For decades, visitors have been booted from or even arrested for trespassing in the grassy plaza outside Guastavino’s, a luxe event venue beneath the Queensboro Bridge on 59th Street and First Avenue.

Sean Basinski, an attorney who lives near the park, posted a video earlier this month showing a Guastavino’s security guard ordering him to leave and telling him, “You’re going to the hospital, then you’re going to jail.” He’s also been arrested by NYPD. Officers would point to signs in the parks declaring it a “private garden.”

Basinski and group of New Yorkers sued Guastavino’s in state court on Monday. By Tuesday, the signs were gone.

“I didn’t do it, I swear, judge,” Basinski joked at a public picnic hosted in the space on Tuesday afternoon. “But they were removed. Maybe that’s a good sign.”

In an email to me [Nina Pullano] Guastavino’s said it “acknowledges that this is a public plaza” and that the “signage indicating that it is a private space has been removed.”

Besides opening the space to public access — a battle they’ve apparently already won — the plaintiffs say Guastavino’s owes the city rental fees for treating a publicly owned plaza as its own private space for events ranging in price from around $150,000 to $300,000.

“You can’t sell our public space,” Basinski said. “The brides and grooms can still come out here and take pictures, and they should. But we can be here too.”

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

A federal judge struck down most of the Trump administration’s attempt to lower the minimum wage for most temporary foreign farmworkers, finding rewritten farmworker wage rules arbitrary and capricious, pushed through without proper public notice. [Jeremy Yurow]

• Hooked: Meta will pay up to $17.1 billion to address claims it made social media addictive to children. [Ryan Knappenberger, Alan Riquelmy, Carly Nairn]

• Mailing it in: The Supreme Court freed President Donald Trump to enforce mail-in voting changes ahead of midterms, but states are pushing back. [Kelsey Reichmann, Ryan Knappenberger]

• West Coast rap: Both sides have rested their cases in Tupac Shakur’s murder trial, meanwhile a murder-for-hire trial opened in Los Angeles against drill rapper Lil Durk. [Alan Riquelmy, Hillel Aron]

• Reverse course: The 11th Circuit tossed a $12M verdict in a passenger’s sexual assault suit against Carnival Cruise Line. [Kayla Goggin]

• Epstein’s bankroll: Bank of America owes $72.5 million to victims of Jeffrey Epstein because of the bank’s role in the late pedophile businessman’s sex trafficking operation. Also, Ghislaine Maxwell failed to overturn her conviction. [Josh Russell, Erik Uebelacker]

• On the topic of millionaire sex trafficking cases: Ex-Abercrombie CEO Michael Jeffries and Wall Street trader Howard Rubin each face trials in 2027 in Brooklyn federal court. [Nina Pullano]

New on Sidebar

The latest gold rush isn’t buried in the dirt. It’s powered by servers. As data center construction explodes across the country, Sidebar’s Kirk McDaniel take us to rural Texas, where Paluxy River Valley residents are determined to protect their water, land and way of life.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Feds schedule kratom derivatives as opioids

2. Lil Durk’s murder-for-hire trial opens in LA

3. Supreme Court frees Trump to enforce mail-in voting changes ahead of midterms

4. Vail Resorts faces third class action over Epic Pass pricing

5. The beach town in the middle of Mexico’s new circular sargassum economy

6. Online streamers sue Twitch, Amazon over generative AI training

7. Judge set to vaporize EPA bid to end California emissions standards

8. Atlanta Braves sued over star player's $3.2 million loan default

In the wake of two skier class actions claiming Vail Resorts cozied up with competitors to double prices for its Epic Pass, an investor says the major ski resort also violated its duty to shareholders. [Amanda Pampuro]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Ninth Circuit: The court reversed summary judgment in favor of prison officials who refused to submit a story an inmate wrote to a university literary journal.

» Second Circuit: A lower court properly dismissed wheelchair users’ class action accusing Lyft of making wheelchair-accessible vehicles available only in major cities.

