Supreme Court rules in favor of Second Amendment gun right
WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Supreme Court says Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices' first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.
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WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Supreme Court says Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices' first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.\nIn a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana's strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to prevent fraud.\nIt was the most important voting rights case since the Bush v. Gore dispute that sealed the 2000 election for George W. Bush. But the voter ID ruling lacked the conservative-liberal split that marked the 2000 case.\nThe law "is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting 'the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,'" Justice John Paul Stevens said in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy. Stevens was a dissenter in Bush v. Gore in 2000.\nJustices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also agreed with the outcome, but wrote separately.\nJustices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented, just as they did in 2000.\nMore than 20 states require some form of identification at the polls. Courts have upheld voter ID laws in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, but struck down Missouri's. Monday's decision comes a week before Indiana's presidential primary.\nThe decision also could spur efforts to pass similar laws in other states.\nKen Falk, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, said he hadn't reviewed the decision, but he was "extremely disappointed" by it. Falk has said voter ID laws inhibit voting, and a person's right to vote "is the most important right." The ACLU brought the case on behalf of Indiana voters.\nThe case concerned a state law, passed in 2005, that was backed by Republicans as a way to deter voter fraud. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed the law as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage elderly, poor and minority voters — those most likely to lack proper ID and who tend to vote for Democrats.\nThere is little history in Indiana of either in-person voter fraud — of the sort the law was designed to thwart — or voters being inconvenienced by the law's requirements. For the overwhelming majority of voters, an Indiana driver license serves as the identification.\n"We cannot conclude that the statute imposes 'excessively burdensome requirements' on any class of voters," Stevens said.\nStevens' opinion suggests that the outcome could be different in a state where voters could provide evidence that their rights had been impaired.\nBut in dissent, Souter said Indiana's voter ID law "threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands of the state's citizens."\nScalia, favoring a broader ruling in defense of voter ID laws, said, "The universally applicable requirements of Indiana's voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not 'even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.'"\nStevens said the partisan divide in Indiana, as well as elsewhere, was noteworthy. But he said that preventing fraud and inspiring voter confidence were legitimate goals of the law, regardless of who backed or opposed it.\nIndiana provides IDs free of charge to the poor and allows voters who lack photo ID to cast a provisional ballot and then show up within 10 days at their county courthouse to produce identification or otherwise attest to their identity.\nStevens said these provisions also help reduce the burden on people who lack driver licenses.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court upheld the most common method of lethal injection executions Wednesday, clearing the way for states to resume executions that have been on hold for nearly 7 months.\nThe justices, by a 7-2 vote, turned back a constitutional challenge to the procedures in place in Kentucky, which uses three drugs to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates. Similar methods are used by roughly three dozen states.\nThe governor of Virginia lifted his state’s moratorium on executions two hours after the high court issued its ruling.\n“We ... agree that petitioners have not carried their burden of showing that the risk of pain from maladministration of a concededly humane lethal injection protocol, and the failure to adopt untried and untested alternatives, constitute cruel and unusual punishment,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in an opinion that garnered only three votes. Four other justices, however, agreed with the outcome.\nRoberts’ opinion did leave open subsequent challenges to lethal injection practices if a state refused to adopt an alternative method that significantly reduced the risk of severe pain.\nJustices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented.\nExecutions have been on hold since September, when the court agreed to hear the Kentucky case. There was no immediate indication when they would resume, but prosecutors in several states said they would seek new execution dates if the court ruled favorably in the Kentucky case.\nForty-two people were executed last year among more than 3,300 people on death row across the country. Another roughly two dozen executions did not go forward because of the Supreme Court’s review, death penalty opponents said.\nThe argument against the three-drug protocol is that if the initial anesthetic does not take hold, the other two drugs can cause excruciating pain. One of those drugs, a paralytic, would render the prisoner unable to express his discomfort.\nThe case before the court came from Kentucky, where two death row inmates did not ask to be spared execution or death by injection. Instead, they wanted the court to order a switch to a single drug, a barbiturate, that causes no pain and can be given in a large enough dose to cause death.\nAt the very least, they said, the state should be required to impose tighter controls on the three-drug process to ensure that the anesthetic is given properly.\nRoberts said the one-drug method, frequently used in animal euthanasia, “has problems of its own, and has never been tried by a single state.”\nKentucky has had only one execution by lethal injection and it did not present any obvious problems, both sides in the case agreed.\nBut executions elsewhere, in Florida and Ohio, took much longer than usual, with strong indications that the prisoners suffered severe pain in the process. Workers had trouble inserting the IV lines that are used to deliver the drugs.\nRoberts said “a condemned prisoner cannot successfully challenge a state’s method of execution merely by showing a slightly or marginally safer alternative.”\nGinsburg, in her dissent, said her colleagues should have asked Kentucky courts to consider whether the state includes adequate safeguards to ensure a prisoner is unconscious and thus unlikely to suffer severe pain.\nJustice John Paul Stevens, while agreeing with the outcome, said the court’s decision would not end the debate over lethal injection. \n“I am now convinced that this case will generate debate not only about the constitutionality of the three-drug protocol, and specifically about the justification for the use of the paralytic agent, pancuronium bromide, but also about the justification for the death penalty itself,” Stevens said.\nStevens suggested that states could spare themselves legal costs and delays in executions by eliminating the use of the paralytic.\nTy Alper, a death penalty opponent and associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, said he expects challenges to lethal injections will continue in several states.\nThe Rev. Pat Delahanty, head of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said the ruling wasn’t a surprise.\n“We never expected it to do more than maybe slow down executions in Kentucky or elsewhere,” Delahanty said. “We’re going to be facing some executions soon.”
