NATIONAL
April 8, 2010 | By Clement Tan
Senate Democrats rejected on Tuesday a Republican demand that next week's scheduled confirmation hearing on Goodwin Liu's nomination to a federal appeals court be postponed, setting up an all-out partisan battle over the Berkeley law professor. Senate Republicans, who complain that Liu had originally failed to respond adequately to numerous questions on a Judiciary Committee questionnaire, pledged to continue pressing for a new hearing date. Liu, President Obama's choice for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, had been expected to testify March 24. But in the aftermath of the March 21 healthcare vote, Senate Republicans forced a postponement by invoking a little-used procedural rule disallowing any committee hearings more than two hours after the start of a Senate session.
OPINION
March 28, 2004
Re "No Pal of the Environment" (editorial, March 23), on William G. Myers III, nominee for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals: Having worked with Myers for a number of years, please let me tell you why he should serve on the 9th Circuit. The 9th Circuit covers the West, and Myers would fill an Idaho seat recently vacated by an Idaho judge. Though no federal judge should represent anyone or anything but federal law, to the extent the 9th Circuit currently represents anything other than embarrassment -- declaring the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, for instance, and summary reversals -- it represents President Clinton, who appointed 14 of its active 26 judges.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
June 23, 2010 | By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times
In the usually decorous environs of a full federal appeals court hearing, 11 black-robed judges Tuesday provoked surprised laughter as they debated whether an activist's Nazi salute to the mayor of Santa Cruz was an act of free speech or a disruption of public order. "It's OK to give the finger to a police officer," Judge Stephen Reinhardt noted helpfully, citing a previous ruling within the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge M. Margaret McKeown asked the Santa Cruz city attorney if boisterous positive expressions — mugging gleefully and pumping two thumbs up — at City Council meetings would also violate the rules of order.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
September 16, 2009 | Carol J. Williams
Court-ordered mediation has failed to settle a lawsuit over delayed and denied care for wounded veterans so the case now goes to a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel, the court reported Tuesday. Two veterans groups brought suit in 2007, alleging systemic failures in the Department of Veterans Affairs' processing of disability claims. They noted that 3,000 veterans die each year while their appeals are pending, and 18 veterans commit suicide each day on average, many suspected to be acts of despair by those with untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
November 3, 2009 | Carol J. Williams
Melvin Brunetti, a federal appeals court judge for the last 24 years whose opinions included upholding anti-hate crime legislation, broader Pentagon scrutiny of homosexuals' security clearances and the death penalty for Robert Alton Harris, has died. He was 75. Brunetti died Friday at his home in Reno after a long battle with cancer, his family told the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, to which he had been appointed by President Reagan in 1985. He had been on senior status with the appeals court since 1999, a semi-retirement in which a judge is replaced on the active roster but continues to handle a reduced caseload.
NATIONAL
November 2, 2009 | David G. Savage
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering, for the third time, the case of a California murderer who was sentenced to die in 1982 for the brutal killing of a young woman. Twenty years ago, the California Supreme Court affirmed a death sentence for Fernando Belmontes, but since then his case has bounced back and forth in the federal courts. Three times in this decade, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned his death sentence as flawed. The case is the latest skirmish in the long-running war between California prosecutors and the 9th Circuit over the death penalty -- and it helps explains the oddity of capital punishment in California.