» Southern District of Illinois: A legal hemp distributor’s civil rights claim accusing Madison County police of improperly seizing inventory at a traffic stop is partially dismissed.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

By now it’s no secret that criminal trials aren’t like they appear on TV and juries rarely see a smoking gun. But what happens when everyone agrees the defendant never fired the murder weapon? Courthouse News captured two such test cases this week: one involving a modern Trader Joe’s tragedy and the other an infamous decades-old cold case.

After declaring himself under orders from Jesus, Gene Atkins shot his 17-year-old girlfriend and his grandmother on July 21, 2018. Atkins then pulled his wounded girlfriend into his grandmother’s car and drove around until he crashed into a utility pole and fled into a nearby Trader Joe’s grocery store. There, Atkins held dozens of people hostage. In the chaos of capturing Atkins, an officer shot 27-year-old store manager Melyda Corado.

While Atkins’ girlfriend and grandmother survived, Corado did not.

Investigators nevertheless concluded the shots had been lawfully fired and the Corado family settled a wrongful death lawsuit for $9.5 million. That didn’t let Atkins off the hook.

After Atkins was restored to competency to stand trial and secured an attorney, a jury found him guilty of two attempted murder charges and several counts related to the hostage takeover. Ultimately, however, Atkins’ peers in June deadlocked 10-2 on holding him accountable for Corado’s death.

This week, a new jury was given an abridged accounting of the day and asked to convict Atkins of second-degree murder.

“Prosecutors charged Atkins for murder using the theory of ‘implied malice,’ when a defendant commits an intentional act that shows conscious disregard for human life, and the act results in someone’s death,” explained Los Angeles reporter Hillel Aron. State attorneys “argued that by shooting at police while running into a crowded supermarket, Atkins knew or should have known that the police would shoot back and likely hit a bystander.”

This time, the jury deliberated just three hours before unanimously finding Atkins guilty. He is scheduled to be sentenced next week.

While the Angeleno was convicted of murder without having touched the weapon, another trial kicked off 300 miles northeast in Las Vegas, in which prosecutors say the defendant who handed over the murder weapon that killed Tupac Shakur did everything but pull the trigger.

The rising career of rapper Tupac Shakur was cut short in Paradise, Nevada, on Sept. 7, 1996, when a .40-caliber Glock 22 pistol sent four bullets into his chest, arm and thigh. The 25-year-old died six days later in the hospital, kicking off a nearly three-decade murder investigation that ended with the arrest of Duane “Keffe D” Davis in September 2023.

In opening statements made to a Las Vegas jury, prosecutors said Davis gave the Glock to his nephew, Orlando Anderson, after Shakur assaulted him. Davis belonged to South Side Compton Crips, a loyalty his nephew appeared to follow when he ripped a Death Row Records chain off Trevon Lane, a man affiliated with rival gang Mob Piru in 1996. Lane was then employed as security for Shakur during a Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand one day before the murder.

At the prize fight, Shakur and Lane encountered Anderson and quickly came to blows. Over the years, when Davis retold the story of the fight, he blamed the rapper for jumping his nephew — a slight prosecutors say he soon acted on.

Prosecutors say Davis and his nephew stalked Shakur through the Las Vegas Strip. Spotting the rapper’s car on the other side of the road, prosecutors say Davis handed Anderson the gun because he had a better shot from the back seat.

Anderson, who died three years later in a Compton shooting, denied being involved in Shakur’s death. As does Davis.

Defense attorneys for the 63-year-old say he was an infamous bullshitter, not a murderer, and that jurors should listen to Davis’ secretly recorded conversations with skepticism. [Alan Riquelmy]

Whether the Vegas jurors find state prosecutors’ witnesses — and memories — credible enough to convict Davis and put Shakur’s murder to rest remains to be seen. It is nevertheless clear, however, that jurors don’t always need a smoking gun to be convinced.

