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  Court Watch - Legal News


A federal appeals court scrutinized the impact of Idaho’s strict abortion ban on emergency medical care on Tuesday, weighing whether the ban criminalizing abortions should be enforceable in life- and health-threatening situations.

John Bursch, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom representing Idaho, asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel of 11 judges to urgently lift the injunction preventing the state from enforcing its abortion ban in emergency room settings, saying it “harms Idaho sovereignty, harms women, (and) harms unborn children.”

“It’s here before you now, you should decide it,” he said.

Idaho’s law makes it a felony to perform an abortion unless the procedure is necessary to prevent the death of the patient.

President Joe Biden’s administration sued Idaho two years ago, contending the law violates a federal rule called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, because it prevents doctors from performing abortions that save their patients from serious infections, organ loss or other major medical issues.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard the case earlier this year but bounced it back to the lower court on a procedural issue, leaving unanswered questions about the legality of the state abortion ban. That will be determined at a later date, but the 9th Circuit’s ruling could decide whether the law can be enforced while the lawsuit is still working its way through court.

During Tuesday’s hearing, the judges raised a number of hypothetical situations as they tried to determine whether the ban can coexist with EMTALA.

Judge Lawrence VanDyke raised the hypothetical of a doctor presented with an organ that would save a patient’s life but which was unethically harvested under state law. If a state has outlawed the use of questionably harvested donor organs, he asked, can the federal government require that treatment?

“Do you think a state’s ethical concerns … have any role to play?” asked VanDyke.

Catherine Carroll, an attorney for the U.S. government, said it was difficult to grapple with the hypothetical since organ transplants do not occur in emergency rooms, but said state ethical concerns about medical treatments could come into play only if the treatments did not violate EMTALA.

Judge Salvador Mendoza Jr. said that he lives in eastern Washington, not far from the Idaho border. The only obstetrics department in the nearby city of Sandpoint, Idaho, shut down after the abortion ban was passed, he noted, leaving no available medical services for women who are “bleeding out” from pregnancy complications, he said.

“That’s the very thing that Congress was trying to avoid” by establishing EMTALA, Mendoza said. “They were trying to set a baseline of medical care for the country.”

But Taylor Meehan, an attorney for the Idaho Legislature, said EMTALA is “not the statute to solve that particular circumstance.” She said an Idaho Supreme Court ruling in another lawsuit over the state’s abortion law made clear that abortion is allowed when patients are experiencing catastrophic bleeding.


Harvey Weinstein was hospitalized Monday following an “alarming blood test,” his attorney said, less than a week after the disgraced movie mogul filed a legal claim alleging substandard medical care at New York City’s notorious jail complex.

Weinstein, 72, was sent to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan for an “emergent treatment due to an alarming blood test result that requires immediate medical attention,” his attorney, Imran Ansari, said in a statement.

“It is expected that he will remain there until his condition stabilizes,” the statement continues. “His deprivation of care is not only medical malpractice, but a violation of his constitutional rights.”

A spokesperson for New York City’s Department of Correction did not immediately respond to an email. The agency’s inmate database confirmed that Weinstein had been transferred from Rikers Island to the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward in Manhattan.

Weinstein has been in city custody since earlier this year after the New York Court of Appeals overturned his 2020 rape conviction in the state. The case is set to be retried in 2025. Weinstein has denied any wrongdoing.

In a legal filing last week, Weinstein’s attorneys accused the city of providing him with substandard medical care for a litany of medical afflictions, which include chronic myeloid leukemia and diabetes.

“When I last visited him, I found him with blood spatter on his prison garb, possibly from IV’s, clothes that had not been washed for weeks, and he had not even been provided clean underwear — hardly sanitary conditions for someone with severe medical conditions,” Ansari said in a statement that likened Rikers Island to a “gulag.”

The troubled jail complex, located on an island in New York City’s East River, has faced growing scrutiny for its mistreatment of detainees and dangerous conditions. Last week, a federal judge cleared the way for a possible federal takeover of the jail system, finding the city had placed its incarcerated population in “unconstitutional danger.”

A publicist for Weinstein, Juda Engelmayer, echoed the allegation in a statement Monday.

