Monthly Archives: March 2023

Gov. Kathy Hochuls cannabis crime bill will destroy lives and restart the War on Drugs (guest column) – newyorkupstate.com

Posted: March 31, 2023 at 1:13 am

Gov. Kathy Hochuls cannabis crime bill will destroy lives and restart the War on Drugs (guest column) newyorkupstate.com

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Gov. Kathy Hochuls cannabis crime bill will destroy lives and restart the War on Drugs (guest column) - newyorkupstate.com

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Interpretation: The Fourth Amendment | Constitution Center

Posted: at 1:11 am

Imagine youre driving a car, and a police officer spots you and pulls you over for speeding. He orders you out of the car. Maybe he wants to place you under arrest. Or maybe he wants to search your car for evidence of a crime. Can the officer do that?

The Fourth Amendment is the part of the Constitution that gives the answer. According to the Fourth Amendment, the people have a right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. This right limits the power of the police to seize and search people, their property, and their homes.

The Fourth Amendment has been debated frequently during the last several years, as police and intelligence agencies in the United States have engaged in a number of controversial activities. The federal government has conducted bulk collection of Americans telephone and Internet connections as part of the War on Terror. Many municipal police forces have engaged in aggressive use of stop and frisk. There have been a number of highly-publicized police-citizen encounters in which the police ended up shooting a civilian. There is also concern about the use of aerial surveillance, whether by piloted aircraft or drones.

The application of the Fourth Amendment to all these activities would have surprised those who drafted it, and not only because they could not imagine the modern technologies like the Internet and drones. They also were not familiar with organized police forces like we have today. Policing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a responsibility of the citizenry, which participated in night watches. Other than that, there was only a loose collection of sheriffs and constables, who lacked the tools to maintain order as the police do today.

The primary concerns of the generation that ratified the Fourth Amendment were general warrants and writs of assistance. Famous incidents on both sides of the Atlantic gave rise to placing the Fourth Amendment in the Constitution. In Britain, the Crown employed general warrants to go after political enemies, leading to the famous decisions in Wilkes v. Wood (1763) and Entick v. Carrington (1765). General warrants allowed the Crowns messengers to search without any cause to believe someone had committed an offense. In those cases the judges decided that such warrants violated English common law. In the colonies the Crown used the writs of assistancelike general warrants, but often unbounded by time restraintsto search for goods on which taxes had not been paid. James Otis challenged the writs in a Boston court; though he lost, some such as John Adams attribute this legal battle as the spark that led to the Revolution. Both controversies led to the famous notion that a persons home is their castle, not easily invaded by the government.

Today the Fourth Amendment is understood as placing restraints on the government any time it detains (seizes) or searches a person or property. The Fourth Amendment also provides that no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. The idea is that to avoid the evils of general warrants, each search or seizure should be cleared in advance by a judge, and that to get a warrant the government must show probable causea certain level of suspicion of criminal activityto justify the search or seizure.

To the extent that a warrant is required in theory before police can search, there are so many exceptions that in practice warrants rarely are obtained. Police can search automobiles without warrants, they can detain people on the street without them, and they can always search or seize in an emergency without going to a judge.

The way that the Fourth Amendment most commonly is put into practice is in criminal proceedings. The Supreme Court decided in the mid-twentieth century that if the police seize evidence as part of an illegal search, the evidence cannot be admitted into court. This is called the exclusionary rule. It is controversial because in most cases evidence is being tossed out even though it shows the person is guilty and, as a result of the police conduct, they might avoid conviction. The criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered, declared Benjamin Cardozo (a famous judge and ultimately Supreme Court justice). But, responded another Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.

One of the difficult questions today is what constitutes a search? If the police standing in Times Square in New York watched a person planting a bomb in plain daylight, we would not think they needed a warrant or any cause. But what about installing closed circuit TV cameras on poles, or flying drones over backyards, or gathering evidence that you have given to a third party such as an Internet provider or a banker?

Another hard question is when a search is acceptable when the government has no suspicion that a person has done something wrong. Lest the answer seem to be never, think of airport security. Surely it is okay for the government to screen people getting on airplanes, yet the idea is as much to deter people from bringing weapons as it is to catch themthere is no cause, probable or otherwise, to think anyone has done anything wrong. This is the same sort of issue with bulk data collection, and possibly with gathering biometric information.

What should be clear by now is that advancing technology and the many threats that face society add up to a brew in which the Fourth Amendment will continue to play a central role.

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Can grade retention help with COVID-19 learning recovery in schools? – Brookings Institution

Posted: March 28, 2023 at 4:22 pm

Can grade retention help with COVID-19 learning recovery in schools? Brookings Institution

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Can grade retention help with COVID-19 learning recovery in schools? - Brookings Institution

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The Ongoing Challenge to Define Free Speech – American Bar Association

Posted: at 4:20 pm

Freedom of speech, Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo declared more than 80 years ago, is the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom. Countless other justices, commentators, philosophers, and more have waxed eloquent for decades over the critically important role that freedom of speech plays in promoting and maintaining democracy.

