May 4, 2021
HARRISBURG (AP) The panel that will redraw boundaries of Pennsylvania’s legislative districts amid public education campaigns to stamp out gerrymandering was appointed a tie-breaking fifth member from the state’s high court Monday.
Mark Nordenberg, the former chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, was appointed by the state Supreme Court. The announcement was made in an order and in a letter to the Legislature’s caucus leaders from the chief justice, Max Baer, who is a fellow Pittsburgher.
Nordenberg, who also was Pitt’s law school dean, now chairs the university’s Institute of Politics. Nordenberg, 72, stepped down as chancellor in 2014 after 18 years.
Pa. Supreme Court to pick Legislative Reapportionment Commission chair
Pennsylvania State Capital Bureau
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court will pick the fifth member and chair of the Legislative Reapportionment Commission after four state Legislature leaders could not agree on a candidate.
In a letter to Supreme Court Chief Justice Max Baer on Friday, Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward, Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff and House Minority Leader Joanna McClinton said they had failed to pick a fifth member within the required 45-day window after their certification.
The Legislative Reapportionment Commission works strictly on reapportioning state legislative districts and drawing maps based on recent census data.
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Apr 30, 2021
Successive grand jury investigations dating to the early 2000s exposed the scale of child sexual abuse and cover-up in Pennsylvania’s Roman Catholic Church. The most recent panel of jurors pored over the evidence, then outlined searing findings in a 2018 report: More than 300 priests and had abused more than 1,000 children over a 70-year period in six Roman Catholic dioceses.
It’s advice to right these wrongs? Change laws to protect children and give victims long timed-out of the justice system a temporary window to seek civil damages.
The grand jury, overseen by Attorney General Josh Shapiro, said victims who reported abuse were often blamed, cowed and sometimes silenced with settlements that prohibited them from reporting abusers to law enforcement. And too often, church leaders handled wrongdoing not with a call to police, but in-house with ineffective treatment, then redeployed the predators to offend again.
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HARRISBURG A key state Senate committee on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved legislation to temporarily allow survivors of decades-old child sexual abuse to sue the perpetrators, an alternative path to justice after a Wolf administration error derailed a previous effort.
The 11-3 vote by the Judiciary Committee positions the bill for a historic floor debate as early as this week, a win for survivors and their advocates who have been pushing for it since the child sexual abuse cover-up scandal that enveloped the Catholic Church in the early 2000s.
In bringing the bill to a vote Wednesday, the committee’s chair, state Sen. Lisa Baker, of Dallas, Luzerne County, R-20th Dist., acknowledged long-standing objections by some Republican colleagues in the chamber who believe such a change can only legally be made by amending the state constitution, a lengthy and time-consuming process.