“Mr. Weinstein, who is suffering from a number of illnesses, including leukemia, has been deprived the medical attention that someone in his medical state deserves, prisoner or not,” he said. “In many ways, this mistreatment constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”


Two New Hampshire fathers who were barred from school district events for wearing pink wristbands marked “XX” to represent female chromosomes insisted at a federal court hearing Thursday that they didn’t set out to harass or otherwise target a transgender soccer player at the game they attended.

But a judge hearing the case suggested the message the parents sent may matter more than their intentions.

Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote sued the Bow school district after being banned from school grounds for wearing the wristbands at their daughters’ soccer game in September. The no-trespass orders have since expired, but a judge is deciding whether the plaintiffs should be allowed to wear the wristbands and carry signs at upcoming school events, including basketball games, swim meets and a music concert, while the case proceeds.

Testifying at Thursday’s hearing, both men said that they did not view the wristbands as a protest against Parker Tirrell, a transgender girl on the opposing team, but rather as a show of support for their daughters and their teammates. U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe questioned whether there is a meaningful distinction and whether their intentions matter.

“Sometimes the message you think you’re sending might not be the message that is being sent,” he said.

McAuliffe asked Foote whether it occurred to him that a transgender person might interpret the pink XX wristbands as an attempt to invalidate their existence.

“If he’s a trans female, pink might be a color he likes,” Foote said.

McAuliffe also noted that while both plaintiffs said they had no problem with transgender people outside the issue of sports, they repeatedly referred to the athlete in question as a boy.

“You seem to go out of your way to suggest there’s no such thing as a trans girl,” McAuliffe said. Foote disagreed, saying it was “like learning a new language” to refer to transgender people.

In a separate courtroom earlier Thursday, another judge held a hearing on a lawsuit brought by Parker Tirrell and another student challenging the state law that bans transgender athletes in grades 5 to 12 from teams that align with their gender identity. It requires schools to designate all teams as either girls, boys or coed, with eligibility determined based on students’ birth certificates “or other evidence.”

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Landya McCafferty ruled earlier this year that the teens can try out for and play on girls school sports teams. The order only applies to those two individuals for now as they seek to overturn the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act on behalf of all transgender girl students in New Hampshire.

Lawyers for the teens said in court Thursday they hoped the matter could go to trial and be resolved before the start of the next school year in September. They said the teens’ school districts and others in the state have asked for guidance regarding the statute. Lawyers for the state said they needed more time to prepare.

Judge Talesha Saint-Marc suggested the timing of the trial was ambitious and asked that both sides talk further about scheduling. Gov. Chris Sununu, who signed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act into law in July, has said it “ensures fairness and safety in women’s sports by maintaining integrity and competitive balance in athletic competitions.” About half of states have adopted similar measures.

In the Bow case, school district officials have said they acted appropriately in sanctioning the parents for conduct they knew violated school policy at athletic events. They’ll explain their evidence on Friday. On Thursday, the plaintiff’s lawyer, Endel Kolde, accused the district of “breathtaking” overreach by asserting that the wristbands target transgender students in general, regardless of whether such students were present at the events.


A judge has postponed a decision on whether to undo President-elect Donald Trump’s hush money conviction as prosecutors consider how to proceed in light of last week’s election and his lawyers argue for dismissal so he can run the country.

The postponement announced Tuesday comes at a dramatic and dynamic point in the New York case, which focused on how Trump accounted for payments to a porn actor before the 2016 election and produced a first-ever conviction of a former commander-in-chief.

Sentencing had been set for Nov. 26. But Manhattan prosecutors now say they’re reassessing, and they appear open to the possibility that the proceedings can’t go as planned.

“These are unprecedented circumstances,” Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo wrote in an email to the court. He said prosecutors need to consider how to balance the “competing interests” of the jury’s verdict and the presidency.

Trump lawyer Emil Bove, meanwhile, argued the case must be thrown out altogether “to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern.”

The messages were exchanged over the weekend and released Tuesday, when Judge Juan M. Merchan had been set to rule on Trump lawyers’ earlier request to toss his conviction for a different reason — because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this summer on presidential immunity.

Instead, Merchan told Trump’s lawyers he’d halt proceedings and delay the ruling until at least Nov. 19 so that prosecutors can suggest a way forward. Both sides agreed to the one-week postponement.

