A Missouri judge who locked two children in jail cells because he was frustrated by their resistance to a parental custody decision is liable for violating their Fourth Amendment rights, a federal appeals court ruled this week. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit rejected Taney County Judge Eric Eighmy's claim that he was shielded by qualified immunity, a doctrine that blocks federal civil rights claims unless they allege a violation of "clearly established" law.
"A reasonable judge should have known better," Judge David Stras writes in an opinion joined by the two other members of the 8th Circuit panel. "The law was 'clearly established' enough" to "place the issue 'beyond debate.'"
Institute for Justice attorney Dylan Moore, who wrote an 8th Circuit brief arguing against immunity for Eighmy and participated in oral arguments, welcomed the decision. "Every reasonable person knows that a judge can't throw children in jail for no good reason," he said. "Yet Judge Eighmy claimed qualified immunity shielded him from accountability anyway because no prior case told him that imprisoning innocent kids is unconstitutional. That defense is ridiculous, and we are thrilled that the court saw through it. When government officials commit such obvious constitutional violations, qualified immunity should never enter the picture."
The incident at the center of the case happened after an October 2019 custody hearing involving Kadan Rockett, then 14, and his 12-year-old sister, Brooklyn, who had achieved a modicum of fame as magicians performing on America's Got Talent. Their divorced parents, Bart Rockett and Kami Ballard, agreed that Ballard, who at that point lived in Missouri, would have primary custody of the children, while Rockett, who was living in California, would be "responsible for them at the beginning of each month and 'during TV pilot season.'" But Kadan and Brooklyn did not want to go home with their mother, which led to an argument in the lobby of the courthouse.
Eighmy intervened, telling Kadan and Brooklyn to come with him to a conference room, where he informed them that they had to leave with Ballard. "The children would not budge, even after the judge mentioned that the other option was foster care," Stras notes. "Frustrated, Judge Eighmy had the children follow him again, this time to a waiting area in the courthouse's juvenile division." A few minutes later, Eighmy "led them down a hallway to two holding cells."
Outside the cells, Eighmy again threatened Kadan and Brooklyn with foster care, but they were still unmoved. "Lock them up," the judge told an officer, who "patted them down and ordered them to remove their socks and shoes" before confining them in separate cells.
It is not clear exactly how much time Kadan and Brooklyn spent in the cells. The Institute for Justice says "about an hour," while Stras says "the time spent in the holding-cell area was between twenty and forty minutes." In any case, the children's respect for Eighmy's authority had improved by the time he came back. He "asked them one more time whether they would leave with their mother," Stras writes. "This time, they both nodded yes, so he let them go."
In June 2021, Rockett, the children's father, sued Eighmy on their behalf under 42 USC 1983, which authorizes claims against state or local officials who violate constitutional rights under color of law. In his motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Eighmy argued that he was protected by judicial immunity, which is absolute with respect to a judge's official duties. U.S. District Judge Douglas Harpool disagreed, and the 8th Circuit affirmed that ruling in 2023, noting that Kadan and Brooklyn were beyond Eighmy's contempt power because they were not parties to the custody case and that "judges do not do double duty as jailers."
Eighmy reiterated his judicial immunity claim in a motion for summary judgment, and Harpool rejected it again. After the trial began, Eighmy claimed qualified immunity twice, once after all the evidence had been submitted and again after the jury's verdict in favor of Kadan and Brooklyn. Harpool denied him that defense both times.
The jury ultimately awarded Kadan and Brooklyn $5,000 each in damages, and Harpool added about $327,000 in attorney fees. Eighmy appealed again, reiterating his judicial immunity claim. But the appeals court ruled that he had abandoned that argument by failing to raise it during the trial or after the verdict. So Eighmy was left with qualified immunity, which the appeals court said he did not deserve.
Eighmy clearly violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable seizures, Stras says, because he "did not have 'probable cause to believe that [the children had] committed' an offense, much less one that justified placing them in a holding cell. Rather, their only misdeed was one every parent knows well: resisting authority. Even in the context of legal-custody proceedings, refusing to leave with a parent is not a jailable offense. Nor were there 'exigent circumstances' arising out of danger to themselves or others."
Did Eighmy's authority as a judge give him extra leeway? Nope. "Criminal contempt was off the table because the children were neither parties to the custody case nor present inside the courtroom," Stras notes. "Nor could the power to punish a party for violating an injunction have provided the justification, given that Judge Eighmy never issued one."
Eighmy's motive for jailing the children does not change that analysis. "We have no doubt that Judge Eighmy believed he was acting in 'good faith,' and possibly even in the children's best interests, by detaining them," Stras writes. "But good faith in the Fourth Amendment context is about reasonable reliance, either on binding appellate precedent or a warrant issued by a 'neutral magistrate.'"
