The US Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a Mississippi prosecutor unconstitutionally excluded black jurors from the murder trial of Curtis Flowers. The conviction will be set aside and Curtis Flowers retried. Flowers has been tried six times for the murder of four people in 1996; two of the trials ended in mistrials and, in [...]
Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal voted on Thursday to criminalize homophobia and transphobia. In an 8-3 decision, the court approved a three-point thesis holding that LGBTQ discrimination should be understood to fall within the nation’s prohibition against racism until the National Congress can issue a law specifically addressing this matter. Brazil’s legislature outlawed racism in 1989 [...]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit in Missouri state court against Secretary of State John Ashcroft on Thursday after Ashcroft rejected the ACLU’s petition to allow the people of Missouri to approve or veto the state’s recently passed abortion legislation in a public referendum. Missouri’s Constitution provides citizens with a right to [...]
The US Supreme Court denied a stay of execution for Alabama inmate Christopher Lee Price on Thursday. Price was convicted and sentenced to death after he murdered a pastor in 1991. The Supreme Court had first denied the stay in April over the objections of the court’s more liberal wing. Price argued that the state’s use [...]
US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) announced Wednesday that it had apprehended 1,036 individuals immediately after they illegally crossed the Rio Grande river into El Paso, Texas. CBP described the group as the largest ever to be encountered by border patrol agents. The members of the group—all from Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador—included 934 family [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Wednesday reversed the district court’s dismissal of a class action lawsuit against French bank BNP Paribas over aiding atrocities in Sudan. The lawsuit was brought in 2016 by 21 refugees from Sudan’s ethnic-cleansing campaign alleging that the bank conspired with and aided and abetted the [...]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ACLU of Alabama and Planned Parenthood Federation of America filed a lawsuit on behalf of Alabama abortion providers Friday challenging the near total abortion ban approved earlier this month. The Alabama Human Life Protection Act bans performing abortions in the state and imposes criminal penalties of up to 99 [...]
Myanmar President Win Myint granted amnesty on Monday to 6,520 prisoners, including journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. The journalists, reporters for Reuters, were arrested in September for alleged violations of Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act and sentenced to seven years in prison for their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative report into the military’s violence against the [...]
The International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled Monday that Jordan, as a party to the Rome Statute, was obligated to arrest Sudan’s former leader Omar al-Bashir during his 2017 visit to Amman for an Arab League Summit. The ICC declined, however, to refer Jordan to the Assembly of States Parties or the UN Security Council, reversing [...]
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) settled claims on Tuesday against a Texas city that refused to approve plans for an Islamic cemetery. The US filed its complaint against the City of Farmersville earlier on Tuesday under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). The complaint alleged that the city unduly burdened the [...]
