The revolution will not be televised

Forget about TV, you can't even get a seat inside the Supreme Court. From USA Today:

The dignified calm of the U.S. Supreme Court was broken recently when seven protesters, one after another, rose to shout epithets about the growing power of money in American politics — a trend the court has hastened through its rulings.

It was a rare moment of chaos in the court. When the episode ended, Chief Justice John Roberts told spectators, "We will now continue with our tradition of having open court in the Supreme Court."

Roberts' off-the-cuff remark was significant, reminding the public that the nation's highest court is indeed open — and openness can sometimes be messy in a democracy. But as the court continues to add blockbuster cases to its docket, the unfortunate narrow scope of the court's openness deserves scrutiny.

In the next three months, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on three extraordinary landmark issues: same-sex marriage, the future of Obamacare and the constitutionality of lethal injections for capital punishment.

Roberts is correct that the court will be open when those cases are argued — but only to 200 or so members of the public lucky enough to obtain seats. Many will wait in line for days in advance. If past experience is repeated, wealthy individuals who want seats will pay thousands of dollars for others to wait in line for them — an unseemly business that tarnishes the court's image of openness.

Why will only a relative handful of people be able to witness history at the court? Because, as open as it is, the court has long refused to let cameras record or broadcast its proceedings. We have written about this before, but the court's policy continues to amaze people — especially young people, who take transparency and access for granted.

Recent polls have shown strong approval for cameras in the Supreme Court (71%) and record-high agreement that the court should be more open and transparent generally (95%).

The group Fix the Court, which advocates for greater transparency at the Supreme Court, posted an amusing video recently in which random Americans were told that the Super Bowl will not be televised. The interviewees refused to believe it — and, no worries, it will be. But when those interviewed were told that a slightly more important institution — namely, the Supreme Court — is never televised, they were incredulous, and upset.

Fight the Power!

How ridiculous is this -- a PD arrested for doing her job:

Warren Lee Hill executed

The 11th Circuit denied his last stay request (Hull & Marcus, with a dissent by Martin) and the Supreme Court also turned him down yesterday, leading Georgia to execute Warren Lee Hill.

Here's the NY Times:

The State of Georgia executed a convicted murderer, Warren Lee Hill, on Tuesday night, ending a prolonged legal fight that led to a series of court-ordered reprieves and frequently tested the state’s standards for capital punishment.

The Georgia attorney general’s office confirmed Mr. Hill’s death at a state prison in Jackson, southeast of Atlanta. He was 54.

The execution would “live on as a moral stain on the people of this state and on the courts that allowed this to happen,” Brian Kammer, one of Mr. Hill’s lawyers, said shortly before the sentence was carried out.

The execution came at the end of a day in which state officials and the federal courts denied Mr. Hill’s final appeals, which focused on claims of intellectual disability and whether Georgia law made it essentially impossible to avoid a death sentences on those grounds.

The United States Supreme Court turned down the appeal Tuesday night; the court said Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor had supported issuing a stay of execution. Earlier Tuesday, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected a request for clemency from Mr. Hill, who was sentenced to death for the 1990 murder of another inmate, Joseph Handspike.

At the time of Mr. Handspike’s death, Mr. Hill was in prison for killing his girlfriend in 1985.

Although Mr. Hill’s appeals sometimes involved questions about Georgia’s lethal injection protocols, his last legal campaign dealt with a contention of an intellectual disability. Mr. Hill, with an I.Q. of 70, had “the emotional and cognitive functioning of an 11-year-old boy,” Mr. Kammer said.

“Warren Lee Hill is intellectually disabled,” Mr. Hill’s lawyers told the Supreme Court in a filing. “The lower Georgia courts have said this twice. All of respondent’s experts have acknowledged this fact.” ***

In a ruling announced less than 30 minutes before the scheduled start of the execution, the justices rejected Mr. Hill’s appeal.

Surveillance nation

You are being watched and tracked all of the time. Do you care? From Fox:

The Justice Department has acknowledged constructing a database to track the movements of millions of vehicles across the U.S. in real time.

The program, whose existence was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, is primarily overseen by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to combat drug trafficking near the U.S.-Mexico border. However, government emails indicate that the agency has been working to expand the database throughout the United States over the past several years.

A Justice Department spokesman told Fox News that the tracking program is compliant with federal, claiming it "includes protocols that limit who can access the database and all of the license plate information is deleted after 90 days." In 2012, a DEA agent testified before a House subcommittee that the program was inaugurated in December 2008 and information gathered by it was available to federal, state, and local law enforcement organizations.

It is not clear whether the tracking is overseen or approved by any court.

Rare view inside the Supreme Court during protest