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday stepped into a legal fight over the use of curse words on the airwaves, the high court’s first major case on broadcast indecency in 30 years.\nThe case concerns a Federal Communications Commission policy that allows for fines against broadcasters for so-called “fleeting expletives,” one-time uses of the F-word or its close cousins.\nFox Broadcasting Co., along with ABC, CBS and NBC, challenged the new policy after the commission said broadcasts of entertainment awards shows in 2002 and 2003 were indecent because of profanity uttered by Bono, Cher and Nicole Richie.\nA federal appeals court said the new policy was invalid and could violate the First Amendment.\nNo fines were issued in the incidents, but the FCC could impose fines for future violations of the policy.\nThe case before the court technically involves only two airings on Fox of the “Billboard Music Awards” in which celebrities’ expletives were broadcast over the airwaves.\nFCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Monday that he was pleased with the court’s decision.\n“The Commission, Congress and most importantly parents understand that protecting our children is our greatest responsibility,” he said in a prepared statement. “I continue to believe we have an obligation then to enforce laws restricting indecent language on television and radio when children are in the audience.”\nThe case will be argued in the fall.\nThe FCC appealed to the Supreme Court after the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York nullified the agency’s enforcement regime regarding “fleeting expletives.” By a 2-1 vote, the appeals court said the FCC had changed its policy and failed to adequately explain why it had done so.\nThe appeals court, acting on a complaint by the networks, nullified the policy until the agency could return with a better explanation for the change. In the same opinion, the court also said the agency’s position was probably unconstitutional.\nThe court rejected the FCC’s policy on procedural grounds, but was “skeptical that the commission can provide a reasoned explanation for its fleeting expletive regime that would pass constitutional muster.”\nSolicitor General Paul Clement, representing the FCC and the Bush administration, argued that the decision “places the commission in an untenable position,” powerless to stop the airing of expletives even when children are watching.\nThe FCC has pending before it “hundreds of thousands of complaints” regarding the broadcast of expletives, Clement said. He argued that the appeals court decision has left the agency “accountable for the coarsening of the airwaves while simultaneously denying it effective tools to address the problem.”\nThe appeal also argued that the FCC’s explanation of its policy was well reasoned and that the appeals court decision was at odds with the landmark 1978 indecency case, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, the last broadcast indecency case heard by the Supreme Court.\nThe case will be argued in the fall.\nThe case is FCC v. Fox Television Stations, 07-582.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed inclined to reduce the $2.5 billion award of punitive damages to victims of the Exxon Valdez disaster.\nSeveral justices indicated they think the amount approved by a federal appeals court is too high, although there was no apparent consensus about how much Exxon Mobil Corp. should have to pay for the 1989 accident in which its 987-foot tanker ran aground on a reef and dumped 11 million gallons of oil into Alaskan waters.\nJustices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter suggested that perhaps a reasonable number would be twice the amount of money the company has paid to compensate victims for economic losses. Walter Dellinger, representing Exxon, said the company has paid about $500 million in such costs.\nOverall, Exxon has paid $3.4 billion in fines, penalties, cleanup costs, claims and other expenses resulting from the worst oil spill in U.S. history.\n“Exxon gained nothing by what went wrong in this case and paid dearly for it,” Dellinger said, in urging the court to erase the punitive damages judgment that has been upheld by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.\nStanford University law professor Jeffrey Fisher said the nearly 33,000 commercial fishermen, Native Alaskans, landowners, businesses and local governments he represents have each received about $15,000 so far “for having their lives destroyed.”\nFisher said nothing in prior Supreme Court decisions should cause the justices to overturn the $2.5 billion award, about $75,000 for each plaintiff.\nBut Souter said the court has struggled for the past decade to limit excessive punitive damages awards and wondered why the justices should not come up with a number in this case.\n“Would that be illegitimate or unwise?” he asked Fisher.\n“I’ll stick with unwise, Justice Souter,” Fisher said.\nIt was less clear how the court would resolve the issue of whether the company could be held liable at all for the acts of Exxon Valdez captain Joseph Hazelwood. Hazelwood was not on the ship’s bridge when the accident occurred and had been drinking shortly before it left port, both in violation of Coast Guard rules and company policy.\nJustice Samuel Alito, who owns Exxon stock, is not taking part in the case. A 4-4 split on that or any issue would leave the appeals court ruling in place.\nTwo brothers from Cordova, Alaska, were in line in front of the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning, waiting to watch the arguments inside.\nCommercial fisherman Steve Copeland, who was 41 at the time of the spill, said he cannot afford to retire because his business has never recovered from the steep decline it suffered due to the disaster.