What about Eighmy's argument that he had no way of knowing his actions were unconstitutional? "The law in this area" was "clearly established," Stras says. "'[I]t would have been sufficiently clear [to] every reasonable official,' Judge Eighmy included, that locking up two children for refusing to follow directions violated the Fourth Amendment. As we put it over a decade and a half ago, long before the events in this case, '[i]t is clearly established that a warrantless arrest, unsupported by probable cause, violates the Fourth Amendment."
That principle was so well established, in fact, that Kadan and Brooklyn, neither of whom had attended law school, took it for granted. "I don't know how you have a right to lock us up," Kadan told Eighmy when he threatened to jail them, according to Rockett's amended complaint. "We have done nothing wrong." The complaint says Brooklyn raised the same point. "How can you just lock up kids?" she asked. "This isn't legal. We've done nothing wrong."
Given Eighmy's obvious disregard for Kadan and Brooklyn's Fourth Amendment rights, "we are not concerned about the lack of a prior case" with "fundamentally similar" facts, Stras says. "Indeed, given how clear the law is, it would have been surprising to find one." He quotes an observation that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch made as a 10th Circuit judge: "Sometimes the most obviously unlawful things happen so rarely that a case on point is itself an unusual thing."
The post The 8th Circuit Rejects Qualified Immunity for a Judge Who Jailed 2 Kids for 'Refusing To Follow Directions' appeared first on Reason Magazine.
A federal judge referred Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and one of his deputies to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution for alleged misconduct. In response, Krasner's office filed a motion seeking to force the Judge--Paul Diamond--from a case involving his office.
Yesterday, Judge Diamond rejected the Philly DA's motion with a terse and forcefully worded order.
Here, from the order, is some background:
In the last two years, the Third Circuit, this Court, and the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court have condemned as dishonest repeated post-trial concessions of relief made by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office. . . . The Pennsylvania Supreme Court was so concerned that it took the remarkable step of ordering all Philadelphia Common Pleas Judges to seek the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General's intervention whenever the DAO made a post-trial concession, so that the Attorney General could confirm the concession's honesty. . . .
The DAO's present post-trial concession is also remarkable: Here, four DAO supervisors credibly testified that the District Attorney himself and his lieutenant, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Stiegler, urged them to make false representations to this Court to "protect the office." According to "the Four," the District Attorney threatened them with "consequences" if they did not. Because these and related accusations, if true, could amount to criminal misconduct, I disqualified the District Attorney and Stiegler from participating further in this case and referred the matter to the Department of Justice for investigation. In the DAO's newly-filed Motions and the District Attorney's unsworn "Declaration"—all of which generate more heat than light—the DAO seeks my recusal from all matters in which the Office appears and asks me to reconsider my rulings in this case. I decline to do either.
And on the merits of the recusal request, here is what Judge Diamond had to say:
During the three-day hearing before me, the DAO failed to object to virtually all the rulings and actions it now challenges. That the Office chose to object only after the Court issued a decision unfavorable to the District Attorney and his lieutenant confirms that the DAO merely disagrees with those rulings. . . .
The Office challenges my noting that the District Attorney neither testified nor offered an affidavit in response to the Four's testimony—on which I based my disqualification order and DOJ referral. I do not credit the District Attorney's absurd suggestion that he did not know he could testify—especially after I twice asked DAO counsel if he wished to call any witnesses. Nor has the District Attorney explained why he did not offer a responsive affidavit, which would have required the declarant to tell the truth (under penalty of false swearing). The Office thus cannot truthfully dispute that the District Attorney chose not to give his version of events in Court under oath. The DAO's apparent belief that this tactical choice was reasonable hardly warrants recusal.
Finally, the DAO believes that I should have been leerier of Mason's testimony—the various corroborative documents notwithstanding—and more responsive to the uncorroborated, dubious testimony of Stiegler. Again, disagreement with my credibility determination is not a basis for recusal. Liteky, 510 U.S. at 555 ("[O]pinions formed by the judge on the basis of facts introduced or events occurring in the course of the current proceedings . . . do not constitute a basis for a bias or partiality motion unless they display a deep-seated favoritism or antagonism that would make fair judgment impossible."); Wecht, 484 F.3d at 220–21 (recusal not warranted despite the court's "skewed and unfair reading of the record"). The other arguments the DAO raises do not warrant discussion. Accordingly, I will deny as frivolous the Motion for Recusal.
