The Supreme Court ruled today that Roberto Miranda, a former death row inmate later determined to be innocent of the crime may sue the public defender's office for its alleged mishandling of the case. The case is Clark County v. Miranda, 02-1629.

Central to the case are the policies of this defender office:

Miranda's lawyers claim that the office routinely gave lie detector tests to new clients, and then used the results to decide how vigorous the client's defense would be. Miranda, a black native Spanish speaker from Cuba, also claims whites and members of the Mormon church got better legal help than minorities and non-Mormons.

Miranda claims he was given a county-paid lawyer, Thomas Rigsby, who had been on the job barely a year and had never tried a capital case. Miranda claims Rigsby asked him to take a lie detector test, which was administered by an English-speaking examiner. The examiner concluded that Miranda failed the test.

"Thereafter, Rigsby did virtually nothing to prepare for Mr. Miranda's trial," Miranda's lawyers said in papers filed with the Supreme Court.

We wrote a long analysis of the case back in February, available here.

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The High Court today rejected the case of Regina Knight, a drug addict who was convicted and sent to prison due to delivering a still-born baby.

Regina McKnight is serving 12 to 20 years in South Carolina for killing her daughter. McKnight tested positive for cocaine in the hospital and acknowledged that she had used crack cocaine while pregnant. The dead child had drugs in her system.

McKnight's lawyers say she is the only woman convicted of homicide after suffering a stillbirth. She challenged her treatment as unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment, and her case also raised questions about the legal and constitutional rights of pregnant women and the fetuses they carry.

Ms. McKnight had the support of a large segment of the medical community, inlcuding the American Public Health Association, American Psychiatric Association and the National Association of Social Workers. Here's a letter signed by numerous groups, detailing why she should not have been convicted.

McKnight's supporters say her case represents a dangerous trend toward holding pregnant women legally liable for all manner of questionable behavior or potentially harmful decisions. "It is quite disturbing in terms of women's autonomy over their bodies while pregnant," said Wyndi Anderson, director of South Carolina Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Ramzi Yousef, convicted of being the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, lost his bid to have the Supreme Court throw out his conviction.

Justices refused to consider whether the government overstepped its reach in prosecuting Ramzi Yousef in the bombing and for plotting to blow up a dozen U.S. jumbo jets over the Far East. "The opportunity for this court to review the extent of extra-territoriality that the U.S. and its courts can exercise to punish 'terrorist' acts must not be passed by as the issue becomes of ever more immediate importance in the world of the 21st Century," Bernard V. Kleinman, one of his attorneys, wrote in the appeal.

Today was the first day of the Supreme Court's new term. Here's a recap of developments in the various cases the court reviewed. The Court disposed of 2,000 cases that had accumulated over the summer.

Two rulings of note that are not discussed in our other Supreme Court posts today: The high court refused to overturn the death sentence of an inmate who is forced to take drugs to make him sane enough to be executed. Some see the decision as an expansion of states' rights. Here's more on the case.

The Court also tossed the $79.5 million verdict against tobacco giant Phillip Morris. It sent the case back to the lower court to determine if the verdict was consitutionally excessive.

The Supreme Court will hear 48 cases this term.

The court will soon decide, for example, whether to hear the Bush administration's appeal of a lower court decision barring the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public school classrooms because of the phrase "under God." Another administration appeal seeks review of a ruling that doctors have a right to discuss with their patients the medical uses of marijuana.

In addition, cases challenging aspects of the detention policies the federal government adopted after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have recently been filed or will shortly reach the court.

Of the cases already accepted for decision, three in addition to the campaign finance case stand out as raising questions of intensely practical as well as theoretical significance. They address issues of church and state, state versus federal power, and partisan politics.

In the ridiculous court decision of the day department,

A federal judge said this week that it was "foolish" for Metro Transit Police to handcuff a 12-year-old girl for eating a french fry on a subway platform, but he ruled that the transit system did not violate her constitutional rights.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan dismissed claims by Tracy Hedgepeth that Metro Transit Police Officer Jason Fazenbaker illegally searched her daughter's backpack and treated her unfairly when he arrested her Oct. 23, 2000, after watching her enter the Tenleytown-AU Station and pop a single french fry into her mouth.

Fazenbaker and other Transit Police officers were posted at the station as part of a week-long sting to catch students snacking and breaking other Metro rules. At the time of the arrest, Metro police maintained that D.C. law allowed them to issue citations of up to $300 to adults caught eating in the Metro but required that minors be arrested and taken into custody. Police seized Ansche's jacket and backpack, removed her shoelaces and transported her to the District's juvenile processing center, where the crying girl was fingerprinted and held for three hours.

Lawyer Terry Kindlon, who sent us the article, says, "This story should be entered in the "Kenneth Lay is Still Not Charged With Anything" file.

We knew there was justice somewhere in Florida....

The Florida Supreme Court set aside a Wednesday deadline for inmates to request DNA testing of evidence that could prove their innocence. By a 4-3 vote today, the justices said they were putting aside the deadline so they can take more time to consider the inmates' appeal challenging the deadline's constitutionality. They said they will hear oral arguments Nov. 7.