\nHis brother, Tom, said Exxon “needs to get told they need to be a better corporate citizen.”\nA jury initially awarded $287 million to compensate for economic losses and $5 billion in punitive damages. The appeals court cut the punitive damages in half. The compensatory damages have been paid.\nExxon argues that long-standing maritime law and the 1970s-era Clean Water Act should bar any punitive damages, which are intended both to punish behavior and deter a repeat. The company says it should not be held accountable for Hazelwood’s reckless conduct.\nThe plaintiffs say the judgment, representing three weeks of Exxon’s 2006 profit, is rational and proportionate. It takes account of Exxon’s decision to allow Hazelwood to command the ship, despite knowing he had an ongoing drinking problem, the plaintiffs contend.\nThe case is Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, 07-219.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court dealt a setback Tuesday to civil rights and privacy advocates who oppose the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.\nThe justices, without comment, turned down an appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union to let it pursue a lawsuit against the program that began shortly after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.\nThe action underscored the difficulty of mounting a challenge to the eavesdropping, which remains classified and was confirmed by President Bush only after a newspaper article revealed its existence.\n“It’s very disturbing that the president’s actions will go unremarked upon by the court,” said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s national security project. “In our view, it shouldn’t be left to executive branch officials alone to determine the limits.”\nThe Terrorist Surveillance Program no longer exists, although the administration has maintained it was legal.\nThe ACLU sued on behalf of itself, other lawyers, reporters and scholars, arguing that the program was illegal and that they had been forced to alter how they communicate with foreigners who were likely to have been targets of the wiretapping.\nA federal judge in Detroit largely agreed, but the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit, saying the plaintiffs could not prove their communications had been monitored and thus could not prove they had been harmed by the program.\nThe government has refused to turn over information about the closely guarded program that could reveal who has been under surveillance.\nACLU officials described the situation as a “Catch-22” because the government says the identities of people whose communications have been intercepted is secret. But only people who know they have been wiretapped can sue over the program.\nA lawsuit filed by an Islamic charity met a similar fate. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year ruled against the Oregon-based U.S. arm of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, concluding that a key piece of evidence is protected as a state secret.\nIn that case, the charity alleged the National Security Agency illegally listened to its calls. The charity had wanted to introduce as evidence a top-secret call log it received mistakenly from the Treasury Department.\nA separate lawsuit against telecommunications companies that have cooperated with the government is pending in the San Francisco-based appeals court. A U.S. district court also is examining whether the warrantless surveillance of people in the United States violates the law that regulates the wiretapping of suspected terrorists and requires the approval of a secret court.\nThe administration announced in January 2007 that it would put intercepts of communications on U.S. soil under the oversight of that court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.\nThe ACLU, in urging the justices to consider its case, said that because the administration voluntarily ended the warrantless wiretapping, it could easily restart it.\nThe administration acknowledged the existence of the program in late 2005, after the New York Times published an article about it.\nThe White House said the monitoring was necessary because the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act left dangerous gaps in the government’s eavesdropping authority.\nLast August, Congress made temporary changes to FISA that made the warrantless wiretapping legal in some instances and also extended immunity from lawsuits to telecommunications companies that help with the intercepts.\nThose changes expired over the weekend, amid disagreements between congressional Democrats and President Bush over the immunity issue.\nExisting wiretaps can continue and any new surveillance the government wants to institute has to follow the FISA rules, which could require court warrants.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court appeared ready Wednesday to uphold the nation’s strictest requirement that voters show photo identification before casting a ballot.\nThe justices are faced with a partisan dispute that echoes the bitterly divided decision that sealed the 2000 presidential election for George W. Bush. Now, as then, the court seemed divided along ideological lines.\nWednesday’s arguments were over a challenge to an Indiana law, passed in 2005, that is backed by Republicans as a prudent way to deter voter fraud. Democrats and civil rights groups oppose the law as unconstitutional and call it a thinly veiled effort to discourage elderly, poor and minority voters – those most likely to lack proper ID and who tend to vote for Democrats – from voting.\nBut Justice Anthony Kennedy, often a key vote on the court, did not sound persuaded that the challengers had made their case.