Despite the ages of the accused, authorities have continued to arrest individuals charged with war crimes during the Holocaust. In May German authorities arrested [JURIST report] a 93-year-old man for allegedly serving as a guard at Auschwitz and assisting in the mass murder carried out at the death camp. German prosecutors have reopened [JURIST report] hundreds of investigations involving former death camp guards after the conviction [JURIST report] of John Demjanjuk [NNDB profile; JURIST news archive] in May 2011 for the murder of thousands during the Holocaust. Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in prison but was released early due to old age and died in September 2011 while awaiting an appeal [JURIST report].

New opportunities now exist for taking an inclusive integrated approach for all waves of IDPs, in the country. ... These include: the proposed revised legislation on IDPs; the realignment of the 2007 strategy on IDPs with the proposed law; the onset of a new registration exercise for all IDPs that should as well profile their vulnerability and needs, and inclusive policies being formulated by the Government in the fields of health, land, agriculture, education, and employment generating activities.

Thousands of people were displaced and several thousand were killed as a result of conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia [BBC backgrounders; JURIST news archive] in the early 1990s. The 2008 conflict [BBC report] between Russia and Georgia caused the number of refugees to rise again. In January Georgia's parliament freed 190 prisoners [JURIST report], many of which were arrested while protesting Georgia President Mikhail Saakashvili, as part of an amnesty agreement that was strongly opposed by Saakashvili. In December Georgian Chief Prosecutor Archil Kbilashvili announced [JURIST report] that the former justice minister in Georgia, Justice Minister Zurab Adeishvili, was set to be charged on December 26 in connection with the torture of prisoners in the country's capital of Tbilisi. The prosecution investigated allegations of torture in the prison. In September UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called on authorities in Georgia to investigate [JURIST report] prisoner mistreatment after video footage allegedly depicted the torture and rape of prisoners in the country's capital of Tbilisi.

Therefore, although certain societal circumstances may have changed since 1968 when the challenged provision was added to the Constitution—and, indeed, some of the original justifications for mandatory retirement may not have reflected the most fair or even the most beneficial public policy—the proper approach of conforming the Constitution more closely with Petitioners' vision of how experiential changes should be taken into account is to pursue further amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution.

The US Supreme Court [official website] has previously considered the merits of a challenge to mandatory retirement provisions of a state constitution. In Gregory v. Ashcroft [opinion], Missouri state court judges challenged a mandatory retirement provision in the state constitution, but the Supreme Court held that the provision did not violate equal protection. Mandatory retirement laws have been considered in European courts of law as well. In November the European Court of Justice (ECJ) [official website] struck down [JURIST report] a law which would have lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges in Hungary from 70 to 62, stating the law was not proportionate to the objectives Hungary was pursing. In 2009 the ECJ ruled that UK mandatory retirement laws were not discriminatory [JURIST report], stating age-based classifications are justifiable in some circumstances. The ECJ also ruled in 2007 that the EU's mandatory retirement policies [JURIST report] did not violate the prohibition against age discrimination if the policy is intended to further the legitimate public interest of increasing employment and the retirees are provided with full pensions.

Here, the sentencing range supported by the jury's verdict was five years' imprisonment to life. The District Court imposed the 7-year mandatory minimum sentence based on its finding by a preponderance of evidence that the firearm was "brandished." Because the finding of brandishing increased the penalty to which the defendant was subjected, it was an element, which had to be found by the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. The judge, rather than the jury, found brandishing, thus violating petitioner’s Sixth Amendment rights.

Since Harris was decided, the court has gained three new members, and two in the majority, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, have left the court. At oral arguments [JURIST report] in January, counsel for the defendant argued, "Any fact that entitles a prosecution by law to a sentence more severe than a judge could otherwise impose must be found by the jury beyond a reasonable doubt." Counsel for the US urged the court to adhere to its ruling in Harris, "because those decisions properly respected the fact that a mandatory minimum divests the defendant of the right to judicial leniency."

In sum, a reverse payment, where large and unjustified, can bring with it the risk of significant anticompetitive effects; one who makes such a payment may be unable to explain and to justify it; such a firm or individual may well possess market power derived from the patent; a court, by examining the size of the payment, may well be able to assess its likely anticompetitive effects along with its potential justifications without litigating the validity of the patent; and parties may well find ways to settle patent disputes without the use of reverse payments. In our view, these considerations, taken together, outweigh the single strong consideration—the desirability of settlements—that led the Eleventh Circuit to provide near-automatic antitrust immunity to reverse payment settlements.

The court heard arguments [JURIST report] in the case in March. The FTC argued that reverse payment agreements are "paradigmatic antitrust trust violation[s]" because "they subvert the competitive process by giving generic manufacturers an incentive to accept a share of their rival's monopoly profits as a substitute for actual competition." Respondents, a group of pharmaceutical companies, argued that reverse-payment agreements are simply settlements. "You're not accepting infringement. What you're doing is recognizing there's a reasonable basis to assert the patent, a bona fide reasonable dispute, and the parties have the ability to settle the dispute. Just as if the party—if someone was entering into a license agreement with—with someone who had a product that they claimed did not infringe the patent, they sat down, negotiated a license and resolved it." The majority of reverse payment settlements arise in the context of pharmaceutical drug regulation.

It has long been settled that the privilege [against self-incrimination] "generally is not self-executing" and that a witness who desires its protection "must claim it." Although "no ritualistic formula is necessary in order to invoke the privilege," ... a witness does not do so by simply standing mute. Because petitioner was required to assert the privilege in order to benefit from it, the judgment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejecting petitioner's Fifth Amendment claim is affirmed.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments [JURIST report] in the case in April. The attorney for Salinas argued that using Salinas' silence in this way violates The Supreme Court's 1987 decision in Griffith v. Kentucky [opinion]. An assistant district attorney in Houston argued on behalf of Texas. He asserted that "absent invocation" of the right to silence, refusing to answer a question can be used as evidence against a defendant's innocence. The federal government supported this view, arguing that the court's 1983 decision in Minnesota v. Murphy [opinion] holds as "the general rule that the Fifth Amendment privilege is not self-executing and that a suspect must invoke it in order to claim its protection to a noncustodial interview in."