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung heralded the delay. He said in a statement that the president-elect’s win makes it “abundantly clear that Americans want an immediate end to the weaponization of our justice system, including this case, which should have never been filed.”

Prosecutors declined to comment. A jury convicted Trump in May of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. The payout was to buy her silence about claims that she had sex with Trump.

Trump says they didn’t have sex, denies any wrongdoing and maintains the prosecution was a political tactic meant to harm his latest campaign. Trump is a Republican. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office brought the case, is a Democrat, as is Merchan.

Just over a month after the verdict, the Supreme Court ruled that ex-presidents can’t be prosecuted for actions they took in the course of running the country, and prosecutors can’t cite those actions even to bolster a case centered on purely personal conduct.

Trump’s lawyers cited that ruling to argue that the hush money jury got some evidence it shouldn’t have, such as Trump’s presidential financial disclosure form and testimony from some White House aides.

Prosecutors disagreed and said the evidence in question was only “a sliver” of their case.

Trump’s criminal conviction was a first for any ex-president. It left the 78-year-old facing the possibility of a fine, probation or up to four years in prison.


The Arizona Supreme Court has declined to hear Republican Kari Lake’s latest appeal over her defeat in the 2022 governor’s race, marking yet another loss in her attempt to overturn the race’s outcome.

The court made its refusal to take up the former TV anchor’s appeal public on Thursday without explaining its decision.

Lake, now locked in a U.S. Senate race against Democrat Ruben Gallego, had lost the governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs by over 17,000 votes.

The courts had previously rejected Lake’s claims that problems with ballot printers at some Maricopa County polling places on Election Day in 2022 were the result of intentional misconduct and that Maricopa County didn’t verify signatures on mail ballots as required by law. A judge also turned down Lake’s request to examine the ballot envelopes of 1.3 million early voters. In all, Lake had three trials related to the 2022 election.

Despite her earlier losses in court and a ruling affirming Hobbs’ victory, Lake had asked the Arizona Supreme Court to review her case, claiming she had new evidence to support her claims. Lawyers for Maricopa County told the court that Lake failed to present any new evidence that would change the courts’ findings.

Lake is among the most vocal of Republican candidates promoting lies that Donald Trump had won the 2020 election over President Joe Biden, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign for governor. While most other election deniers around the country conceded after losing their races, Lake did not.

The Lake campaign didn’t respond to an email seeking comment on the Supreme Court’s latest decision.


A divided Pennsylvania appeals court ruled Wednesday that the envelopes voters use to send in mail ballots do not need to have been accurately hand-dated, weighing in after the state Supreme Court sidestepped the issue and six days before the end of voting in the presidential election.

The 3-2 decision by Commonwealth Court upheld a Philadelphia judge’s ruling that 69 mail ballots should be counted in a pair of single-candidate state House of Representatives special elections held in September.

The majority said the mandate for exterior envelope dates, which are not needed to determine if a ballot has arrived in time, violates a state constitutional provision that says elections must be free and equal and no civil or military power can interfere with the “free exercise of the right of suffrage.”

The majority opinion by Judge Ellen Ceisler said the envelope dating rules “restrict the right to have one’s vote counted in the special election to only those voters who correctly handwrite the date on their mail ballots and effectively deny the right to all other qualified electors who sought to exercise the franchise by mail in a timely manner but made minor mistakes or omissions.”

Ceisler, in a footnote, urged the national and state Republican parties, which lost the case, “to proceed expeditiously should they wish to appeal this decision.”

A lawyer for the Republican parties, Linda A. Kerns, said an appeal will be filed in the coming days.

“We know that the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has already spoken on this issue,” Kerns said Wednesday. “Pennsylvania law requires voters to sign and date mail ballots — that is an important election integrity safeguard.”

Lawyers for the two Philadelphia voters who sued to have their ballots counted hailed the decision but acknowledged it may not be the last word.

“We hope that every county will abide by this ruling in its processing of mail ballots next month,” Mimi McKenzie, legal director of the Public Interest Law Center, said in a statement. She advised voters to still date their return envelopes and fix any balloting mistakes if they can.

