A federal judge in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Friday sentenced Paul Magliocchetti, founder of the now-defunct political lobbying firm PMA Group, to 27 months imprisonment for his involvement in campaign finance improprieties spanning over five years. Magliocchetti was indicted in August and the following month pleaded guilty to [...]

A federal judge on Friday indefinitely postponed the trial of Allen Stanford , citing chemical dependency that has left Stanford incompetent to stand trial at present. Judge David Hittner of the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas heard testimony from three psychiatrists before concluding that Stanford’s addiction to anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications [...]

The Illinois House passed a bill abolishing the death penalty Thursday, but the bill must still be passed by the Senate with the General Assembly facing a lame-duck session. The amended bill (SB3539) passed the House 60-54 just hours after it had failed by a single vote. It marks the first time the state legislature [...]

The US Department of Defense (DOD) announced Thursday that Guantanamo Bay detainee Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed was transfered to his native Algeria pursuant to a court order from November 2009. The DOD said it had successfully transferred Farhi after the inter-agency Guantanamo Review Task Force approved the transfer following a comprehensive review considering, especially, the [...]

The South Korea National Police Agency announced Thursday that it has found evidence that Google illegally collected private data in the process of producing its popular Street View mapping service. The illegally captured data included hundreds of thousands of emails, instant messages, passwords and search histories through unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. The information was discovered on [...]

The civilian trial of 800 soldiers charged with crimes stemming from their roles in a February 2009 mutiny began Wednesday in the Bangladeshi capital city of Dhaka. The soldiers were charged in July with crimes including murder, conspiracy and looting military weapons, among others. This is the latest in a series of military and civil [...]

Sarah Robison, University of Minnesota Law School ’12, writes about the possible deleterious impact of the citizen-contractor loophole on asylum applicants… Individuals applying for political asylum in the United States often believe that applying for asylum will alleviate their fear of persecution, but often do not realize that a citizen-contractor loophole in the asylum application [...]

A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously Tuesday that California’s Mount Soledad cross, a 43-foot cross erected as a Korean War veterans’ memorial, is unconstitutional under the First Amendment . Justice M. Margaret McKeown declared, “he use of such a distinctively Christian symbol to honor all veterans [...]

A judge for the US Court of Federal Claims has issued a preliminary injunction preventing the US Department of Interior (DOI) from accepting a bid from Microsoft to overhaul its e-mail system, according to a ruling made public Tuesday. Google had filed a lawsuit in November alleging that the DOI arbitrarily decided only to allow [...]

Joseph Schaeffer, Pitt Law ’12, attended the Hot Shale Plays conference co-hosted by the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation and Energy and Mineral Law Foundation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He writes about the Pittsburgh City Council’s ban on Marcellus Shale drilling… Pittsburgh recently played host to a RMMLF and EMLF co-sponsored special institute titled “Development Issues [...]