and Jack Reavley who are 83 and 85 years old, respectively. They first met in 1951 when both were serving in the military. Reavley was Claunch’s commanding officer.

The two men have been together ever since; nearly sixty years. In that time, they haven’t been gay activists. They did not organize against Prop. 8. Jack Reavley and Bob Claunch were simply two people who loved each other, and demonstrated their commitment for more than a half century.

Up until recently, the couple didn’t fret about the fact that their relationship couldn’t be legalized through marriage. They didn’t feel they needed the piece of paper to prove who and what they were to each other.

However, now that it appears that Proposition 8 will likely be let to stand, and the men are old and increasingly frail, they wonder if they should have gotten married during the brief window of time in California when they had the chance.

Read the rest of the story here.

UPDATE: Live blogging the court at the end of the post. But, to cut to the chase, I’m sorry to say, Ken Starr was by far the most impressive of the attorneys. Some of his argument was horrifying. But it was extremely well constructed. Plus, he came off as a heavey hitter. A super pro. The others, not so much. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I don’t think so.

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At 9 a.m. this morning, the three-hour hearing in front of the California Supreme Court about the issue of same sex marriage will begin with Kenneth Starr and Shannon Minter delivering opening arguments for and against Proposition 8, respectively.

And it’s on television.

Fire up the Jumbotrons. (Actually there will be a Jumbotron in front of the Sacramento San Francisco court building* to accommodate those who want to witness whatever history is or is not made—but who can’t squeeze inside the actual court.)

The New York Times—in its new bid to get LA readers to jump ship from the Los Angeles Times—has a story about the first day of the Prop. 8 case featured front and center on its main web page, whereas the putative actual LA newspaper of record (that would be our beloved but beleaguered LA Times) has nothing on its own front page about the hearing (at least last time I checked). There is, however, an editorial that gives a not-bad rundown on what to expect from today’s opening arguments.

A good companion rundown may be found at the Huff Post in a column written by civil litigator Emma Ruby-Sachs, titled Prop 8 For Dummies..

Ruby-Sachs concludes, as I do, that the best argument against Prop. 8 is going to be— not that it violates the equal protection clause—but the contention that it is not a proper amendment to the California constitution at all, but a constitutional revision, which must be approved by the state legislature.

Gentleman and ladies, start your TiVos. I’ll meet you back here when the first round is over.

(And then we’ll check in on the other big legal drama still unfolding—namely the W.R. Grace trial.)

* Next time, with more sleep, I might even get the city right on the first go-round. (sigh.)

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UPDATE: LIVE BLOGGING

So far the justices are not going for the “revision” concept. But we ain’t done with that concept just yet.

The lawyers are trying to get the justices to say that any time you take away a fundamental right from a minority, this constitutes a revision, not an amendment. If the court goes for this, they will be setting a precedent. After initially being resistant. They are now at least entertaining the notion.

The best Twitter feed on the hearing may be found here.

AG Jerry Brown is live twittering: @JerryBrown2010 His updates aren’t that speedy, though. At least not yet.

Attorney Terry Stewart, now arguing for SF, has a very problematic bright mauve pocket hanky.

Did I mishear or did Ken Starr just say the power of the people includes the right to eliminate free speech under the California constitution. WTF???

Starr: “We don’t view Prop 8 as invalidating marriages–they just wouldn’t be recognized.” Okay, sure. That works. (NOT.)

We are now hearing double-speak on the level of Starr’s nemesis and the famous “it depends on what the definition of is is..”

OMG, Justice George is making “definition of IS” jokes. Go Justice George!

Okay, back to work on other deadlines. (Mostly)

Justice Kennard: Is it still your view that the sky has fallen in and that gays and lesbians are left with nothing?

If Justice Kennard is the swing vote, Prop 8 will remain law. No question. Kennard’s starting to get on my last nerve, by the way.

SF Deputy City Attorney Terry Stewart gave a great rebuttal. She was excellent—my new hero, mauve pocket hanky and all. (Stewart: “The amendment power is a limited power.” Uh, yeah.) Don’t think it will be enough for Kennard, sadly.

And the court is adjourned.

Over and out. We’ll know in 90 days – ish.

In a decision that hearkened back to the 1948 opinion overturning the prohibition against interracial marriages, the California Supreme Court decided that same sex couples have a “fundamental right” to marry each other, just like straight couples. In doing so, the California Supremes struck down nearly any law that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation.

The decision was a very pleasant and welcome surprise coming from the Republican dominated court. There are a zillion articles and opinion pieces about the decision, but the LA Times has a fairly thorough story, so you may as well start there.

Time Magazine has a good rundown as well.

It is a dramatic legal story….but with a twist. And it’s a hell of a twist having to do with a well-known prosecutor and a stripper.

First, here are the basics:

On Monday, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously that San Quentin inmate Adam Miranda should not have been sentenced to death twenty years ago because senior District Attorney Curt Hazell—and three sitting judges (formerly prosecutors), Judge Lance Ito, San Diego Judge Roger W. Krauel, and Orange County Superior Court Judge Frederick Horn —-either knowingly or accidentally failed to hand over an essential piece of exculpatory evidence—-namely the confession to a related killing by the prosecution’s star witness.

This is complicated case, and Miranda is not a good guy. Here’s how the LA Times explains it in yesterday’s editorial:

[Adam] Miranda is not a sympathetic symbol for abolishing the death penalty. Jurors were presented with a videotape at trial that showed him killing an Eagle Rock convenience store clerk; having committed such a brutal crime, he should never again walk free. But his sentence — death, and not life without parole — was based in part on another killing. The letter found in the prosecutor’s file, but never shared with the defense as required by law and thus never considered by the sentencing jury, contained evidence of another man’s admission to that crime.

In other words, Miranda is a stone killer who deserves life without possibility of parole. But, given the laws of the state, the central issue around which his death sentence was built, was entirely false.

Scarily, it was only the nearly two decades of pro bono digging on the part of entertainment lawyer George Hedges, that got Miranda off death row. Here’s what Hedges told Business Wire:

“We have been through a 20-year struggle to locate evidence the DA’s office intentionally withheld that showed our client did not commit the murder that placed him on death row 26 years ago,” said Mr. Hedges. “The case reveals an outrageous miscarriage of justice.”

“It took us years to force the DA’s office to turn over the Miranda files, and there in the back of one of the files was an envelope containing a confession to the murder by the star witness the prosecutors used to condemn our client to death,” added Mr. Bensinger. “It shows just how corrupt the system is. Without an all-out legal assault our client would have been put to death years ago for a crime he didn’t commit.”

And if that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the twist to the story:

The main witness in Miranda’s murder trial (the murder for which he was righteously convicted), was a woman named Donna Navarro who was working as a stripper at the time of the trial, but who happened in on the scene of the crime, and had the courage to come forward in order to testify to what she saw.
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