And on the question of reconsideration:
The DAO does not discuss or even mention the burden and criteria a party seeking reconsideration must meet. Rather, as it did in seeking my recusal, the Office urges me to revisit my rulings because it disagrees with them. Once again, that disagreement does not warrant reconsideration. . . .
I will not discuss here every protest the Office makes to virtually all my rulings, my credibility determinations, and (once again) my reference to the District Attorney's silence in the face of damning testimony from his own employees and former employee. In his belated, unsworn "Declaration" the District Attorney attacks three of these witnesses as unworthy of belief. This after-the-fact attempt to cram "evidence" into a closed record seems intended to persuade the media, not the Court. In any event, the evidence is unpersuasive and does not warrant reconsideration. . . .
Accordingly, I will again deny the DAO's frivolous Motion.
Judge Diamond's order concludes:
Four of the District Attorney's supervisors offered powerful, unrebutted testimony that their boss and Stiegler urged them to misrepresent to this Court. When the Four told the District Attorney that he had thus created a conflict compelling them to inform the Court and withdraw from this case, he threatened them with "consequences." There are few attorney transgressions more serious than lying to the Court, urging others to do so, or threatening them should they tell the Court the truth. . . . If this in fact occurred, it is all the more serious because it occurred after four Courts condemned the DAO's conduct in circumstances like those presented here. Disqualifying the District Attorney and Stiegler and referring them for investigation is thus reasonable and warranted. That the District Attorney chose not to testify but sought to "make his case" with an unsworn declaration—the credibility of which I am unable to assess—makes that investigation even more necessary. Although Mr. Krasner may yet have the opportunity to testify under oath in another forum, his intemperate filings provide no basis for recusal or reconsideration of my rulings.
The post Judge Refuses to Recuse in Case Involving Alleged Misconduct by Philly DA's Office appeared first on Reason Magazine.
According to The Washington Post, "The chairman of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee is investigating two D.C.-based activist groups over hosting what he called 'jury nullification training sessions,' claiming that their instructions given to potential jurors were an illegal attempt to subvert federal prosecutors."
The committee chair in question, Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.), has set his sights on the groups known as Free DC and Harriet's Wildest Dreams because they, in Comer's words, believe "that potential jurors should not make decisions impartially based on applying the law as instructed to the facts presented before them in the case, but based on their subjective, personal beliefs and activist agendas."
I hate to break it to Comer, but many prominent members of America's Founding generation would have agreed with those D.C. activists.
The debate over jury nullification asks whether there is a proper place in our legal system for a jury to acquit, not because of any lack of evidence of a defendant's guilt, but because the jury believes the underlying law that was supposedly broken, or the prosecutor's particular enforcement of that law, to be unconstitutional.
In 1791, the influential Founding Father James Wilson, who was a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, delivered a widely discussed lecture on law at the College of Philadelphia. "Whoever would be obliged to obey a constitutional law, is justified in refusing to obey an unconstitutional act of the legislature," Wilson said. "When a question, even of this delicate nature, occurs, every one who is called to act, has a right to judge." Needless to say, jurors are among those "called to act" in this very manner. Jurors therefore have their own "right to judge" the constitutionality of the law (and prosecution) before them.
Thomas Jefferson made a similar point in a 1789 letter to Thomas Paine. "The trial by jury," Jefferson wrote, is "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." How else may a jury hold the government accountable to the principles of the Constitution than by judging for itself the constitutionality of the government's actions, including the actions of the police and prosecution?
According to Comer, the job of a juror is mechanically "applying the law as instructed to the facts presented before them in the case."
But that's not what Founding Fathers such as Wilson and Jefferson thought. They argued that the job of the juror was to apply the text of the Constitution to the actions of the government and to acquit the defendant if either the law or its enforcement came up short. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it in his great book, Democracy in America, the jury "places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed, or a portion of the governed, and not in that of the government."
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in two cases that are worth keeping track of.
The post Jury Nullification Is Not a Crime appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Thanks to a 2005 DUI conviction in Pennsylvania, Edward Williams permanently lost the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. But he did not realize that until a decade later, and his confusion on that point is understandable.
The federal law that stripped Williams of his Second Amendment rights is commonly described as applying to "felons," and Williams' offense was a misdemeanor. But although his sentence did not include any time behind bars, his crime theoretically could have sent him to prison for up to five years. That was enough to trigger 18 USC 922(g)(1), which covers anyone convicted of "a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year."
When a lawyer alerted Williams to that wrinkle, which made his continued ownership of firearms a federal felony, he got rid of his guns. But he did not think that requirement was fair, reasonable, or constitutional, and this week a federal appeals court agreed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit recognized a historical tradition of disarming "physically dangerous individuals" whose possession of firearms would pose a threat to public safety. But it said Williams plainly does not fit into that category.
