The lawyer who killed a federal judge’s son and seriously wounded her husband at their New Jersey home last summer also had been tracking Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the judge said in a television interview.
U.S. District Judge Esther Salas said FBI agents discovered the information in a locker belonging to the lawyer, Roy Den Hollander. “They found another gun, a Glock, more ammunition. But the most troubling thing they found was a manila folder with a workup on Justice Sonia Sotomayor,” Salas said in an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes.” The segment is scheduled for broadcast Sunday, but a portion of the interview aired Friday on “CBS This Morning.”
Both the Supreme Court and the FBI declined to comment Friday. “We do not discuss security as a matter of Court policy,” court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said in an email.
Authorities have said Den Hollander, a men’s rights lawyer with a history of anti-feminist writings, posed as a FedEx delivery person and fatally shot 20-year-old Daniel Anderl and wounded his father, Mark Anderl, in July. Salas was in another part of the home at the time and was not injured.
Den Hollander, 72, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound the day after the ambush. Authorities believe he also shot and killed a fellow attorney in California in the days before the attack at Salas’ home.
The AP has previously reported that when Den Hollander was found dead he had a document with him with information about a dozen female judges from across the country, half of whom are Latina, including Salas.
Salas has been calling for more privacy and protections for judges, including scrubbing personal information from the internet, to deal with mounting cyberthreats. The U.S. Marshals Service, which protects about 2,700 federal judges, said there were 4,449 threats and inappropriate communications in 2019, up from 926 such incidents in 2015.
Legislation named for Salas’ son that would make it easier to shield judges’ personal information from the public failed to pass the Senate in December, but could be reintroduced this year.
A federal appeals court ordered work to stop at a major oil project on Alaska’s North Slope, siding with conservation and Indigenous groups.
The decision Saturday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will stop on-the-ground work for the winter at the Willow project operated by ConocoPhillips Co., the Anchorage Daily News reported Sunday.
Ice roads support wintertime work at projects on Alaska’s North Slope, but they melt in the spring and that drastically reduces what can be done for all but a handful of months.
The Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska was expected to provide jobs for about 120 people this year.
Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and other groups sued last fall to stop the project altogether, not just in winter. They argue that the Trump administration didn’t follow environmental laws before approving the project.
This month, the groups asked the 9th Circuit to overturn a U.S. District Court decision to allow winter work to continue. After the groups appealed, short-term work was halted.
Ninth Circuit Judges William Canby and Michelle Friedland agreed that the plaintiffs would be harmed without an injunction that stops the work until the court can rule on the case itself.
ConocoPhillips spokeswoman Natalie Lowman didn’t say in an email Sunday whether the company plans to appeal the work stoppage.
A new legal challenge to Gov. Tony Evers’ latest mask mandate is before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, filed less than a week after the Legislature struck down a previous order and the governor quickly issued a new one.
Prominent Republican donor Jere Fabick asked the court late Tuesday to issue a temporary injunction to block the mask order Evers issued on Feb. 4, just after the GOP-controlled Legislature voted to repeal an earlier order. Fabick’s lawsuit challenging Evers’ authority to issue multiple emergency orders remains before the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in November but has yet to issue a ruling.
Republicans and Fabick contend that the Democratic governor exceeded his authority by issuing multiple public health emergencies due to the coronavirus pandemic. Evers tied the mask mandates to each emergency order.
Fabick and the GOP-controlled Legislature argue that Evers must get legislative approval to extend a health emergency beyond 60 days if it’s for the same event. Evers contends the changing nature of the pandemic warranted him issuing new health orders.
Fabick’s attorneys argued in the filing Tuesday that the Supreme Court needed to take “immediate action” to stop the latest order from Evers. Republicans in the Legislature have said they are awaiting a court rule before taking any action to strike down the latest mask order, which runs until March 20.
Nearly 60 organizations opposed repeal of the mask mandate, including groups representing hospitals, doctors, nurses, EMTs, school administrators, businesses, children, unions, Milwaukee schools, American Indian tribes, pharmacists, firefighters, local health departments, senior citizens, churches and dentists.
Fabick is a board member and policy advisor for The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank, and also the president of a multistate Caterpillar equipment and engine dealer. He has given more than $350,000 to Republican or conservative candidates in Wisconsin between 1994 and the middle of 2020, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Wisconsin’s COVID-19 cases have been trending downward since mid-November. The seven-day average of new cases on Tuesday was its lowest in five months and the state ranks 11th nationally in the percentage of its total population that has received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The UW Health System reported Wednesday that thanks to wearing masks and other coronavirus precautions, cases of influenza are “practically nonexistent.” As of Wednesday, there had been one positive flu test at UW Health. That compares with 1,183 at this point last year and 149 in 2019, the health system said.
The Supreme Court is telling California that it can’t bar indoor church services because of the coronavirus pandemic, but it can keep for now a ban on singing and chanting indoors.
The high court issued orders late Friday in two cases where churches had sued over coronavirus-related restrictions in the state. The high court said that for now, California can’t ban indoor worship as it had in almost all of the state because virus cases are high.
The justices said the state can cap indoor services at 25% of a building’s capacity. The justices also declined to stop California from enforcing a ban put in place last summer on indoor singing and chanting. California had put the restrictions in place because the virus is more easily transmitted indoors and singing releases tiny droplets that can carry the disease.
The justices were acting on emergency requests to halt the restrictions from South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista and Pasadena-based Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry, which has more than 160 churches across the state.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “federal courts owe significant deference to politically accountable officials” when it comes to public health restrictions, but he said deference “has its limits.”