\n“You want us to invalidate a statute on the ground that it’s a minor inconvenience to a small percentage of voters?” Kennedy said near the end of the lively session. Kennedy did, however, voice concern over some aspects of obtaining an ID, including the difficulty the poor have in getting the birth certificates that are needed to get photo IDs.\nMore than 20 states require some form of identification at the polls. Courts have upheld voter ID laws in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, but struck down Missouri’s. The Indiana case should be decided by late June, in time for the November elections.\nPaul Smith, representing the challengers, told the justices that there is no evidence of in-person voter fraud in Indiana. He said the law is a subtle way “to skew the outcome on election days.”\nIndiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher said the vast majority of Indiana voters easily comply with the law. \n“You’re talking about an infinitesimal portion of the electorate that could be burdened,” Fisher said under sharp questioning from Justice David Souter.\nThe justices could use the case to instruct courts on how to weigh claims of voter fraud versus those of disenfranchisement.
WASHINGTON – Serious problems in state death penalty systems compromise fairness and accuracy in capital punishment cases and justify a nationwide freeze on executions, the American Bar Association says.\nProblems cited in a report released Sunday by the lawyers’ organization include:\n• Spotty collection and preservation of DNA evidence, which has been used to exonerate more than 200 inmates;\n• Misidentification by eyewitnesses;\n• False confessions from defendants; and\n• Persistent racial disparities that make death sentences more likely when victims are white.\nThe report is a compilation of separate reviews done over the past three years about how the death penalty operates in eight states: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.\nTeams that studied the systems in Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania did not call for a halt to executions in those states. But the ABA said every state with the death penalty should review its execution procedures before putting anyone else to death.\n“After carefully studying the way states across the spectrum handle executions, it has become crystal clear that the process is deeply flawed,” said Stephen F. Hanlon, chairman of the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project. “The death penalty system is rife with irregularity.”\nThe ABA, which takes no position on capital punishment, did not study lethal injection procedures that are under challenge across the nation. The procedures will be reviewed by the Supreme Court early next year in a case from Kentucky.\nState and federal courts have effectively stopped most executions pending a high court decision.
WASHINGTON – Chief Justice John Roberts walked out of a hospital in Maine on Tuesday, released a day after he suffered a seizure. The White House said he told President Bush he was doing fine.\nRoberts strode briskly out of the Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockport, Maine, wearing a blue sport coat, open collar shirt and slacks. He waved to onlookers before getting into a waiting sports utility vehicle for a short trip to a dock, where he then took a pontoon boat to his summer home on Hupper Island, near Port Clyde, Maine.\nRoberts had no response when a reporter hollered, “How are you feeling?”\nThe chief justice, 52, plans to continue his summer vacation, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said. She said that doctors found no cause for concern after evaluating Roberts.\nRoberts was hospitalized after he fell on a dock near his home on Monday. He had a prior unexplained seizure in 1993. Bush had called Roberts earlier Tuesday, and press secretary Tony Snow said the president was assured the chief justice was doing well.\nSnow said that Roberts “sounded like he was in \ngreat spirits.”\nDoctors who examined Roberts after his seizure said they found no tumor, stroke or any other explanation for the episode.\nRoberts told the White House of his previous seizure when Bush nominated him to the nation’s highest court and “it was taken into consideration,” Snow said. Roberts also had physical exams that were forwarded to relevant members of Congress. “He was very open about it,” Snow said.\nThe spokesman did not know whether outside experts were consulted or whether Bush himself was informed at the time but said it was determined that Roberts had a clean bill of health and was competent to serve.\nTwo Senate Judiciary Committee aides who were involved in Roberts’ confirmation hearing in 2005 said the committee was aware of a previous seizure whose cause was never diagnosed. The sources would not say whether Roberts disclosed that he took any medication as a result. Such health information is often provided to the panel in private briefings, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.\nBy definition, someone who has had more than one seizure without any other cause is determined to have epilepsy, said Dr. Marc Schlosberg, a Washington Hospital Center neurologist who is not involved in the Roberts case.\nWhether Roberts will need anti-seizure medications to prevent another is something he and his doctor will have to decide. After two seizures, the likelihood of another at some point is greater than 60 percent.\nEpilepsy is merely a term for a seizure disorder, but it is a loaded term because it makes people think of someone who has frequent seizures, cautioned Dr. Edward Mkrdichian, a neurosurgeon at the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch.