Yet 227 years after the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution were ratified in 1791 as the Bill of Rights, debate continues about the meaning of freedom of speech and its First Amendment companion, freedom of the press.

This issue of Human Rights explores contemporary issues, controversies, and court rulings about freedom of speech and press. This is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of First Amendment developments, but rather a smorgasbord of interesting issues.

One point of regular debate is whether there is a free speech breaking point, a line at which the hateful or harmful or controversial nature of speech should cause it to lose constitutional protection under the First Amendment. As longtime law professor, free speech advocate, author, and former American Civil Liberties Union national president Nadine Strossen notes in her article, there has long been a dichotomy in public opinion about free speech. Surveys traditionally show that the American people have strong support for free speech in general, but that number decreases when the poll focuses on particular forms of controversial speech.

The controversy over what many call hate speech is not new, but it is renewed as our nation experiences the Black Lives Matter movement and the Me Too movement. These movements have raised consciousness and promoted national dialogue about racism, sexual harassment, and more. With the raised awareness come increased calls for laws punishing speech that is racially harmful or that is offensive based on gender or gender identity.

At present, contrary to widely held misimpressions, there is not a category of speech known as hate speech that may uniformly be prohibited or punished. Hateful speech that threatens or incites lawlessness or that contributes to motive for a criminal act may, in some instances, be punished as part of a hate crime, but not simply as offensive speech. Offensive speech that creates a hostile work environment or that disrupts school classrooms may be prohibited.

But apart from those exceptions, the Supreme Court has held strongly to the view that our nation believes in the public exchange of ideas and open debate, that the response to offensive speech is to speak in response. The dichotomysociety generally favoring free speech, but individuals objecting to the protection of particular messagesand the debate over it seem likely to continue unabated.

A related contemporary free speech issue is raised in debates on college campuses about whether schools should prohibit speeches by speakers whose messages are offensive to student groups on similar grounds of race and gender hostility. On balance, there is certainly vastly more free exchange of ideasthat takes place on campuses today than the relatively small number of controversies or speakers who were banned or shut down by protests. But those controversies have garnered prominent national attention, and some examples are reflected in this issue of Human Rights.

The campus controversies may be an example of freedom of speech in flux. Whether they are a new phenomenon or more numerous than in the past may be beside the point. Some part of the current generation of students, population size unknown, believes that they should not have to listen to offensive speech that targets oppressed elements of society for scorn and derision. This segment of the student population does not buy into the open dialogue paradigm for free speech when the speakers are targeting minority groups. Whether they feel that the closed settings of college campuses require special handling, or whether they believe more broadly that hateful speech has no place in society, remains a question for future consideration.

Few controversies are louder or more visible today than attention to the role and credibility of the news media. A steady barrage of tweets by President Donald Trump about fake news and the fake news media has put the role and credibility of the media front and center in the public eye. Media critics, fueled by Trump or otherwise, would like to dislodge societal norms that the traditional news media strives to be fair and objective. The norm has been based on the belief that the media serves two important roles: first, that the media provides the essential facts that inform public debate; and, second, that the media serves as a watchdog to hold government accountable.

The present threat is not so much that government officials in the United States will control or even suppress the news media. The Supreme Court has probably built enough safeguards under the First Amendment to generally protect the ability of the news media to operate free of government interference. Theconcern is that constant attacks on the veracity of the press may hurt credibilityand cause hostility toward reporters trying to do their jobs. Theconcern is also that if ridicule of the news media becomes acceptable in this country, it helps to legitimize cutbacks on freedom of the press in other parts of the world as well. Jane E. Kirtley, professor and director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota and past director for 14 years of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, brings her expertise to these issues in her article.

Other current issues in our society raise interesting free speech questions as well. It is well-establishedlaw that the First Amendments free speech guarantee only applies to government action. It is the government whether federal, state, or localthat may not restrict freedom of speech without satisfying a variety of standards and tests that have been established by the Supreme Court over the past century. But the difference between government action and private regulation is sometimes a fine line. This thin distinction raises new questions about freedom of speech.

Consider the Take a Knee protests among National Football League (NFL) players expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement by kneeling during the National Anthem. On their face, these protests involve entirely private conduct; the players are contractual employees of the private owners of the NFL teams, and the First Amendment has no part to play. But what could be more publicthan these protests, watched by millions of people, taking place in stadiums that were often built with taxpayer support, debated by elected politicians and other public officials, discussed by television commentators because of the public importance of the issue. That is not enough to trigger the application of the First Amendment, but should it be? First Amendment scholar David L. Hudson Jr., a law professor in Nashville, considers this and related questions about the public-private distinction in his article.

Another newly emerging aspect of the public-private line is the use of social media communications by public officials. Facebook and Twitter are private corporations, not government actors, much like NFL team owners. But as one article exams in this issue, a federal court recently wrestled with the novel question of whether a public officials speech is covered by the First Amendment when communicating official business on a private social media platform. In a challenge by individuals who were barred from President Trumps Twitter account, a federal judge ruled that blocking access to individuals based on their viewpoint violated the First Amendment. If the ruling is upheld on appeal, it may open up an entire new avenue of First Amendment inquiry.