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

Arguing wildlife officials waved plans through without adequately studying what mining could do to local whales, turtles and coral, two conservation groups sued to delay the planned sale of rights to mine the seafloor for metal in the Rose Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, a place where Samoan families have long tracked sacred sea turtles and revered sharks as ancestral guardians. [Jeremy Yurow]

• Chips fall: A California woman filed a class action against the Campbell’s Company over its purported misrepresentation of avocado oil being used in “Kettle Brand Avocado Oil Sea Salt With a Hint of Pink Peppercorn Potato Chips.” [Alan Riquelmy]

• Naked rules: Elon Musk-owned tech company xAI sought a preliminary injunction from a federal judge against Minnesota’s first-in-the-nation legislation banning AI “nudification.” [Ryan Luetkemeyer]

• Infinite scroll: A Northern California jury heard opening statements by state attorneys general and Meta in a seismic federal trial over whether the tech giant deceived the public about addictive features of its social media platforms and their risks to teen mental health. [ Carly Nairn]

• C is for censor: The Disney Company sued the Trump administration over its censorship campaign calling for the Federal Communications Commission to revoke the ABC News broadcasting license and remove late-night host Jimmy Kimmel from the air. [Ryan Knappenberger]

• Road rage: Hip hop artist Young Thug asked a Georgia judge to toss a 10-year-old case aiming to hold him responsible for a 2015 gunshot attack on rival Lil Wayne’s tour bus in Atlanta. [Megan Butler]

This week on Sidebar

The latest gold rush isn’t buried in the dirt. It’s powered by servers. As tech giants race to build hyperscale data centers for the artificial intelligence boom, the promise of economic growth is colliding with growing resistance from rural communities.

One question looms as the data center boom accelerates: How do we build the infrastructure of the future without sacrificing the places people call home?

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Atlanta Braves sued over star player’s $3.2 million loan default

2. The beach town in the middle of Mexico’s new circular sargassum economy

3. Young Thug attorneys back in court over Lil Wayne bus shooting

4. A year with Luigi Mangione: MDC inmate recounts time with CEO shooter

5. Supreme Court shoots down Trump’s final bid to review E. Jean Carroll sexual assault case

6. New York judge orders unsealing of Ghislaine Maxwell-related grand jury subpoenas

7. Feds struggle to explain redactions in Epstein files compliance case

8. Border Patrol agents seek qualified immunity for killing unarmed Native American

A state court paused an expected murder trial for Luigi Mangione after he copped to shooting and killing a healthcare executive in federal court. With the 28-year-old facing decades in federal prison, Courthouse News spoke with a friend he made inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. [Erik Uebelacker]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Colorado Court of Appeals: Police did not violate a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights when they conducted a warrantless search and tested DNA evidence taken from his trash — evidence that ultimately linked the suspect to a 1981 homicide of which he was convicted in 2022.

» Massachusetts Court of Appeals: A zoo veterinarian’s harassment prevention order was vacated after a state appeals court found a trial judge improperly accepted the veterinarian’s affidavit and challenged the self-represented protester to disprove the allegations, which was not her burden.

» Northern District of California: A federal court maintained several claims in a class action against Otter.ai filed by individuals who said the platform illegally recorded and transcribed meetings — as advertised — without obtaining all participants’ consent, as required in states like California, Illinois and Washington.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

It’s a violation of a U.S. citizen’s Fourth Amendment rights for the government to collect and keep DNA evidence — unless they’ve been accused of a crime. The Supreme Court held in 2013’s Maryland v. King that cheek swab DNA tests don’t violate the prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure if investigators have probable cause.

But what about the rights of noncitizens? This week, reporter Benjamin S. Weiss dove into the genetic panopticon generated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s interactions with noncitizens, which would surely ring constitutional alarm bells if only the individuals were able to sue.

According to a July report published by the Georgetown University Law School’s Center on Privacy and Technology, ICE agents captured the DNA of as many as 900,000 people last year alone, filing it all away in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) run by the FBI.

That’s on top of the 3 million CODIS entries listed as “detainee” profiles reported this past December, ages ranging from 4 to 96 years old.

“The use of DNA sampling on immigration detainees, many of whom are charged with civil offenses, raises constitutional questions — namely with respect to the Fourth Amendment, which shields against warrantless searches and other unreasonable seizures of property by the federal government,” Weiss wrote. But legal experts told him, “The water is murkier when it comes to immigration enforcement, where federal courts have yet to weigh in on whether ICE’s mass DNA sampling violates the Constitution.”

