Constitutional Law

Weekend News Roundup: February 19, 2008

A roundup of news from this past weekend.

• Trial judges often rely on their intuition – resulting in preventable mistakes, LegalBlogWatch
• reported.
• Law.com examined whether TV shows are responsible for the public's distrust of lawyers.
• Slate discussed the discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Courts in the western district of Missouri have adopted a novel approach to retroactive sentence-reduction procedures for crack convictions, Sentencing Law and Policy reported.
• Two convicted child murderers were exonerated in Mississippi, including the first- exoneration based upon post-conviction DNA testing in Mississippi.
• A federal judge approved an internet hosting company's placing the website Wikileaks offline and preventing the transfer of its content to another provider upon the request of a foreign bank implicated in money laundering -- without affording Wikileaks the opportunity to address the court, Wired reported. Wikileaks is a whistleblower website that aggregates leaked documents. 
• Americans United took a look at the religious beliefs of America's founders on President's Day. (Geoff Stone wrote about a similar subject last year).
• The CIA's efforts to create a network of front companies in Europe in the wake of 9/11 was mostly abandoned after the agency concluded "they were ill-conceived and poorly positioned," the L.A. Times reported.
• The FBI gained unauthorized access email accounts because of a miscommunication with an internet service provider, the New York Times reported.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on February 19, 2008 (boomark / email).