5/22/1807: Aaron Burr is indicted on charges of treason. Chief Justice John Marshall would preside over Burr's trial. The post Today in Supreme Court History: May 22, 1807 appeared first on Reason.com.
5/23/1991: Rust v. Sullivan is decided. The post Today in Supreme Court History: May 23, 1991 appeared first on Reason.com.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's resignation could have been connected to the potential legal trouble she created for President Donald Trump, according to an analyst on Friday.Legal analyst Scott MacFarlane, Chief Washington Correspondent for MeidasTouch, told MS NOW anchor Katy Tur that Gabbard's presence at the January FBI raid on the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center caused legal problems for the Trump administration, Mediaite reported."Not only is there concern that Tulsi Gabbard was there when the feds raided Fulton County and took their 2020 ballots — that’s complicating the effort by the [Trump] administration to fend off a legal challenge from Fulton County trying to get their ballots back. Her presence there has been a problem, potentially legally, in the dispute over those ballots," MacFarlane said.“Because she’s a political actor,” MacFarlane said. “As a national intelligence director, she’s viewed as a political actor if she’s there for what is viewed to be a politically-motivated raid. The Fulton County commissioner is arguing in court that this was a weaponized seizure of their ballots. Tulsi Gabbard being there is part of their argument, and that complicates things more. Why is the director of national intelligence playing any type of politicized role in anything domestically?”White House adviser Kurt Olsen led the raid in Fulton County. The former Trump campaign attorney was a figure in the "Stop the Steal" campaign — the MAGA effort to overturn President Joe Biden's 2020 presidential election win.Gabbard announced on Friday that she was leaving due to her husband's cancer diagnosis. However, a source familiar with her resignation told Reuters that Gabbard "had been forced out by the White House" — a different story compared to the announcement and social media reactions from Trump and other officials.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Friday appealed a federal judge’s order halting the enforcement of a law that blocks state and local police from arresting suspected illegal immigrants. The case concerns Senate Bill 4, a long-contested state law that cracked down on illegal immigration during the Biden administration. The law is still facing legal […]
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard is working diligently to declassify a controversial FISA Court opinion that would detail the court's concerns with how the federal government conducts searches using Section 702 of FISA. The post Director Tulsi Gabbard Working Diligently to Declassify Controversial FISA Court Opinion appeared first on Breitbart.
A former Christian school teacher in Indiana has learned her fate after pleading guilty to child sex crimes with a student, according to court records.Torrie Lemon, 24, pleaded guilty to felony child seduction in Hamilton County last Thursday, according to WTHR-TV.'It started with hugs, then longer hugs, then kissing, and then sexual acts.'Lemon was sentenced to 40 days in prison and nearly four years of probation.Law enforcement launched an investigation in April 2025.Lemon — who taught at Colonial Christian School, which includes pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade students and is located on the north side of Indianapolis — was accused of having sex with a student while she was a chaperone on a school trip to South Carolina.Citing court documents, WXIN-TV said a friend of the victim reportedly borrowed the victim’s phone and found sexual text messages between Lemon and the victim — and the friend told a teacher.The IndyStar obtained court documents saying a student informed a teacher after finding a video on the victim's phone of Lemon and the victim kissing.Court docs said the teacher confiscated the student's phone, informed the victim's parents, and filed a report with the Indiana Department of Child Services as well as with police in South Carolina.The victim told an officer with the Greenville Police Department that she was "in a relationship" with Lemon, according to court documents.Lemon informed a Greenville officer that she "was having an inappropriate relationship with a student from her school" for a few months, court records stated.Court documents added that school officials immediately sent Lemon home from the South Carolina trip, and the parents of the victim picked up the victim.RELATED: Former girls' high school basketball coach hit with 32 sex charges, including 'deviant sexual intercourse with a student' On April 14, a detective with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department interviewed the victim.The student said she started texting and hanging out with Lemon in January 2025 as friends, but the messages "quickly began turning sexual," WXIN reported.The student told police she never intended their relationship to turn sexual since "she knew it was wrong," but the pair did have sexual relations in March 2025, according to court documents the IndyStar obtained.The IndyStar reported that the detective also learned that the two "had sex at Lemon's on-campus apartment, in a church, and at the student's house."The student's mother told a detective she considered Lemon a "family friend," and the family allowed Lemon to stay at their house on several occasions after she moved to Indiana from New Hampshire, according to court records.Court documents also indicated that the student's father said his daughter began talking about age of consent laws in Indiana after the two met.'I love you more than I can describe.'The mother told authorities that her daughter and Lemon "quickly" developed a friendship over a few months, court documents stated.Court records also show that the mother discovered text messages between Lemon and her daughter that read "I can't wait to see you," and "I saw you across the room and wanted to give you a hug."According to court documents, the mother confronted Lemon, who told the mother nothing inappropriate was happening.The mother was "upset" after sexual misconduct accusations surfaced, court docs said.Court records also said detectives examined the daughter's cell phone for evidence, but most of the text messages between the student and teacher had been permanently deleted.The digital forensics unit of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department could not recover most of the deleted data from the student's phone, but the unit did recover some communications between the pair, according to court documents.The IndyStar reported that some of the messages read, "Thank you for an amazing night and morning," and "I love you more than I can describe."RELATED: Teacher allegedly sexually abused 5th-grade boy in classroom closet, kissed him in front of her own young child in classroomLemon was fired from her teaching position in June 2025, WXIN reported.In Lemon's exit interview with the school's principal, she confessed to having an inappropriate relationship with a student and said that "it started with hugs, then longer hugs, then kissing, and then sexual acts," according to the IndyStar.WXIN reported that the victim said they "started out as just friends," but that she and Lemon "began making sexual jokes and talking about attraction to women."Court docs say the victim told investigators that she and Lemon "wanted it to just be a friendship" because they knew a sexual relationship "went against their beliefs as Christians, and it was also against the law."According to court documents, the 17-year-old girl told police that Lemon kissed her during a school trip to Wabash, Indiana.WXIN reported:The victim then said she and Lemon began touching each other sexually while...
