Page 47 - Amendment Center News Today

Civil rights lawyers sued Maine officials on behalf of impoverished criminal defendants on Tuesday, alleging the state failed to create an effective public defense system in violation of their constitutional rights. Maine doesn’t supervise the...

The lawsuit on behalf of five incarcerated people says the system fails to meet the requirements of the U.S. Constitution.

The ACLU of Maine has scheduled a press briefing for Tuesday morning to discuss what it described as a constitutional challenge to state practices.

32 Republicans joined Democrats in the South Dakota House to kill a bill that would have banned the state and its political subdivisions from participating in the enforcement of a wide range of federal gun control measures; past, present and future.

The legislation would create a cause of action in state courts to sue peace officers employed by a local government "who under the color of law, subjects, or causes to be subjected, including failure to intervene, any other person to the deprivation of any individual rights that create binding obligations on government actors secured by the United States Constitution, or by the state constitution." Qualified Immunity would not be a defense in cases brought under this statute.

The legislation would end civil asset forfeiture in Tennessee and replace it with a criminal forfeiture process. In practice, the proposed law would require a criminal conviction before prosecutors could proceed with the forfeiture process in most cases.

The legislation would repeal the entire state civil asset forfeiture process. If passed into law, state and local police could no longer engage in civil asset forfeiture under state law.

The last line of defense in the criminal justice system is woefully understaffed and overworked

Bills filed in the Wyoming legislature would widely ban state enforcement of federal gun control; past, present and future. Passage into law would represent a major step toward ending federal acts that infringe on the right to keep and bear arms within the state.

A bill introduced in the Kansas House would reform asset forfeiture laws to prohibit the state from taking property without a criminal conviction in most cases. But the legislation leaves a loophole open that allows police to circumvent stricter state laws by passing cases off to the feds.