"The federal government spent nearly a decade trying to permanently disarm a peaceable man over a nonviolent misdemeanor—and it lost bigly," says Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, which supported Williams' lawsuit. "The government does not get to turn a nonviolent conviction into a lifetime ban on exercising a constitutionally protected right."
The 3rd Circuit's en banc decision in Williams v. Attorney General affirms a 2023 ruling by a federal judge who likewise concluded that disarming Williams was unconstitutional. It elaborates on the logic of Range v. Attorney General, a 2023 decision that restored the gun rights of a Pennsylvania man who had been convicted of food stamp fraud. In both cases, the 3rd Circuit held that applying Section 922(g)(1) to the plaintiffs was not "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation"—the Second Amendment test established by the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
Writing for the majority in Williams' case, 3rd Circuit Judge Paul Matey acknowledges that the Supreme Court has described "longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons" as "presumptively lawful." But "those longstanding customs restricted the violently dangerous (within which some felons would be included), not felons writ large," he says. "Felons were restricted because they posed a physical danger, rather than for their offense of conviction."
Matey argues that "focusing on physical dangerousness corrects the erroneous argument" that "only law-abiding and responsible citizens can exercise the rights protected by the Second Amendment"—a claim that the Supreme Court rejected in the 2024 case United States v. Rahimi. "We find no history that supports disarming irresponsible people, where 'responsible' is defined by the whim of the sovereign or the will of the majority," he says, alluding to the danger of allowing legislators to whittle away at the Second Amendment by criminalizing an ever-widening range of conduct.
Matey emphasizes "the novelty of forever restricting all felons from possessing firearms for lawful purposes." The original restriction, which Congress approved in 1938 as part of the Federal Firearms Act, applied only to violent crimes such as murder, manslaughter, rape, kidnapping, robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon. In 1961, Congress expanded the ban to cover nonviolent crimes punishable by more than a year in prison.
Williams' 2005 DUI conviction qualified for two reasons. He had a prior DUI conviction, stemming from a 2000 arrest in State College. And when he was arrested again in Philadelphia four years later, his blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.223 percent. That made his second offense a first-degree misdemeanor, which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.
Since then, Williams has stayed out of trouble. "He has done nothing violent, let alone dangerous, for over twenty years, and has held steady employment at the same job for over three decades," Matey notes. Williams drinks only occasionally, and a psychological evaluation found he "has a normal personality, without psychopathology and without addiction or violent tendencies."
The Justice Department nevertheless argued that Williams' continuing disarmament is consistent with the Bruen test, which requires historical analogs that are "relevantly similar" in motivation and scope. In making that case, the government relied mainly on early laws aimed at "habitual drunkards"—the same analogy that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected last June in United States v. Hemani, which involved the federal ban on gun possession by "unlawful" drug users.
Although the Justice Department "acknowledges it may proscribe Williams's possession of firearms only if he 'presently poses a physical danger if armed,'" Matey says, it "offers no evidence to establish this as the aim of the habitual drunkard laws." Those laws, the Supreme Court noted in Hemani, "did not seek to protect the public from violence so much as to protect habitual drunkards from themselves and their families from financial devastation."
Nor did the habitual drunkard laws permanently disarm people, as Section 922(g)(1) does. "Most statutes capped the commitment of habitual drunkards to the state inebriate asylum, prison, or hard labor to a few months or years," Matey notes. "Others provided for an indefinite period of incarceration, but had no indication that upon release individuals continued to forfeit their arms. Rather, once someone was 'safe' to 'go at large,' they were restored to the status of a full rights-bearing citizen."
Contrary to the considerations that the Supreme Court deemed relevant in Hemani, Matey says, the Justice Department "fails to show that Williams threatens to 'misuse[] a gun while intoxicated,' or that he 'poses a danger to himself or others as a result' of
alcohol abuse. In fact, much like those nineteenth-century drunkards released from custody and restored their rights, the record shows that Williams poses no present physical danger from the use of a firearm, or anything else."
The 3rd Circuit is one of three federal appeals courts that have allowed people with nonviolent felony records to argue that Section 922(g)(1) is unconstitutional as applied to them. But such challenges have been blocked in six circuits, notwithstanding compelling historical evidence that the law reaches much farther than the Second Amendment allows. So far, the Supreme Court has declined to accept any of the many petitions asking it to resolve that circuit split.
The post The 3rd Circuit Upholds the Gun Rights of a Man Who Committed a Nonviolent Misdemeanor 2 Decades Ago appeared first on Reason Magazine.