Roberts wrote that California’s determination “that the maximum number of adherents who can safely worship in the most cavernous cathedral is zero—appears to reflect not expertise or discretion, but instead insufficient appreciation or consideration of the interests at stake.”
In addition to Roberts, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett also wrote to explain their views. Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas would have kept California from enforcing its singing ban. Barrett, the court’s newest justice, disagreed. Writing for herself and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, she said it wasn’t clear at this point whether the singing ban was being applied “across the board.”
She wrote that “if a chorister can sing in a Hollywood studio but not in her church, California’s regulations cannot be viewed as neutral,” triggering a stricter review by courts. The justices said the churches who sued can submit new evidence to a lower court that the singing ban is not being applied generally.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented, saying they would have upheld California’s restrictions. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent for herself, Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Sonia Sotomayor that the court’s action “risks worsening the pandemic.” She said that the court was “making a special exception for worship services” rather than treating them like other activities where large groups of people come together “in close proximity for extended periods of time.” In areas of California where COVID-19 is widespread, which includes most of the state, activities including indoor dining and going to the movies are banned.
A California appeals court justice accused of sexually harassing staff and attorneys will be removed from office after the state Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal Wednesday.
Jeffrey Johnson will become the highest-ranking California judge ever removed for misconduct, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Johnson, 60, serves on the Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. Eleven women accused him of making unwanted sexual advances to them or groping them, including another justice on the court and a lawyer who alleged that Johnson put his hand under her dress at a dinner.
In June, the state Commission on Judicial Performance ordered him removed from the bench, where he had served since being appointed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He previously served as a federal prosecutor and a federal judge.
Johnson's conduct “severely tarnished the esteem of the judiciary in the eyes of the public,” the commission said. Johnson and his lawyers appealed, saying he never had committed any “willful misconduct” and didn't have any previous record of discipline, the Chronicle reported.
But on Wednesday, the state Supreme Court declined to review the decision.
“This decision deprives the public of a diverse jurist who is universally acknowledged to be a brilliant and exceptionally fair judicial officer,” said Paul S. Meyer, an attorney for Johnson.
One of six men charged in an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiracy, admitting that the group discussed an incredible scheme to snatch her at her lakeside vacation home and destroy a bridge to slow down police.
Ty Garbin’s guilty plea is a major catch for prosecutors, only about four months after arrests were made. His testimony could strengthen the government’s case against the others and back up evidence collected by informants and undercover agents.
Garbin appeared in federal court in Grand Rapids a few hours after a plea agreement loaded with details about the operation was filed, including his pledge to fully cooperate with investigators. There was no agreement on a sentencing range, but his assistance could help him when he returns July 8.
The FBI in October said it broke up a plot to kidnap Whitmer, a Democrat, by anti-government extremists upset over coronavirus restrictions she had imposed in Michigan. Six people were charged in federal court while eight others were charged in state court with aiding them.
U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker went through a series of questions about Garbin’s rights and his willingness to plead guilty.
When the judge asked if he had second thoughts, Garbin replied: “I do not, your honor.”
In the plea agreement, Garbin, 25, of Hartland, acknowledged more than six pages of stunning allegations. He said he and others trained with weapons in Munith, Michigan, and Cambria, Wisconsin, last summer and “discussed the plan to storm the Capitol and kidnap the governor.”
The plot, he said, eventually switched to Whitmer’s second home in Antrim County.
Garbin said he “advocated waiting until after the national election, when the conspirators expected widespread civil unrest to make it easier for them to operate.”
In September, the six men trained at Garbin’s property near Luther, Michigan, constructing a “shoot house” to resemble Whitmer’s vacation home and “assaulting it with firearms,” the plea deal states.
The men also made trips to Antrim County to study the home and the area, Garbin said.
Garbin said he sent a text message to someone who turned out to be a government informant, indicating that “if the bridge goes down it will stop the wave,” a suggestion that police would be delayed in responding to a kidnapping if a nearby bridge was blown up.
A federal appeals court has denied a Southern California church’s request to overturn the state’s coronavirus restrictions barring worship services indoors during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a newspaper report Saturday.
The Sacramento Bee said Friday’s ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals leaves the door open for addressing Gov. Gavin Newsom administration’s limits on church attendance if a California county is in a less-restrictive COVID-19 tier.
A three-judge panel ruled against South Bay United Pentecostal Church of Chula Vista over public health orders that restrict religious services from being held inside while virus case rates and hospitalizations remain high.
While the panel agreed the San Diego-area church is suffering “irreparable harm,” the judges believed California’s rules to curb the spread of the virus did not violate First Amendment rights, the Bee reported.
The judges said the ban on indoor service is directly tied to the state’s effects to curb the spread of COVID-19, which has killed 36,000 Californians and infected more than 3 million.
Newsom and the state have faced multiple lawsuits over restrictions on gatherings, church services, restaurant dining and other limits on activities aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19.
“We are mindful that ‘even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten,’” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote in the court’s opinion. “But we do not think this is what California has done.”
South Bay had appealed the original denial by U.S. District Judge Cynthia Bashant twice and were denied an emergency injunction from the U.S. Supreme Court in May.
The court’s 50-page ruling was skeptical of Newsom’s attendance limits during worship services, suggesting those rules could be struck down, the Bee said.
The panel said it believed the church could succeed in its claim that the state’s 100- and 200-person attendance caps were unconstitutional.
The judges sent the matter back to the lower court to consider the attendance caps.
Currently in California, indoor worship services are banned in all purple-tiered counties — those deemed to be at widespre
Breaking Legal News - POSTED: 2021/02/19 18:42
