Tag Archives: Constitution

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit on Oct. 23 said Indiana could not enforce a 2011 state law that barred abortion providers – including Planned Parenthood – from receiving any state or federal funds. It would have stripped all Medicaid funding from any health care provider that provides abortion services, among many others. The appellate court barred enforcement of the law, based on Planned Parenthood’s objection that the state defunding law violates a federal Medicaid law that …

Law enforcement pulled another surprising move recently in the case of Melvin Colon, an alleged gangster from the Bronx, when cops convinced one of his Facebook friends to let them have access to Colon’s page. As a result, cops secured photos and posts that helped to indict him for gang-related racketeering, murder, and drug charges. Colon fought the indictment, brandishing his Fourth Amendment right to privacy and arguing that he had a legitimate expectation that his friends would keep his …

You might remember KaZaA, a file-sharing site that allowed users to share music. Jammie Thomas-Rasset likely remembers it, and vividly. She was the first person to challenge the recording industry when it began coming after people for sharing music online, and now she has to pay up. After seven years and three trials resulting in different damages awards, the Minnesota woman who used KaZaA in 2005 to download 1,700 songs now owes four record companies $222,000. The 8th U.S. Circuit …

NEWS UPDATE: See the story and video at Twitter Caves and Hands Over Protester’s Tweets to Avoid Fines. In what’s being called a case of first impression, a judge in Manhattan ruled on July 2 that Twitter must turn over some of the deleted Tweets of a user who was arrested in October 2011 during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. Prosecutors believe that Malcolm Harris was tweeting about an issue he is trying to use in his defense and that his …

How private are your posts on Facebook and your tweets on Twitter? If you think the answer depends only on how you configure your privacy or security settings for your accounts, you might be in for a rude awakening – at least if you’re ever involved in a court case. Two recent cases illustrate that if you step into a courthouse – whether intentionally, as a plaintiff in a civil suit, or not so intentionally as a defendant or even …