The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it will not decide Hamm v. Smith, a case involving a genuinely difficult constitutional question about whether an Alabama inmate may lawfully be executed. The immediate upshot of this decision is that Joseph Clifton Smith, who’s at the heart of this case, will not be killed. Smith prevailed […]
The Supreme Court took the unusual step on Thursday of dismissing a case that it had already heard, handing a rare win to a death-row prisoner and avoiding a ruling that could make it harder for other prisoners with intellectual disabilities to avoid execution.In rare cases, the justices agree to hear a case, only to conclude later that it would be inappropriate or unnecessary for the high court to decide the case. When this happens, the court can decline to rule for either side and instead hold that the case is “dismissed as improvidently granted.” For brevity’s sake, most observers typically say these cases were “DIG’d.”The court does not typically announce the vote breakdown when DIG-ing a case. Thanks to the concurring and dissenting opinions, it can be readily inferred this time. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch all dissented from the court’s move. Logically, that means Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined with the court’s liberals to nix the case.In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor applauded the court’s decision to avoid a ruling. “Here, neither Alabama nor the United States seriously contends that the District Court’s finding was clearly erroneous,” she explained in a concurring opinion joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “For good reason: It was not.” Alito argued in dissent that the lower courts had misapplied precedents on executing people with intellectual disabilities and criticized his colleagues for not clarifying them. “By instead remaining silent, the Court exacerbates the confusion that plagues our jurisprudence in this area,” he claimed.Thursday’s decision is good news for Joseph Smith, the death-row inmate in this particular case. Since the Supreme Court issued no actual ruling, the lower court decision where he prevailed is the final word. An Alabama jury convicted him of murdering Durk Van Dam in 1997 in a dispute over money. After receiving a death sentence from the trial court, Smith and his lawyers challenged the death sentence in court by claiming that he was intellectually disabled. They pointed to IQ tests where he scored in the mid-to-high 70s, as well as other evidence of his poor educational performances and low mental aptitudes.It is a long-standing principle of the Anglo-American legal system that people with mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities are less culpable for their crimes. Lord Blackstone, the famed eighteenth-century judge and legal commentator, noted in the parlance of his era that “idiots and lunatics are not chargeable for their own acts, if committed when under these incapacities: no, not even for treason itself.” He invoked a Latin legal maxim that, translated into English, meant “Madness alone punishes the madman.”In 2002, the Supreme Court held in Atkins v. Virginia that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment includes executing people with intellectual disabilities. Using an Eighth Amendment test that it had applied since the 1950s, the court looked at whether there was a national consensus against executing people with intellectual disabilities and concluded that one existed. (More on that test later.)“Those mentally retarded persons who meet the law’s requirements for criminal responsibility should be tried and punished when they commit crimes,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court, using the parlance of his time. “Because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses, however, they do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct. Moreover, their impairments can jeopardize the reliability and fairness of capital proceedings against mentally retarded defendants.”The Atkins ruling did not specify the level of intellectual disability that could be permitted for an execution, nor did it spell out how to discern when someone met the constitutional threshold. Some death penalty states responded to Atkins by enacting a bright-line cutoff, typically at an IQ of 70. In 2014, the Supreme Court weighed in again by ruling that Florida could not execute a man whose IQ score had ranged between 71 and 80. This time, the court held that defendants must provide additional evidence of intellectual disability in “borderline” cases.In this particular case, Smith took two tests from two experts, one hired by his own lawyers and one hired by the state. He scored a 74 on his lawyers’ test and a 78 on the one administered by Alabama. Both tests had a confidence interval of 95 percent, meaning that his score could fall between 70 and 83. The two experts, as well as a third one also hired by Smith’s lawyers, reached different conclusions.