Here's background, along with a TalkLeft mini-editorial on the issue.

We think this Cincinnati Judge went a little overboard here...he jailed an alleged rape victim for five days because she refused to testify against the man she said raped her. The case doesn't appear to involve an issue of a fabricated complaint. The accuser has said she was threatened and afraid to testify.

In citing the woman for contempt of court last week, [Judge] Dinkelacker said, "If victims don't participate in the system, we don't have justice." The woman, who had missed a hearing as well as the two trial dates, told the judge that neighbors threatened her and her children, calling her a snitch.

Actually, the Judge jailed her for ten days but she's now agreed to testify so he cut it to five.

Wouldn't it have been a better idea for the Judge to order the prosecution to investigate her claim of threats? And, if true, provide protection? The defense lawyer will have a field day cross-examining the accuser now: she'd do anything to get out of jail--even stick to a story that wasn't true.

Good news from the New Hampshire Supreme Court. In a new decision, it has disagreed with the Supreme Court and held that individuals have a right to privacy in trash they put out for collection.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled Monday that garbage is private, even when it has been put out near the street for collection. The 4-1 decision runs counter to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and high courts in most other states. But the court said New Hampshire's constitution provides a stronger expectation of privacy than the U.S. Constitution. The decision came in a case in which police searched a man's trash and found wire scrapers coated with marijuana residue.

The Court relied on the New Hampshire state consitution in arriving at its ruling:

We conclude that the defendant exhibited an actual expectation of privacy in his trash because he placed it in black plastic bags with the expectation it would be picked up by authorized persons for eventual disposal. We also conclude that society is prepared to recognize that expectation as reasonable. We acknowledge that the United States Supreme Court has held, to the contrary, that "society would not accept as reasonable [a] claim to an expectation of privacy in trash left for collection in an area accessible to the public." California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 41 (1988). We are free, however, to construe our State Constitution to provide greater protection than the Federal Constitution. See id. at 43; Ball, 124 N.H. at 231-32. We do so here.

The full text of the opinion is here. Hawaii and Washington are two other states that have ruled this way.

John Wesley Hall, author of the legal text book Search and Seizure (3rd Ed. 2000), who monitors new fourth amendment cases daily over at FourthAmendment.com (a free site with online supplements to his book) writes of a quirky Nebraska decision. A minor is stopped for a traffic offense and then asked for consent to search. The Court holds the consent is valid because the juvenile was free to go even though he was never told so. The case is In re Clinton G. (2003) 12 Neb App 178, 2003 Neb App Lexis 253.

This court finds that a minor would know he was free to go because of prior case law which he was expected to be on notice of; what a crock. This case is so off the wall that I shouldn't even include it in the Book Updates except that Nebraskans need to know that they are in a police state.

The Washington Supreme Court has ruled that police need a warrant before installing a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect's car. It is the first court in the country to rule this way.

"Use of GPS tracking devices is a particularly intrusive method of surveillance, making it possible to acquire an enormous amount of personal information about the citizen under circumstances where the individual is unaware that every single vehicle trip taken and the duration of every single stop may be recorded by the government," Justice Barbara Madsen wrote in the unanimous decision

She raised the prospect of citizens being tracked to "the strip club, the opera, the baseball game, the `wrong' side of town, the family planning clinic, the labor rally." The closely watched case had evoked worries about police using the satellite-tracking devices like Big Brother to watch citizens' every move.

Doug Honig, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, said ... Attaching a GPS device to a car is "the equivalent of placing an invisible police officer in a person's back seat," Honig said. "Our state constitution has very strong protections for privacy. Some other states also have very strong protections for privacy. This will be a strong precedent for them to look at and for any law enforcement agency around the country."

Our first thought: Scott Peterson, accused of murdering his pregnant wife Laci, will be very happy to hear this--although if the ruling was based on Washington's state constitution as opposed to the Fourth Amendment, it may not be adopted by California. Washington's state constitution has very strict privacy protections.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals Monday issued a decision upholding the contemptible procedure of perp walks:

A federal appeals court has unanimously approved police "perp walks," in which handcuffed, camera-shy defendants are paraded before cameras, claiming it may sway others from attempting crimes similar to those charged to the defendants.

"The image of the accused being led away to contend with the justice system powerfully communicates government efforts to thwart the criminal element, and it may deter others from attempting similar crimes," said the opinion authored by Circuit Judge Fred I. Parker and released Monday, four weeks after he died Aug. 12.

The tradition does not violate a prisoner's civil rights so long as it is not "an inherently fictional dramatization" staged solely to satisfy press curiosity, a panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 in a New York case.

Perp walk: Think Lee Harvey Oswald who was shot to death during it. Timothy McVeigh, who wasn't even provided a bullet-proof vest. Here's our description of McVeigh's perp walk (taken from our brief asking that eyewitness identifications of him be suppressed from trial):