As the U.S. House impeached President Trump for the second time for "incitement of insurrection" Wednesday afternoon, many legal and political science scholars have decried his behavior and are demanding accountability to the Constitution. The Constitution lays the ground rules in Article 2, Section 4...
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Five employees asked to resign with just a few hours' notice Last Friday, within hours of being appointed by State Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby as the head of a key judicial office, Andrew Heath began purging it of some career employees. As new Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) director, Heath forced top senior employees to resign with only a few hours' notice and replaced them with Republican loyalists, including the daughter of a conservative appellate judge.
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Backlogged court system and delayed trials create social justice inequities during COVID-19
While the number of people in county jails has dropped because of the pandemic, some incarcerated people in North Carolina are staying locked up longer, a study monitoring these populations shows.
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WASHINGTON— The fate of the sweeping 2010 health care law known as Obamacare is again in limbo, with the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday scheduled to hear arguments over whether the statute should be overturned. States are at the heart of the case; nearly every one has made an argument about why the Affordable Care Act, as it's officially titled, should be kept or struck down.
...At the end of long night of close contests, Republican candidates appeared on the verge of pulling off a somewhat surprising clean sweep of statewide races for the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. With an unknown number of mail-in ballots yet to be counted, however, at least one (and possibly others) appear to remain too close to call.
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One month after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, having argued that the nation needs the Equal Rights Amendment, the surviving justices have dismissed an effort by women’s groups to enshrine the ERA in the U.S. Constitution. The court refused to take up the matter at the behest of ERA proponents, who will instead make their case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, which they’d hoped to bypass.
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Republicans, including Tillis, endorse controversial nomination while Democrats express deep concerns Day Two of the extraordinary U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett stretched into the evening hours yesterday, but the event generated few surprises and little new information as the nominee avoided taking controversial stances.
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[Editor’s note: On Friday, Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG), the nation’s largest network of attorneys committed to upholding human rights and equal justice for all, in partnership with Alliance for Justice, a national association of over 120 organizations that leads the fight for a fair America, submitted the following open letter, signed by more than 5,000 attorneys representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia, to the United States Senate objecting to the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. It is the largest known lawyer opposition letter to a Supreme Court nominee. Click here to see explore the signatures]
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Inactive registered voters in North Carolina can cast ballots In the last decade, millions of registered voters across the county have been removed from voter rolls. In 2019, Ohio removed more than 460,000 voter registration files from its list. Georgia removed 313,000 people from its rolls in October 2019 alone, and in Michigan, from 2011 to 2018, 1.2 million voters were removed from voter lists.
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Capital punishment arrived in the colony of North Carolina as part of English common law. Even misdemeanors warranted harsh corporal punishment and a long list of felonies qualified for the death penalty. People were executed not only for murder but also rape, theft, arson, and assault.
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Trump shifts focus of his accusations from illegal immigrants to advanced voting TOPEKA, Kansas — Scott Moore had never heard of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program before election officials in Kansas and Florida exposed his personal information, along with 944 other Kansas voters.
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Right now, our nation is in a moment of reckoning with our criminal punishment system. We are finally seeing clearly what should have been obvious long ago: The system has its knee on the necks of Black people. In North Carolina, as we begin a long-overdue conversation about the future of police and prisons, we must confront the punishment that sits at the top of that system, condoning all its other cruelties — the death penalty.
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WASHINGTON—Four years ago, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina was among 11 Republicans on the GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee who wrote a letter explaining why they would not be holding hearings on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. There were still eight months until Election Day in 2016...
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As part of our ongoing effort to inform North Carolinians about the state judiciary, Policy Watch is publishing a series of Q&A’s with the candidates seeking statewide judicial office this fall. Each of the 16 candidates (six who are contesting three Supreme Court seats and ten who are contesting five seats on the Court of Appeals) was asked the same seven questions by former PW Courts, Law and Democracy Reporter Melissa Boughton.
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As part of our ongoing effort to inform North Carolinians about the state judiciary, Policy Watch is publishing a series of Q&A’s with the candidates seeking statewide judicial office this fall. Each of the 16 candidates (six who are contesting three Supreme Court seats and ten who are contesting five seats on the Court of Appeals) was asked the same seven questions by former PW Courts, Law and Democracy Reporter Melissa Boughton.
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