Legion of Angels News Archive

SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) – The California Supreme Court has cleared the way for Californians to vote in November on whether to ban same-sex marriages in the state.

The court on Wednesday denied a petition to remove the initiative from the state’s general election ballots. The unanimous decision was handed down without elaboration.

Hundreds of marriage licenses have been issued to same-sex couples since mid-June, a month after the court overturned the state’s laws against such unions.

However, on June 2, opponents of same-sex marriage filed for a ballot initiative that would ban such marriages in the state’s constitution. Such a ban would overturn the court’s May ruling.

Equality California, a Sacramento-based activist group, filed a petition against the initiative — Proposition 8 — arguing that it involves a constitutional revision that can’t be adopted through a ballot vote.

The group also contended that petitions circulated to qualify the proposition for the ballot contained material that misled readers about the measure’s effects.

Jennifer Kerns, a spokeswoman for the proposition, called Wednesday’s decision “a huge victory.”

“We believe it deals a strong blow to our opponents and sends a strong message that they won’t be able to keep the ballot initiative away from the people of California,” she said.

Calls Wednesday to Equality California were not immediately returned.

If the proposition is approved, it would be the second time same-sex marriages have been voided in California.

In February 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom — who is considering a run for governor — challenged the state’s laws against same-sex marriage, ordering city officials to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.

Those unions were voided by the California Supreme Court, though the justices sidestepped the issue of whether banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, allowing legal cases to work their way through the lower courts.

Several gay and lesbian couples — along with the city of San Francisco and gay-rights groups — sued, saying they were victims of unlawful discrimination.

A lower court ruled San Francisco had acted unlawfully in issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. However, the state Supreme Court’s ruling in May struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional.

That decision made California the nation’s second state, after Massachusetts, to legalize same-sex marriage. Four other states allow civil unions.

Source — CNN

WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court ruled last week that the death penalty for raping a child was unconstitutional, the majority noted that a child rapist could face the ultimate penalty in only six states — not in any of the 30 other states that have the death penalty, and not under the jurisdiction of the federal government either.

This inventory of jurisdictions was a central part of the court’s analysis, the foundation for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s conclusion in his majority opinion that capital punishment for child rape was contrary to the “evolving standards of decency” by which the court judges how the death penalty is applied.

It turns out that Justice Kennedy’s confident assertion about the absence of federal law was wrong.

A military law blog pointed out over the weekend that Congress, in fact, revised the sex crimes section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 2006 to add child rape to the military death penalty. The revisions were in the National Defense Authorization Act that year. President Bush signed that bill into law and then, last September, carried the changes forward by issuing Executive Order 13447, which put the provisions into the 2008 edition of the Manual for Courts-Martial.

Anyone in the federal government — or anywhere else, for that matter — who knew about these developments did not tell the court. Not one of the 10 briefs filed in the case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, mentioned it. The Office of the Solicitor General, which represents the federal government in the Supreme Court, did not even file a brief, evidently having concluded that the federal government had no stake in whether Louisiana’s death penalty for child rape was constitutional.

The provision was the subject of a post over the weekend on the blog run by Dwight Sullivan, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve who now works for the Air Force as a civilian defense lawyer handling death penalty appeals.

Mr. Sullivan was reading the Supreme Court’s decision on a plane and was surprised to see no mention of the military statute. “We’re not talking about ancient history,” he said in an interview. “This happened in 2006.”

His titled his blog post “The Supremes Dis the Military Justice System.”

Jeffrey L. Fisher, a Stanford Law School professor who successfully represented the defendant in the case, Patrick Kennedy, said that he and others on the defense legal team, in researching how various jurisdictions treat child rape, had actually looked into what military law said on the subject. All they found was an old provision making rape a capital offense; it predated the court’s modern death penalty jurisprudence, under which the death penalty for the rape of an adult woman was ruled unconstitutional in 1977.

“We just assumed it was defunct,” Mr. Fisher said of the military provision. “We figured if somebody in the government thought otherwise, we’d hear about it.”

The Justice Department declined to comment. “We do not comment on internal deliberative matters,” said Erik Ablin of the department’s Office of Public Affairs. The lawyers in the Jefferson Parish, La., district attorney’s office who handled the case for the state, in defense of Louisiana’s child rape law, were out of the office this week. Steve Wimberly, the lawyer in the office designated to handle press inquiries about the Supreme Court case, did not return a telephone call.

Any losing party in the Supreme Court can file a petition within 25 days asking the justices to reconsider their decision. Granting such a petition requires a majority vote. Although these petitions are filed rather often, they are, not surprisingly, almost never granted.

R. Ted Cruz, who argued the case in support of Louisiana on behalf of a coalition of 10 states, said in an interview that the chance that the court would reconsider the decision was “extremely unlikely” even if Louisiana brought the omission to the justices’ attention. “A member of the majority would have to change his mind, but it’s obvious that both sides gave this case very careful consideration,” Mr. Cruz said. The vote in the case was 5 to 4.

At the time of the argument, Mr. Cruz was the Texas solicitor general. He has since gone into private practice. In preparing for the case, he said, the existence of the military provision simply “eluded everyone’s research.”

No one in the military has been charged with a capital crime yet under the revised provision. And despite the flurry of activity surrounding the death penalty, the military has not in fact executed anyone for decades. Its last execution took place on April 13, 1961, when Pvt. John A. Bennett was put to death by hanging. His crime: the rape of an 11-year-old girl.

Source — The New York Times

TORONTO - The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the $35 billion leveraged buyout of BCE Inc. - the largest leveraged buyout in history - can go ahead.

The high court overturned a lower court ruling. The lower court had blocked the telecommunications company’s sale because it had failed to adequately consider the interests of bondholders.

The ruling allows the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and its minority U.S. partners to finalize the deal to buy BCE (nyse: BCE - news - people ).

Source — Forbes