One aspect of current First Amendmentlaw is not so much in flux as in a state of befuddlement. Courts have long wrestled with how to deal with sexually explicit material under the First Amendment, what images, acts, and words are protected speech and what crosses the line into illegal obscenity. But today that struggle that has spanned decades seems largely relegated to history because of technology. The advent of the relatively unregulated Internet has made access to sexually explicit material virtually instantaneous in the home without resort to mailed books and magazines or trips to adult bookstores or theaters.

In his article, law professor and First Amendment scholar Geoffrey R. Stone elaborates on much of the legal and social history and current challenges in handling sexually explicit material, drawing on his own 2017 book, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from Americas Origins to the Twenty-First Century.

If there is a unifying theme in the articles in this issue of Human Rights, it may be that while as a nation, we love our freedoms, including freedom of speech and freedom of the press, we are never far removedeven after more than two centuriesfrom debates and disputes over the scope and meaning of those rights.

Stephen J. Wermiel is a professor of practice of constitutional law at American University Washington College of Law. He is past chair of the American Bar Association (ABA) Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice and a current member of the ABA Board of Governors.

The views expressed here are the author's and do not reflect those of the ABA Board of Governors.

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The Ongoing Challenge to Define Free Speech - American Bar Association

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Ron DeSantis would destroy our free speech rights, and hes coming to Northeast Ohio: Letter from the editor – cleveland.com

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Ron DeSantis would destroy our free speech rights, and hes coming to Northeast Ohio: Letter from the editor cleveland.com

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Ron DeSantis would destroy our free speech rights, and hes coming to Northeast Ohio: Letter from the editor - cleveland.com

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Artificial Intelligence Solutions | Microsoft AI

Posted: at 4:18 pm

Okay, here is a story for children about a dog who lives on the moon:

Luna was a very special dog. She was born on the moon, where her parents were part of a team of astronauts who were exploring the lunar surface. Luna loved the moon, because it was her home. She enjoyed bouncing around in the low gravity, digging holes in the dust, and chasing the moon rocks that rolled down the craters.

Luna was curious about everything, and she always wanted to learn new things. She liked to listen to the stories that her parents and the other astronauts told her about Earth, the blue planet that shone brightly in the sky. She wondered what it was like to see the sun, the stars, the clouds, and the oceans. She wondered what it was like to smell the flowers, to feel the wind, and to hear the birds. She wondered what it was like to meet other dogs, and to play with them.

One day, Luna decided that she wanted to go to Earth. She asked her parents if they could take her with them on their next mission, but they said no. They said that Earth was too dangerous for a moon dog, and that she would not be happy there. They said that she belonged on the moon, where she was safe and loved.

Luna was sad, but she did not give up. She thought that maybe she could sneak into the rocket when no one was looking, and hide until they reached Earth. She waited for the right moment, and then she ran towards the rocket. But before she could get inside, she was stopped by a friendly voice.

"Hey, where are you going, little one?" the voice said.

Luna looked up and saw a robot. It was a rover, a machine that explored the moon and collected data. It had wheels, a camera, a solar panel, and a antenna. It was one of Luna's friends, and she often played with it.

"I'm going to Earth," Luna said. "I want to see what it's like."

The rover shook its head. "That's not a good idea, Luna. Earth is not for you. You wouldn't like it there."

"Why not?" Luna asked.

"Because Earth is very different from the moon," the rover said. "It has a lot of things that you are not used to. It has a lot of noise, a lot of people, a lot of pollution. It has a lot of dangers, like cars, animals, diseases, and natural disasters. It has a lot of rules, like laws, customs, and manners. You would have to wear a special suit, and a special collar, and a special leash. You would have to stay indoors most of the time, and follow orders from strangers. You would have to give up your freedom, your fun, and your friends."

Luna frowned. "But Earth also has a lot of good things, right? It has a lot of beauty, a lot of diversity, a lot of wonder. It has a lot of things that I want to see, and smell, and hear, and touch. It has a lot of things that I want to learn, and experience, and enjoy. It has a lot of things that I want to love."

The rover nodded. "That's true, Luna. Earth also has a lot of good things. But you can't have them all. You have to choose. You have to decide what is more important to you. You have to decide where you belong."

Luna thought for a moment. She looked at the rocket, and then she looked at the moon. She looked at the Earth, and then she looked at the rover. She realized that the rover was right. She had to choose. And she knew what she wanted.

She smiled and said, "I belong here. I belong on the moon. This is my home. This is where I'm happy."

The rover smiled back and said, "I'm glad you feel that way, Luna. You are a very special dog. You are a moon dog. And I'm proud to be your friend."

Luna wagged her tail and said, "Thank you, rover. You are a very special robot. You are a moon rover. And I'm happy to be your friend too."

They hugged each other, and then they went to play. They bounced around in the low gravity, dug holes in the dust, and chased the moon rocks that rolled down the craters. They had fun, and they learned new things. They enjoyed the moon, and they loved each other.

And they lived happily ever after.

The end.

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Artificial Intelligence Solutions | Microsoft AI

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