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the federal government on Monday to take a fresh look at regulating carbon dioxide emissions from cars, a rebuke to Bush administration policy on global warming.\nIn a 5-4 decision, the court said the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from cars.\nGreenhouse gases are air pollutants under the landmark environmental law, Justice John Paul Stevens said in his majority opinion.\nThe court’s four conservative justices – Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas – dissented.\nMany scientists believe greenhouse gases, flowing into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, are leading to a warming of the Earth, rising sea levels and other marked ecological changes.\nThe politics of global warming have changed dramatically since the court agreed last year to hear its first global warming case.\n“In many ways, the debate has moved beyond this,” said Chris Miller, director of the global warming campaign for Greenpeace, one of the environmental groups that sued the EPA. “All the front-runners in the 2008 presidential campaign, both Democrats and Republicans, even the business community, are much further along on this than the Bush administration is.”\nDemocrats took control of Congress last November. The world’s leading climate scientists reported in February that global warming is “very likely” caused by man and is so severe that it will “continue for centuries.” Former Vice President Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” – making the case for quick action on climate change – won an Oscar. Business leaders say they are increasingly open to congressional action to cut greenhouse gases emissions, of which carbon dioxide is the largest.\nWhite House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the Bush administration questioned whether it had the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant. “Now the Supreme Court has settled that matter for us, and we’re going to have to take a look and analyze it and see where we go from there.”\n“We’re going to have to let EPA take a good look at it, and they’re going to have to analyze it and think about what it means for any future policy decisions,” she added.\nCarbon dioxide is produced when fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas are burned. One way to reduce those emissions is to have more fuel-efficient cars.\nThe court had three questions before it.\n–Do states have the right to sue the EPA to challenge its decision?\n–Does the Clean Air Act give EPA the authority to regulate tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases?\n–Does EPA have the discretion not to regulate those emissions?\nThe court said yes to the first two questions. On the third, it ordered EPA to re-evaluate its contention that it has the discretion not to regulate tailpipe emissions. The court said the agency has so far provided a “laundry list” of reasons that include foreign policy considerations.\nThe majority said the agency must tie its rationale more closely to the Clean Air Act.\n“EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change,” Stevens said. He was joined by his liberal colleagues, Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, and the court’s swing voter, Justice Anthony Kennedy.\nThe lawsuit was filed by 12 states and 13 environmental groups that had grown frustrated by the Bush administration’s inaction on global warming.\nIn his dissent, Roberts focused on the issue of standing, whether a party has the right to file a lawsuit.\nThe court should simply recognize that redress of the kind of grievances spelled out by the state of Massachusetts is the function of Congress and the chief executive, not the federal courts, Roberts said.
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday wrestled with voluntary integration plans in public schools, asking whether programs in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle are acceptable moves toward student diversity or other names for illegal racial quotas.\nJustice Anthony Kennedy, who could hold the decisive vote, joined his conservative colleagues in expressing deep skepticism about the programs.\nThe Seattle district seems to be telling its high school students who are subject to the plan that "everybody can get a meal" but that only certain people can get "dessert," Kennedy said. He was referring to the fact that some students did not get assigned to the schools they preferred based on their race.\nAbout Louisville's system-wide assignment plan, Kennedy said, "It's a troubling case."\nThe court's four liberal justices indicated they see no constitutional problem with school districts that factor in a student's race in an effort to have individual school populations approximate the racial makeup of the entire system. Federal appeals courts have upheld both programs.\nIn Louisville, the school system spent 25 years under a federal court order to desegregate its system. The school board decided to keep much of the court-ordered plan in place to prevent schools from resegregating.\n"What's constitutionally required one day is constitutionally prohibited the next day? That's very odd," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.\nFrancis Mellen Jr., representing the Louisville schools, called the plan a success story that enjoys broad community support, including among parents of white and black students.\nKennedy wanted to know that even assuming the school board's good faith, can it assign students "based on the color of an individual child's skin"?\nThe justices and lawyers arguing the cases referred repeatedly to a 2003 Supreme Court ruling that permitted the limited consideration of race to attain a diverse student body on the college level.\nChief Justice John Roberts expressed concern about making school assignments "based on skin color" and not "any other factor."\nAttorney Michael Madden, representing the Seattle school district, said race is just one factor that it is relied on only in some instances and then only at the end of a lengthy process.\nMadden drew a distinction between the Seattle school program and the subject of the court's 2003 decision, which narrowly approved the University of Michigan law school affirmative action admissions program.\n"This is not like being denied admission to a state's flagship university," Madden told Roberts. The Seattle students are "not being denied admission, they are being redistributed."\nAmid the oral arguments, pro-affirmative action demonstrators bearing "Fight For Equality" placards marched on the sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court in a brisk wind. A parent-teachers group from Chicago and several civil rights groups were among those sponsoring the demonstration.