Top Senator Calls for Justice Thomas
To Recuse After Wife’s Comments
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is calling on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases involving a religious legal group that won praise recently from his wife.
Ginni Thomas sent an email to First Liberty Institute complimenting it for its opposition to Supreme Court reforms suggested by President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress.
“You guys have filled the sails of many judges,” the email to a First Liberty Institute lawyer said. “Can I just tell you, thank you so, so, so much.”
The lawyer read the email during a conference call with the institute’s top donors.
Clarence Thomas is at the center of a reform movement after it was disclosed in media reports that he accepted lavish gifts from a friend and Republican campaign donors who had business before the Supreme Court.
The federal court reform advocacy group Fix the Court estimated this year that over the past 20 years Clarence Thomas accepted gifts worth $4.2 million. They included luxury vacations, money for a more than quarter-million dollar recreational vehicle and business contracts for his wife’s consulting firm.
In the same period, eight other Supreme Court justices, plus eight retired or deceased justices, received gifts roughly totaling $600,000, Fix the Court said.
Reports of the gifts led to legislative proposals for a Supreme Court code of ethics that could be enforced by outside groups. The court’s ethics and disclosure rules are now enforced only internally, among the nine justices.
Thomas and other justices have said a code of ethics enforced by Congress or other federal judges could be a deterrent for the Supreme Court to rule on the most controversial issues because of the risk of political reprisal against them.
Some of the calls for a new code of ethics have come from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“The reported comments by Ginni Thomas are deeply problematic,” Durbin said in a statement Monday. “She’s testified before Congress that she and Justice Thomas do not discuss each other’s work. That defense now rings hollow. Whether she’s inflating her knowledge of judges’ views on ethics reform or telling the truth, her apparent comments on behalf of judicial officers create a clear appearance of impropriety for Justice Thomas.”
Durbin is a supporter of the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act. It is a pending bill that would require Supreme Court justices to adopt a binding code of conduct, create a mechanism to investigate alleged violations of the code and set new disclosure and transparency requirements.
Controversy over First Liberty Institute is the second time in the past four years Ginni Thomas’ conservative political activities created an apparent conflict of interest for her husband.
In 2020, as Donald Trump claimed the presidential election was stolen from him by voter fraud, Ginni Thomas sent emails to 29 Arizona legislators urging them to choose "a clean slate of Electors" after the first of the state’s electors gave the victory to Biden.
For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.
Antitrust Trial Against Google
Aimed at its Ad Business
Google tries to dominate both the competition and its customers with its online advertising business strategy, a Justice Department prosecutor said during an ongoing antitrust trial for the internet giant in Alexandria, Va.
The outcome of the trial in federal court threatens to break up Google’s internet advertising dominance.
Google used tactics such as acquisitions of competitors and restrictive contracts that gave customers no other options for online ads, Julia Tarver Wood, a Justice Department antitrust division lawyer said.
“Google is not here because they are big, they are here because they used that size to crush competition," she said.
Google argues that consumers will be hurt if they are forced to sell off parts of their business to competitors.
The Justice Department lawsuit – joined by 17 states – would create “absurd results” that do not reflect the modern realities of internet advertising, attorneys for Google said.
The government’s lawsuit “is like a time capsule,” said Google attorney Karen Dunn.
Google keeps about 30 cents of every dollar businesses spend on the display ads. The Justice Department lawsuit is directed at the $31 billion a year part of Google’s ad business that matches website publishers with advertisers.
The New York Times, News Corp. and USA Today and others say Google is profiting from content they create while their own ad revenue is falling.
Justice Department prosecutors say the result is a drop in the quality of news.
“This conduct hurts all of us because, as publishers make less money from advertisements, fewer publishers are able to offer internet content without subscriptions, paywalls, or alternative forms of monetization,” the Justice Department complaint says.
Prosecutors are seeking a court order requiring Google to divest itself of its Ad Manager services. AdManager allows businesses to post ads on the tops and sides of internet pages while also monitoring the performance of their advertising spaces.
Google argues the issue is not unfair competition, it’s the success of its business.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a blog post that “we will show that ad buyers and sellers have many options, and when they choose Google they do so because our ad tech is simple, affordable, and effective. In short — it works.”
For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.
Judge’s Ruling Creates Possibility Police
Will Need to Hire Mental Health Staff
Mental health advocates won a significant victory this week when a federal judge in Washington, D.C., decided they could move forward with their lawsuit that challenges the use of police to handle mental health crises.
They argue that mental health experts should be sent when 911 gets a call about someone who is suicidal or overly emotional, not police who are likely to aggravate the risk of violent confrontation.
The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU on behalf of a nonprofit organization called Bread for the City that assists underprivileged persons.
Attorneys for the District of Columbia filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The federal judge denied the motion, saying the civil rights issues in the case need to be decided at a trial.
Implications of the lawsuit extend nationally. Police departments could be required to hire mental health experts for some emergency calls.
“This ruling moves us one step closer to bringing essential, life-saving emergency mental health care to D.C. communities,” said Ashika Verriest, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project. “Qualified providers are best equipped to handle mental health emergencies with skills and compassion; police with a gun only serve to escalate, handcuff, and arrest.”
He suggested that funding for mental health professionals could come from existing police budgets because their services would more efficiently resolve emotional crises.
Bread for the City argues an inappropriate response to emotionally-impaired persons by police violates the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.
The ruling in Washington, D.C., matches a federal magistrate’s decision two weeks ago in Oregon. The magistrate also said a police response to persons with mental health disabilities might violate federal law.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said in her ruling in favor of Bread for the City that she was not criticizing police conduct but saying that additional training appears to be needed.