While no court has ruled whether this type of sweeping DNA collection is legal — it’s questionable whether a plaintiff could survive the motion to dismiss stage and get a judge to rule on the merits of their complaint — it’s notoriously difficult for migrants to sue immigration officers for infringing on their rights. Even if a group brought a class action suit against DNA collection, one legal expert told Courthouse News, it would be even harder to challenge the genetic records already collected.

“There’s a bit of immigration exceptionalism,” he said. “They could argue that this isn’t used for law enforcement — it’s a special need beyond law enforcement, so it has to be a reasonable search,” said Ric Simmons, a legal scholar and professor at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

“Even if they did this illegally, even if a court says you’re not allowed to take these swabs, they could still use the evidence they got in any kind of deportation proceeding,” Simmons added.

With the confidence of law enforcement in collecting and using DNA evidence, it’s worth noting that a complete human genome was mapped just four years ago. If we don’t even know all there is to know about the building blocks of life, how can we even know what we’re giving up and if it’s worth it?

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

In a last minute change of plea hearing, Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk in 2024. He faces life in prison. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Donor disclosure: Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-backed lobbying firm, asked the Third Circuit to pause a Delaware law requiring advocacy groups to disclose the names and addresses of their donors just weeks ahead of state elections. [Jackson Healy]

• Second verse: A Los Angeles man went on trial for the second time for the murder of a Trader Joe’s employee who was killed during crossfire with police after the man fled into the market in the Silver Lake neighborhood. [Edvard Pettersson]

• On the record: The California Supreme Court directed county courts to provide indigent people with a verbatim record of court proceedings, even if a court reporter isn’t available. [Alan Riquelmy]

• Hot stuff: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued the owners of three Tucson rental properties accused of leaving tenants without central air conditioning under extreme summer heat as temperatures reached as high as 98.8 degrees Fahrenheit. [Joe Duhownik]

• Death row: Just months after a botched attempt, the Supreme Court greenlit a Tennessee man’s execution despite concerns about the competency of officials set to carry out his lethal injection. [Kelsey Reichmann]

Previously on Sidebar

The days are getting shorter and summer break is drawing to a close, so get out and smell the sunshine as much as you can. In this episode, the Sidebar crew explores public lands, be they treasured beauties or places to dump trash.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Forest Service slammed for allowing off-road events in coastal marten habitat

2. New York judge orders unsealing of Ghislaine Maxwell-related grand jury subpoenas

3. Florida Democrats jockey in longshot bid to overtake GOP senator

4. Feds struggle to explain redactions in Epstein files compliance case

5. Iowa governor’s office insists executive privilege can block release of staff emails

6. Former San Diego border officer sentenced to 9 years for Sinaloa Cartel drug smuggling scheme

7. Mamdani faces lawsuit over rollout of pied-à-terre tax in New York City

8. Big Pharma sues to block Illinois drug discount law

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, accused in the Las Vegas shooting death of Tupac Shakur three decades ago, appeared before the men and women who will compose his jury as selection began this week. [Alan Riquelmy]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Northern District of Illinois: A federal court allowed trade secrets claims to proceed against two former executives of Ford Gum & Machine Co., the maker of Big League Chew shredded chewing gum, who are accused of sharing the company’s confidential information with competitors who sought to replace it as the exclusive licensee for Big League Chew.

» California Court of Appeals: Finding Kenny Chesney did not have a duty to warn listeners of scams, an appeals court ruled against a fan who sued the country singer after she gave over $300,000 to a person impersonating him online.

» Eastern District of Pennsylvania: A federal court granted summary judgment to PNC Bank on a former trust real estate adviser’s claims that the bank fired her for taking medical leave. Ultimately, the court agreed she was not fired for taking leave, but because she deleted all her work emails to prevent her manager from transferring her responsibilities to other employees while she was out.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

They say if you have to explain a joke, it’s just not funny. But after more than a decade of litigation, U.S. Circuit Judge Milan Smith Jr. seemed to be chuckling as he wrote the opinion that finally released Bad Spaniels from Jack Daniel’s trademark claims this week.