\nDemonstrators chanted "Equal education, not segregation" and "We won't go to the back of the bus, integration is a must." Some held signs that read "Stop racism now." Among the crowd were representatives of the National Organization for Women, the NAACP and students from Howard University.\nThough outnumbered, there were some in the crowd from the other side.\n"Regardless of how well-motivated, allowing the state to engineer racial mixing only creates racial stereotypes and increases racial tension," said Terry Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm. "The court needs to put an end to state-mandated tinkering with race."\nThe school policies in contention are designed to keep schools from segregating along the same lines as neighborhoods. In Seattle, only high school students are affected. Louisville's plan applies system-wide.\n"The plan has prevented the resegregation that inevitably would result from the community's segregated housing patterns and that most likely would produce many schools that might be perceived as 'failing,'" the Seattle school district said in its brief to the high court.\nThe Bush administration has taken the side of the parents who are suing the school districts, much as it intervened on behalf of college and graduate students who challenged Michigan's affirmative action policies in 2003.\nThe court upheld race-conscious admissions in higher education in a 5-4 opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has since retired.
The IU Department of Economics and the India Studies Program will sponsor a conference about child labor in India on Thursday and Friday in Wylie Hall.\nThe 2006 Child Labor Conference will include a variety of perspectives from selected speakers, said Gerhard Glomm, professor and chair of the economics department. Five speakers from IU, including Glomm, will present at the conference, along with five others from other universities and organizations that specialize in economics.\nThe goal of the conference is to understand child labor issues better and to figure out policies that can be put into place to combat it, Glomm said. \nIndia is the prime focus of the conference because two of the scholars in the economics department selected had written papers regarding the child labor crisis in India, Glomm said. The issue of child labor is crucial to understand because kids are going to work in other countries instead of getting an education, he said. By gathering various experts to discuss this, more light will be shed on the problem, and beneficial solutions may arise.\n"Child labor is one of the biggest policy problems around anywhere," Glomm said.\nGlomm said India is an appropriate focus since most of its citizens are farmers; they must depend on the weather for whatever profit they get. If there is a bad crop, children must work in factories instead of going to school in order to earn enough money for their families to survive, he said.\nThe conference runs from 4 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday and will resume 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Friday. Topics to be discussed include "Buying Out Child Labor" and "The Ten Year Consequences of Child Labor"
WASHINGTON -- More than 10,000 fugitives wanted for murder, rape, child abuse and other crimes have been arrested in the largest coordinated crackdown by federal, state and local law enforcement officials in history.\nThe number of arrests during the weeklong effort was 10 times the average for such a period, according to the U.S. Marshals Service, which led the nationwide dragnet timed to coincide with National Victims' Rights Week.\nAt the same time, however, those arrests represent just 1 percent of the 1 million fugitives in the FBI's national database, according to the Marshals Service.\nMore than 150 of those nabbed April 4-10 were wanted for murder, 550 were sought on rape or sexual assault charges, and more than 600 had outstanding arrest warrants for armed robbery, federal officials said Thursday.\nAmong those captured were 150 gang members and 100 unregistered sex offenders, said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who held a news conference with U.S. Marshals Service Director Ben Reyna to announce the results of "Operation Falcon" -- an acronym for Federal And Local Cops Organized Nationally.\nJose Rivera-Sanchez was among the fugitives who had been on the run for years, living in Waterbury, Conn., until his arrest last week, 11 years after tunneling out of a prison in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. He had been serving a 37-year sentence for attempted murder, assault and robbery when he and nine other inmates escaped. One remains at large, said Marshals Service Spokesman Manuel Varela.\nOthers arrested included Eddie Kelly, 24, wanted by Dallas police for allegedly killing a man by shooting him five times after leaving a drug house on Feb. 13, and Marcel Baldwin, 21, of Atlanta, who was found beneath a trap door in his kitchen. He was wanted on charges of assault and sexual offense against a child.\nNathan T. Speights, 28, of Syracuse, N.Y., was picked up in Baltimore on Sunday an hour after a warrant was issued for him in connection with the April 3 killing of Mark Sardella, 26, outside a private motorcycle club in Syracuse.\nGonzales said more than 70 percent of those picked up had prior arrests for violent crimes.\n"We know from history -- and from the bitter experiences of far too many victims -- that a fugitive with a rap sheet is more desperate, more predatory, and more likely to commit the crimes that plague citizens and communities," Gonzales said at the news conference\nThe number of fugitives caught was at 10,472 Thursday, but officials said that could change as local police finish processing heavy caseloads from the past week.\nCongress gave the Marshals Service more money and authority to go after fugitives when it refocused the FBI's mission toward stopping terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Marshals Service spokesman David Turner, noting that the agency now has five permanent regional task forces to search for fugitives.\nThe Marshals Service spent $900,000 on the weeklong exercise, most of it to pay overtime to local and state police. More than 3,000 officers from 960 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies took part.\n"Our goal was to find out what impact we'd have in a nationwide effort," Reyna said.\nSome of those arrested, particularly for the most violent crimes, would have been high on the marshals' lists no matter when warrants were issued. But officials said it was important to get state, local and federal officials to work together on such a broad initiative.\nFor all of last year, marshals arrested more than 36,000 people wanted on federal warrants, and worked with state and local authorities in catching another 31,600 fugitives, according to the Marshals Service's Web site.