By Madeline CARR
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Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
Recent warnings from American AI leaders have created the impression that the world is only beginning to confront the dangers of advanced artificial intelligence.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of tech company Anthropic, has called for governments to intervene to slow the development of increasingly powerful AI models.
His proposal begins with independent evaluators embedded inside AI companies, moves on to regulation and progresses to government-backed coordination among democratic states.
Ultimately, it seeks global agreements with China on testing of AI systems, dangerous applications of the technology and the pace of AI development.
Yet there is a China-shaped hole in this narrative. The Asian superpower is portrayed as the difficult final participant in a governance system that the US and its allies must first create.
In fact, China has already established an extensive system of AI rules, assessment, filing, technical standards and government oversight. Here’s how China’s AI governance system has developed in stages alongside the technology itself.
Beijing’s 2022 rules on algorithmic recommendation services apply to technologies that select, rank, filter or recommend online content to users.
They compel companies that use algorithms to examine how they work, to protect the personal information of users, to give users certain controls, and to introduce safeguards for workers, consumers, children and older people.
China’s deep synthesis provisions, effective from January 2023, extended regulation to synthetic (or AI-generated) text, images, audio and video. AI companies must authenticate users, protect data, keep relevant records, assess their systems and identify synthetic material that could be mistaken for authentic content.
The interim measures for generative artificial intelligence services were introduced in August 2023. These added rules for public-facing generative AI, particularly those that can influence public opinion or persuade uses in other ways.
The measures apply to the legality and quality of training data, users’ personal information, intellectual property and discrimination based on protected characteristics. The rules also cover transparency by AI companies and the accuracy and reliability of products.
Under the rules, companies must address problems found in their services. These services must undergo a security assessment to examine their risks and compliance with Chinese legislation. The companies must also file information about their algorithms with Chinese authorities.
These mechanisms are not identical to the independent evaluators that would be embedded in AI companies, as has been proposed by Amodei. But they perform some of the same functions.
Frontier risks
Beijing’s latest set of measures is called the AI safety governance framework 3.0, published in September 2026. It sets out a broad approach to identifying, grading and responding to risks throughout the lifecycle of AI systems.
Building on earlier versions, the framework covers AI model and data risks, vulnerabilities in open source models (those which can be freely modified by users), AI’s effects on employment and society and increasingly autonomous systems.
It includes a dedicated mechanism for managing risks associated with rapidly developing AI agents (systems that carry out tasks in response to instructions by a user).
The framework addresses some of the same dangers now generating alarm in Silicon Valley, including highly autonomous systems, the misuse of chemical, biological and nuclear technologies, and the possibility of humans losing control of advanced AI. It proposes continual safety evaluations, risk based safeguards, humans being in charge, and emergency intervention mechanisms.
An independent analysis by the US Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank has described the framework as China’s attempt to “to advance frontier safety without the need for heavy handed regulatory interventions”.
Legal consequences
None of this means that Chinese AI rules should be transplanted elsewhere. Its institutions, regulatory traditions and technological priorities are different.
Many functions now presented as urgent aspirations in the US, including evaluation, accountability for AI companies, risk classification for AI systems, regulatory filing, technical standards and government oversight are already embedded in the governance architecture of the world’s other AI superpower.
The US is free to conclude that a market-led system best serves its economic and strategic interests. The Trump administration has favoured a “minimally burdensome” national approach to AI and has sought to limit more demanding state-level regulation.
But a market-led model cannot mean privatising the rewards of AI while exporting its risks. US companies may capture the commercial gains, while governments elsewhere are left to investigate security incidents, protect public systems and absorb the wider costs when those technologies fail. The OpenAI agent that gained unauthorised access to Australia’s state healthcare service shows how AI risks are being exported.
If Washington rejects extensive controls before systems are released, the US needs a credible legal regime for assessing who is liable for damage caused by those AI models. Otherwise, countries dependent on foreign AI systems will face increasingly difficult choices about whose technology to trust, and on what terms.
Silicon Valley’s governing ethos has long been to “move fast and break things”. That was always a questionable principle for technologies woven deeply into public life. It is untenable for companies whose own leaders now warn that their products could cause catastrophic harm.
Beijing has already surrounded its AI sector with public obligations, regulatory oversight and an evolving framework of risk assessment. A global debate that treats such governance as a future aspiration should at least recognise that one country is already ahead of the curve.
Original article: theconversation.com
Former Swain Co. sheriff faces sex crime charges from NC and Cherokees. He might avoid NC prosecution if judge buys mental fitness claim.
Unfit to stand trial? Ex-sheriff facing sex charges seeks to avoid prosecution. is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s more than 11 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
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