In a dissent, Judge Matthew Wolf said his colleagues should have simply forwarded the case to the state Supreme Court or at least waited until after the election.

“The majority, in no uncertain terms, concludes that any county board of elections’ decision not to count undated or incorrectly dated mail-in and absentee ballots violates the free and equal elections clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution,” Wolf wrote.

Another dissent, by Judge Patricia McCullough, called the majority decision “a substantial change to voting rules at the eleventh hour and on specious grounds.”

“Wrong decisions issued at the wrong time are doubly threatening to the integrity of Pennsylvania’s elections and the public’s confidence in them,” McCullough said.

The state Supreme Court earlier this month rejected a request by voting rights and left-leaning groups to stop counties from throwing out mail-in ballots without the accurate, handwritten dates, citing earlier rulings that courts should avoid confusing voters close to elections.


A federal trial is set to begin Monday over claims that supporters of former President Donald Trump threatened and harassed a Biden-Harris campaign bus in Texas four years ago, disrupting the campaign on the last day of early voting.

The civil trial over the so-called “Trump Train” comes as Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris race into the final two months of their head-to-head fight for the White House in November.

Democrats on the bus said they feared for their lives as Trump supporters in dozens of trucks and cars nearly caused collisions, harassing their convoy for more than 90 minutes, hitting a Biden-Harris campaign staffer’s car and forcing the bus driver to repeatedly swerve for safety.

“For at least 90 minutes, defendants terrorized and menaced the driver and passengers,” the lawsuit alleges. “They played a madcap game of highway ‘chicken’ coming within three to four inches of the bus. They tried to run the bus off the road.”

The highway confrontation prompted an FBI investigation, which led then-President Trump to declare that in his opinion, “these patriots did nothing wrong.” Among those suing is former Texas state senator and Democratic nominee for governor Wendy Davis, who was on the bus that day. Davis rose to prominence in 2013 with her 13-hour filibuster of an anti-abortion bill in the state Capitol. The other three plaintiffs are a campaign volunteer, staffer and the bus driver.

The lawsuit names six defendants, accusing them of violating the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” an 1871 federal law to stop political violence and intimidation tactics.

The same law was used in part to indict Trump on federal election interference charges over attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection. Enacted by Congress during the Reconstruction Era, the law was created to protect Black men’s right to vote by prohibiting political violence.

Videos of the confrontation on Oct. 30, 2020, that were shared on social media, including some recorded by the Trump supporters, show a group of cars and pickup trucks — many adorned with large Trump flags — riding alongside the campaign bus as it traveled from San Antonio to Austin. The Trump supporters at times boxed in the bus, slowed it down, kept it from exiting the highway and repeatedly forced the bus driver to make evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision, the lawsuit says.

On the two previous days, Biden-Harris supporters were subjected to death threats, with some Trump supporters displaying weapons, according to the lawsuit. These threats in combination with the highway confrontation led Democrats to cancel an event later in the day.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, alleges the defendants were members of local groups near San Antonio that coordinated the confrontation.

Francisco Canseco, an attorney for three of the defendants, said his clients acted lawfully and did not infringe on the free speech rights of those on the bus.  “It’s more of a constitutional issue,” Canseco said. “It’s more of who has the greater right to speak behind their candidate.”

Judge Robert Pitman, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, is set to preside over Monday’s trial. He denied the defendants’ pretrial motion for a summary judgment in their favor, ruling last month that the KKK Act prohibits the physical intimidation of people traveling to political rallies, even when racial bias isn’t a factor.

While one of the defendants, Eliazar Cisneros, argued his group had a First Amendment right to demonstrate support for their candidate, the judge wrote that “assaulting, intimidating, or imminently threatening others with force is not protected expression.”

“Just as the First Amendment does not protect a driver waving a political flag from running a red light, it does not protect Defendants from allegedly threatening Plaintiffs with reckless driving,” Pitman wrote.

A prior lawsuit filed over the “Trump Train” alleged the San Marcos Police Department violated the Ku Klux Klan Act by failing to send a police escort after multiple 911 calls were made and a bus rider said his life was threatened. It accused officers of privately laughing and joking about the emergency calls. San Marcos settled the lawsuit in 2023 for $175,000 and a requirement that law enforcement get training on responding to political violence.

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