“I conclude that Bread [for the City] has plausibly alleged that individuals with mental health disabilities are denied the benefits of the District’s emergency response system," Reyes said in her oral ruling.
Bread for the City said in its lawsuit that unsuitable police responses have forced the organization to divert its resources for providing food, clothing and medical care to clients to address their mental health concerns.
If they were to call 911, they would lose the trust of their clients, thereby impairing the effectiveness of the aid group, Bread for the City argued.
As evidence of how police aggravate situations, Bread for the City attorneys mentioned a 2016 report from the D.C. Department of Behavioral Health and the Metropolitan Police Department.
It said the police department requires a 40-hour training course for its Crisis Intervention Officers but that it provided minimal benefit. The report said that in 2016, 20 percent of mental health calls ended with an injury for the person in crisis, which was a 7 percent increase since the program started in 2011.
The District of Columbia has community response teams of non-police mental health professionals, but they answer only 1 percent of mental health-related 911 calls, according to the lawsuit.
Attorneys for the District of Columbia argued the lawsuit should be dismissed because Bread for the City suffered no damages that gave it a right to sue.
The city cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in FDA v. Alliance of Hippocratic Medicine in which a group of conservative doctors sued to block expanded use of the abortion drug mifepristone.
“The plaintiffs have sincere legal, moral, ideological and policy objections to elective abortion and to FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone,” the Supreme Court ruling said. But the doctors' moral objections did not show they suffered an injury that would allow them to sue.
The judge in this week’s ruling said the cases are different because Bread for the City can demonstrate it suffered damages by inappropriate police responses.
“[Bread for the City] alleges that having staff respond to emergencies keeps them from providing other clients with the basic services that are part of Bread's mission, which prevents Bread both from fulfilling its mission of providing those services and from obtaining revenue by billing for those services,” Reyes said. “All of those expenditures were allegedly ‘in response to and to counteract the effect of defendants’ alleged unlawful acts.’”
The case is Bread for the City v. District of Columbia, Case No. 1:23-cv-01945, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.
D.C. Council Bill Would Require
Closer Oversight of 911 Calls
A District of Columbia council member introduced a bill last week that takes a tough stance toward management of the city’s 911 emergency call center.
Council member Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2) said she wants to get rid of the kinds of delays and mistakes that sent emergency responders to wrong addresses or made them arrive too late to provide critical assistance.
“The standard for our emergency response must be 100 percent accuracy,” Pinto said as she introduced the Transparency in Emergency Response Act. She chairs the council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety.
A key part of the proposed legislation would require the Office of Unified Communications to publicly release audio and transcripts that might demonstrate dispatching errors.
Pinto said she plans to hold monthly oversight hearings of the agency and to make unannounced visits to the 911 call center every other week.
The legislation responds to audits from inside and outside the city administration that found systemic failures in the Office of Unified Communications. Chief among them is low staffing levels tied to pay and employee morale.
Last year, the 911 dispatchers sent firefighters to the wrong address for a call about a newborn in cardiac arrest, canceled a call over an unconscious child in a hot car and classified a call about a man who collapsed as a low priority. In all three cases, someone died.
Last month, firefighters arrived 23 minutes after the first call about flooding at a dog kennel. By then, 10 dogs had drowned to death in their cages.
Pinto said she plans the unannounced visits to monitor dispatcher training, check on staffing levels and to listen to concerns of employees.
Her bill would change an Office of Unified Communications policy that gave its management discretion over whether to publicly release records of 911 calls.
For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.
Two D.C. Police Officers Sentenced
After Deadly Car Chase of Moped
Two former Washington, D.C., police officers were sentenced to prison last week after a deadly chase of a 20-year-old man on a moped and their attempt to cover it up.
The Oct. 23, 2020 incident prompted protests outside a police station.
Karon Hylton-Brown was spotted by Metropolitan Police Department officer Terence Sutton riding a moped on a city sidewalk without a helmet. Sutton ordered him to stop but Hylton-Brown instead sped away.
Sutton pursued him for about three minutes and 10 blocks in an unmarked police car. At times, they ran through stop signs and went the wrong way on a one-way street.
Shortly after Sutton turned off his red lights and siren while continuing the pursuit, Hylton-Brown was hit by an oncoming car as he emerged from an alley.
He died after being flung into the air and losing consciousness from severe head trauma.
“Hylton-Brown was not a fleeing felon, and trial evidence established the officers had no reason to believe that he was,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing. “There was also no evidence that he presented any immediate risk of harm to anyone else or that he had a weapon.”
District of Columbia law allows police to pursue criminal suspects in car chases only if they pose a likelihood of harm to other persons and it can be done without risk to other persons.
After Hylton-Brown died, Sutton is accused of submitting a falsified police report to hide any appearance he did anything wrong. His supervisor, former police lieutenant Andrew Zabavsky, was charged with conspiring to help Sutton in the cover-up.
They did not follow required police procedures after a serious injury, denied there had been a police chase and falsely alleged that Hylton-Brown was drunk.
Sutton, 40, was sentenced to five years and six months in prison for second degree murder. Zabavsky was sentenced to four years on conspiracy-related charges.
Prosecutors wrote about Zabavsky, “A police officer covering up the circumstances of an on-duty death he caused is a grave offense and a shocking breach of public trust.”
Sutton said in a statement to the court, “Never in my wildest nightmare would I have thought this incident would end like this. As a police officer, my intentions have always been pure and genuine — to serve and protect the people who live and work in the community.”
For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.