Opening his opinion with the classic setup “a man walks into a bar,” Smith and his Ninth Circuit colleagues concluded the jokester landed the punchline.

“Neither Bad Spaniels nor the toy’s trade dress facially tarnished Jack Daniel’s corresponding famous marks, and neither was portrayed in an unwholesome or unsavory context that was likely to tarnish the reputation of the famous marks,” the George W. Bush appointee concluded in a 28-page opinion.

VIP first sued Jack Daniel’s for declaratory relief in 2014 after the whiskey maker sent a cease and desist, claiming the Bad Spaniels dog toy violated Jack Daniel’s trademark.

Shaped like a rectangular booze bottle, Bad Spaniels “Old No. 2 On Your Tennessee Carpet” promises to contain “43% poo by volume” and to be “100% smelly.” The maker of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey did not appreciate the jokes.

A federal judge initially rejected VIP’s First Amendment arguments, but a unanimous panel on the Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded.

When VIP prevailed on remand and again at the appeals court, Jack Daniel’s brought the case to the Supreme Court in 2023. The high court didn’t decide whether the toy infringed on the whiskey brand’s trademark but agreed that the Ninth Circuit went too far to shield its maker from trademark infringement claims, remanding the case to the lower court.

The trial court then ruled in favor of Jack Daniel’s, enjoining VIP Products from selling the toy. VIP Products appealed, arguing its name wasn’t enough to evoke the name of the Tennessee whiskey giant under federal copyright law. The Ninth Circuit agreed, citing the law’s narrow rubric for evaluating reputational harm.

To prevail, Smith explained, Jack Daniel’s needed to establish that each contested element on the Bad Spaniels toy was similar enough to its famous design to cause reputational harm. In court, however, the liquor giant focused on the toy’s name and shape, letting the reference to “Old No. 7” drop to the wayside.

The appellate court was also less than impressed by an expert witness who testified during the bench trial that any association between food and excrement was detrimental.

The expert, Smith wrote, “did not conduct any studies on Bad Spaniels specifically, relying solely on generic consumer psychology research to conclude that VIP’s introduction of Bad Spaniels into the marketplace resulted in reputational harm to Jack Daniel’s trademarks and trade dress.”

The panel remanded with instructions to enter judgment on behalf of Bad Spaniels, so this seems the end of the tail. Now man and best friend alike may enjoy their square bottle of choice at the end of a long day.

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

A hidden cost of Trump’s mass immigrant detention agenda: attorneys fees. Courthouse News identified nearly 100 cases in which the government was ordered to pay attorney’s fees to an immigrant it unlawfully detained, totaling more than $1.1 million this year. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Call center collection: A class of shoppers say Walmart illegally collected their biometrics when they called the company’s customer service line for help. [Caitlyn Rosen]

• Trump Train: A Trump supporter asked a Fifth Circuit panel to overturn a $40,000 verdict order for his role in organizing the “Trump Train” convoy of cars that surrounded a Joe Biden campaign bus as it drove from San Antonio to Austin, Texas, days before the 2020 election. [Christina van Waasbergen]

• Epstein ranch: New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued the U.S. Department of Justice claiming the federal government is stonewalling the state’s criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s conduct at his “Zorro Ranch” outside Santa Fe. [Ryan Knappenberger]

• Face off: New York’s efforts to prevent federal immigration agents from wearing face coverings hit a roadblock after a federal judge temporarily blocked the state’s mask ban from being enforced. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Fishy food: A diner asked the Fifth Circuit to restore his putative class action against renowned Mississippi restaurant Mary Mahoney’s Old French House, which has pleaded guilty to passing off frozen imported fish as locally caught. [Christina van Waasbergen]

Previously on Sidebar

A long-running feud between two eviction lawyers cumulated into a Twitter parody account and a libel lawsuit that made it all the way to a jury trial—with unexpected results. With assists from “pedo guy” and Devin Nunes’ mom, the Sidebar crew asks why it is so hard to win a defamation lawsuit when digital satire is at play.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. First parent convicted of murder for son’s school shooting sentenced to 15 years in prison

