There were several pretty interesting legal items in my email today.
The first involves the City and County of Santa Cruz filing action in Federal Court to enjoin the DEA from blocking the reopening of a marijuana farm and disallowing sales of marijuana for medical use.
"It is pretty clear that the people in the state of California support the use of medical marijuana," said Mardi Wormhoudt, a Santa Cruz County Supervisor. "It is disturbing when the people in the state have overwhelmingly expressed their support at the ballot the federal government feels no right to uphold that."The Supreme Court has previous ruled on the right to use marijuana for medical use, but maybe a county and city can surmount a powerful enough attack to get them to reconsider their decision. Who knows?
In a surprising decision to many, the Supreme Court decided against limiting the appeal options of people convicted of federal crimes. The Bush administration had been pushing for the opposite decision, but the court was concerned about too many cases of bad lawyering and thought that limits on appeals might allow such to get overlooked. I suppose they figure if you get enough lawyers looking over the shoulders of other lawyers, sooner or later, someone will do a good job representing the defendant.
I was personally very sad when I read about this case. It concerns people who held themselves out as a Tiger Rescue Sanctuary, and yet, today as many as 30 ***s and other big cats were found dead along with 58 cubs in a freezer in a home attached to the sanctuary. I just do not understand people taking on a responsibility and then ignoring it. Especially when it concerns ***s, the most endangered of all the big cats.
An Appellate Court in Florida struck down what was being called a "Scarlet Letter" law that required women who wanted to put up kids for adoption to disclose everyone who might have possibly fathered the child in a newspaper publication in all cities where the children might have been conceived. The State of Florida did not really put up much of a fight, it seems. The court found "the offending provisions substantially interfere with both a woman's independence in choosing adoption ... and with the right not to disclose the intimate personal information that is required when the father is unknown. We deem the invasion of both of these interests so patent in this instance as to not require our analysis." Last I recall, the Texas Legislature had devised a law that said that if you had sex with a woman and were interested in what happened to any child that might result from that sexual act, you were to register your interest, giving the details of the event, with the State. If that child was to be put up for adoption, all one had to do was produce a certificate from the registry showing no one had registered as a person who was interested in such child, and that was that. It was designed to speed up the adoption process and to save money for parties. Have you ever wondered how much they charge for those legal notices in the newspaper? And, does anyone read any of them anyway?
The California Supreme Court agreed that life support can be cut off for a 1½ year old child who has been in a coma for a year, and the child can be allowed to die.
"I'm very happy," said the child's mother. "I want him to go to heaven. That's all I ever wanted."The child's father's attorney stated:
"His position has always been, where there is life, there is hope. No matter what the circumstances are, the state should not be terminating a child's life."Of course, pulling the plug on the child could lead to a murder charge for the father who authorities say beat, shook and threw his son against the crib on Dec. 17, 2001. What kind of a person does that to a baby?
The last interesting case is the patent suit against Ebay. This case is interesting because Federal district Judge Jerome B. Friedman has already warned the attorneys that "it's going to be your responsibility to make sure this is something the average person can understand." I have always thought I was a fairly technologically knowledgeable person, but I am wondering just what it was that was proprietary about the creation of an Internet auction site. The plaintiffs are claiming Ebay stole its programs and procedures, but Ebay is saying that its procedures don't infringe the plaintiff's patents, and that those patents are unenforceable anyway because other people had proposed similar systems and methods before Woolston, the plaintiff, filed his applications. I am just glad I am not on that jury. You can bet that the testimony is going to be pretty dull and dry.
Posted by Tiger at April 24, 2003 11:52 PM