More updates
The Indianapolis Star followed Marcia Oddi’s lead today and took note that it has been 1 year since the Indiana Court of Appeals heard arguments on a challenge to Indiana’s ban on same sex marriage:
Ken Falk, an Indiana Civil Liberties Union attorney representing the three same-sex couples challenging the law, said a decision could come any day.
“Hopefully soon,” he said. “A year is a long time for the Court of Appeals, but obviously this is considered to be an extremely important case, which, I assume, is why they’re spending a lot of time on it.”
Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter, whose office is defending the law, added that the case is complex and lacks lot of legal precedents.
“It’s longer than the average length of time between the oral arguments and the issuance of a decision,” he said, “but there are many other cases that go beyond the average.”
Link.
The man who accused Union County Sheriff Steve Leverton of battering him while he was confined in the Union County Jail announce that he will pursue a civil rights action against the Sheriff and county. The incident remains under investigation by the Indiana State Police. Link.
The Pal-Item also takes note today, with the closing of the Masonte Door Corporation, that Indiana has lost almost 13% of its manufacturing jobs between 1988 and 2003. Barbara Street, director of the East Central Indiana Workforce Investment Board, recently finished a report in which her office followed employees of Indiana Glass Co. in Dunkirk, Ind., after the plant closed in late 2002:
Of the 274 displaced workers, 172 participated in the project. After nearly two years, Street said that:
Forty-four percent again were employed.
- Six percent still were looking for a job.
- Thirty-one percent currently were involved in training or education.
- Nineteen percent of those who enrolled in the program never contacted Street’s office and were lost track of.
Street said the 31 percent still in a training program was “very good news.” Of those employed, she said many went back into manufacturing or got jobs in the service sector. Their average wage was about $11 or $12 an hour.
Ken Lammers over at Crim Law recently blogged his experience in a sentencing hearing to show what typically goes on in one of those, at least in Virginia. Now, thanks to an Ohio Common Pleas Judge in Cleveland, you can see for yourself. The Judge set up his personal video camera on his bench and is now posting sentencing hearings in felony cases on the web. You can watch them here. The article in the Beacon Journal provides background here. Link via the Indiana Law Blog.
I have discussed before my occasional frustration with reporters in traditional media forms who often stumble over basic legal concepts when they cover the law. Last night Jennifer Ludden at NPR did a really good piece on Maryland’s effort to battle the epidemic of witness intimidation in Baltimore’s drug wars. Most notable was the fire in 2003 that killed a family of 7 who were making efforts to get drug trafficking out of their neighborhood. Maryland is pushing forward a law that would permit the use of witness statements in criminal trials without calling the witness to testify in situations where it can be shown that the defendant killed the witness or intimidated them before trial. This law is clearly running straight into the Confrontation Clause of the US Constitution, but similar provisions have survived challenges, albeit prior to Crawford. I was enjoying the story up to the point where Ludden gave a little primer on the hearsay rule. She said that when a child is a victim of abuse, a social worker can come to court and relay the child’s tale of abuse through an exception to the “rule against hearsay.” First, I know of no such exception. It does not appear on my list of hearsay exceptions. There are statutes out there that permit video taped testimony to come into evidence so the child does not have to be in the same room as the defendant, but to mention this “exception” without noting that the Supreme Court recently wiped away all these laws in Crawford, is misleading, at least. Maybe NPR could find some second year law students to be volunteer fact checkers.
