Thursday, October 09, 2008

Civil Rights Roundup: 10/09/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

It's election time, and you know what that means: illegally keeping eligible voters off the rolls!

Polling places may not have the resources to handle the expected crush of voters this election.

The Supreme Court is examining whether employees who cooperate in discrimination and harassment cases, but are not the complaining parties themselves, are protecting via anti-retaliation provisions.

A federal appeals court has blocked the release of 17 innocent men being detained at Guantanamo, pending a hearing by that court.

Not only was the torture regime developed at Guantanamo exported to American prisons, but some officials worried that the tactics used domestically were actually "harsher" than those at our Cuban base.

High fuel prices mean its harder to run school buses. Not running buses means kids only go to their neighborhood schools. Neighborhood schools lead to school resegregation. Resegregation means students suffer.

An Iowa resident crossed into Nebraska to take advantage of the state's extremely broad "safe haven" law, abandoning her 14 year old daughter to state authorities.

A federal judge is urging immigration authorities to hold off deporting a man until his civil case against the Boston Police concludes. The man served 19 years in prison for rapes that he did not commit.

Another immigration raid, another town torn asunder.

The Cook County (Chicago) sheriff has ordered his deputies to cease evicting people, arguing that many of the evicted are renters who have done nothing wrong -- victims of landlords whose properties are being repossessed.

The Ohio Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by a death row inmate arguing he's too fat to be executed. The argument is that his girth will make it too hard to find a vein insuring the execution is done quickly and painlessly.

It's looking as if minority college enrollment is stalling out. In an amazing coincidence, affirmative action efforts have also been stalling out or proactively rolled back in recent years.

Another Virginia paper comes out in favor of re-enfranchising ex-felons.

The Department of Justice has checked -- for now -- efforts by a Georgia county's election officials to investigate the citizenship of voters whom the county had suspicions about.

1 comment:

PG said...

Speaking of voter rolls, the Instapundit types are convinced that there's voter fraud in Marion County, Indiana, because the current registered voter rolls show 5% more people than the Census indicated there were people 18+. It's a statistical mess of an analysis. They rely on 2006 population estimates of age groups which almost certainly undercount the population of the literal dozen colleges, where students have registered to vote in this election year but may not have been counted in the local Census. I feel fairly certain of the undercount because the county that includes the state's biggest city, Indianapolis, nonetheless has more people counted in the 0-4 age range than the 18-24. Unless they have some awful child mortality, that shouldn't be happening.