WASHINGTON -- Three men have been indicted on charges they plotted to attack financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C.\nA four-count indictment unsealed Tuesday accuses Dhiran Barot, Nadeem Tarmohammed and Qaisar Shaffi of scouting the New York Stock Exchange and Citicorp Building in New York; the Prudential Building in Newark, N.J.; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in the District of Columbia.\nThe three men, already in custody in England, were charged with three conspiracy counts and providing material support to terrorists.\n"They are indicted here, and whether or not they actually ever are extradited here I guess is a matter of discussion," said New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. "But I think it's important, both substantively and symbolically important, that you come here, you do this type of surveillance, we're not going to forget."\nU.S. officials claim Barot is a senior al-Qaida figure, known variously as Abu Eisa al-Hindi, Abu Musa al-Hindi and Issa al-Britani, who scouted prominent financial targets in the United States at the behest of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.\nProsecutors say the men conducted surveillance on the buildings between August 2000 and April 2001, including video surveillance in Manhattan around April 2001. U.S. officials previously have described detailed surveillance photos and documents, which they believe came from Barot, that were found on a computer seized in Pakistan last summer.\nThat information prompted the government in August to raise the risk of a terrorist attack to "high" for those specific financial institutions. The color-coded threat level for the rest of the nation remained at yellow, or elevated, the middle of a five-point scale.\nFederal authorities, who acknowledged the threat was based mainly on years-old intelligence, said the decision to raise the threat level was based on an abundance of caution and because of the lengthy planning and plotting record of the terrorist network known as al-Qaida.\nThe decision was made during a summer of unease over the possibility that terrorists might launch attacks on the political conventions or otherwise try to disrupt the presidential election. In March, bombs on trains in Madrid killed 191 people days before Spanish elections.\nCritics attributed the elevated threat level to political calculations by the Bush administration.\nThe threat level was lowered in November to yellow for the buildings.\nThe men were among eight people arrested in August in England on terrorism-related charges.\nBarot, 32, was charged there with possessing reconnaissance plans for the U.S. institutions and notebooks containing information on explosives, poisons, chemicals and related matters "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism."\nTarmohammed, 26, was charged there, along with Barot, with possessing plans of the Prudential building. Shaffi, 25, also was charged in Britain with possessing an extract from the "Terrorist's Handbook" on the preparation of chemicals, explosive recipes and other information.\nThe U.S. intends to seek their extradition once the British prosecutions are completed, Justice Department spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said.\nTheir trial in England is expected to begin in January, according to the Crown Prosecution Service.\nBritish proceedings and any sentences would have to be completed before extradition could be possible, the Crown Prosecution Service said. The service also said that until then, none of them would be available for interrogation by U.S. agents.
WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Monday he would move aggressively to prosecute obscenity cases, and he laid out a broader agenda much like that of his predecessor, John Ashcroft.\nIn his first lengthy address since becoming attorney general in early February, Gonzales said people who distribute obscene materials do not enjoy constitutional guarantees of free speech.\n"I am committed to prosecuting these crimes aggressively," he said to a Washington meeting of the California-based Hoover Institution.\nThe Justice Department is appealing the dismissal of an obscenity case in Pittsburgh in which a federal judge said prosecutors went too far in trying to block the sale of pornographic movies over the Internet and through the mail. The case initially was prosecuted under Ashcroft.\nGonzales, the son of Mexican immigrants, said the Justice Department also would continue its recent stepped-up activity in human trafficking investigations and prosecutions. "Its victims are usually aliens, many of them women and children who are smuggled into our country and held in bondage," he said.\nThe Justice Department also is sending teams of federal agents to five more cities struggling with violent crime, Gonzales said, extending a program begun last year in 15 cities. Investigators focus on prosecuting people for firearms violations, which often accompany gang activity, illegal drug organizations and organized crime groups.\nThe cities are: Camden, N.J.; Fresno, Calif.; Hartford, Conn.; Houston and New Orleans.\nAmong other priorities Gonzales noted:\n• Ending Senate blocking of judicial nominees, a "broken process that must be fixed," before there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court.\n• Renewing provisions of the USA Patriot Act that are set to expire at the end of the year, saying the law has been an important tool in preventing terror attacks in the United States.\n• Amending the Constitution to give crime victims the right to participate in prosecutions and sentencings.\nAlso Monday, the Justice Department announced that Christopher Wray, head of the criminal division since June 2003, was resigning.\nWray is the first high-ranking official to leave since Gonzales took over as attorney general. No replacement has been named.
WASHINGTON - Bones found in a Washington park Wednesday are the remains of Chandra Levy, the federal intern who disappeared more than a year ago, police announced Wednesday.\nPolice chief Charles H. Ramsey said the identification was made through dental records.\nLevy's disappearance riveted the nation for months and contributed to the political demise of her hometown congressman, Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif.\nIdentification of the remains did not end the mystery of her death. Ramsey said the manner and cause were still unknown.\n"The remains found earlier today are in fact Chandra Levy," Ramsey said. The remains were discovered in Washington's Rock Creek Park by a man walking his dog. "He was searching for turtles," Ramsey said.\nLevy, 24, of Modesto, Calif., disappeared sometime after logging off her computer about 1 p.m. on May 1, 2001. When police searched her apartment they found her wallet, credit card, computer and cell phone. Only her keys were missing.\nPolice conducted intensive searches in the weeks following her disappearance but turned up no solid clues. They looked at a variety of theories - murder, suicide or that Levy had gone into hiding or lost her memory.\nThey also questioned Condit several times. The 54-year-old, married lawmaker denied having anything to do with the disappearance but did eventually acknowledge an affair with her, a police source said.\nPolice repeatedly said Condit was not a suspect.\nThe police had found evidence last year on Levy's laptop computer that she had searched a Web site for the park's Klingle Mansion on the day she vanished.\nThe bones were found about a mile north of the mansion and about four miles away from Levy's apartment. Friends had said Levy frequented the 1,754-acre park, located in northwest Washington.\nLevy came to Washington for an internship with the Bureau of Prisons and lived in an apartment. In late April 2001, her internship was abruptly cut short when supervisors learned she was ineligible to continue because she had finished her college coursework the previous December.\nA sociable, earnest student who enjoyed travel abroad with her family and staying fit, Levy was last seen April 30 when she canceled her membership at a health club near her apartment.\nShe had been preparing to return to California for graduation from the University of Southern California and sent her parents, Dr. Robert and Susan Levy, an e-mail on May 1 noting airfares for the trip home.\nThe Levys called police five days later when they could not reach her, and her father also telephoned Condit asking for his help.\nCondit called Levy a good friend and established a reward fund to help find her. In July, he reportedly told police he was having an affair, though publicly he never made such a disclosure, saying only they shared a close relationship.\nCondit, abandoned by all but a few Democratic allies, lost the Democratic primary in March to former protege Dennis Cardoza, a state assemblyman.\nLevy's mother had recalled her as a strong-willed and independent woman who enjoyed outdoor pursuits such as whitewater rafting and skiing.\nAt San Francisco State University, Levy studied journalism and worked as a reporter and sports editor at the Golden Gater, the twice-a-week student paper.\nIn September 2000, the Levys sent their daughter east for a paid internship in the public information office at Bureau of Prisons that would complete her master's degree in public administration from the University of Southern California. Levy hoped to combine her interests in public policy and the criminal justice system.\nWithin weeks of arriving, Levy and a friend visited Condit's office, where they had their photo snapped with the congressman. He also took them to the House gallery to watch him vote. Within months Levy told family members she was having an affair with Condit.\nAfter her disappearance, police searched Condit's apartment with his consent and obtained a DNA sample from him. Condit submitted to a lie detector test arranged by his lawyer, who said the congressman was found to be truthful when denying any knowledge about what happened to Levy.\nA grand jury has been reviewing Levy's disappearance and whether Condit or his aides obstructed the investigation. The grand jury subpoenaed documents from Condit last year.