2. Walmart accused of collecting customers’ voiceprints

3. Baltimore Sun owner sues Maryland governor over Epstein, Trump claims

4. Candace Owens trades legal blows with Macrons over transgender accusations

5. DC Circuit denies Ute Tribe ownership over millions of acres in Utah

6. Appeals court gives Leah Remini’s defamation suit against Church of Scientology another trim

7. Ninth Circuit upholds bribery conviction of longtime LA politician

8. States rip feds over new Affordable Care Act coverage provisions

A stockholder filed suit against Nvidia’s board of directors and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang claims the tech giant knowingly allowed the company to use stolen copyrighted materials for financial gain. [Destiny DeVooght]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Eastern District of Pennsylvania: Drexel University must face suit from a tenured professor who says one of her courses was changed from in-person to online instruction in retaliation for her prevailing in an earlier equal-pay case.

» Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals: The 10th Circuit revived three environmental organizations’ lawsuit attempting to get Suncor Energy to comply with a 20-year-old consent decree regarding air pollution emitted by refinery plants in Colorado.

» Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals: The Fifth Circuit found the Board of immigration Appeals improperly considered date discrepancies in dismissing an appeal filed by an Afghani citizen who fled the country when the Taliban seized control and issued a warrant for his arrest.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

Colt Gray grew up isolated. His parents’ drug use and financial instability led to the family moving numerous times and lapses in his school enrollment. At 12, Gray finally found a place to belong: the online true crime community. However, he also encountered dysfunctional users who glorified mental illness, schizophrenia and even mass shooters.

A couple of years later, Gray began talking about a potential attack online, which led to some of his messages getting reported to police, who showed up to his home but never ensured firearms were out of reach.

Gray’s pain and planning culminated on Sept. 4, 2024, when the then-14-year-old brought an AR-15-style rifle to school and proceeded to open fire, killing four and injuring nine others. Gray then surrendered to school resource officers.

After initially pleading not guilty, Gray agreed to a nonnegotiated guilty plea, leaving Piedmont Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Nicholas Primm to decide his sentence.

Gray’s defense attorney, Charlton Allen, urged the judge to grant him life with parole in light of the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama. While the court did not ban life without parole for juvenile homicide offenders, it did hold that states cannot require that sentence automatically.

In the end, Primm pointed to the exception for “permanent incorrigibility” established in the high court’s 2016 ruling in Montgomery v. Louisiana in denying Gray a chance at parole.

“A youth may fail to consider the harm his rash acts may inflict before acting. But you did consider. You studied that pain when you researched the trials of your profaned idols. You contemplated that pain over and over. This wasn’t transient immaturity; it was deliberate, contemplated evil,” Primm said.

Despite Miller and other landmark Supreme Court rulings, many so-called juvenile lifers are growing old behind bars. The parole process can be notoriously opaque and political regardless of a defendant’s age. But for juvenile prisoners, advocates say parole foot-dragging has left young offenders to die in prison even when they’re entitled to an opportunity for release. [Megan Butler]

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

The Justice Department wants the D.C. Circuit to uphold a federal judge’s finding that the tech giant maintained an illegal monopoly, affirm data-sharing remedies and vacate the denial of a ban on massive payments to distributors like Apple. [Ryan Knappenberger]

• Pentagon v. Anthropic: A federal judge is likely to permanently block the Trump administration from labeling AI developer Anthropic as a “supply chain risk,” saying she was troubled by the idea that a company’s criticism of the government makes it untrustworthy. [Margaret Attridge]

• Sex abuse insurance: The 10th Circuit sided with the Mormon Church in its bid to seek reimbursement from two insurance companies for costs stemming from defending and settling sexual abuse lawsuits. The panel determined that the policies were ambiguous as to what counts as an “occurrence.” [Edvard Pettersson]

• Giuliani’s health: Lawyers for Rudy Giuliani and a former associate who claims her then-boss “demanded” sex from her and subjected her to booze- and Viagra-fueled bouts of harassment sparred over how the former mayor’s health should affect the timing of a potential civil trial. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Vanity plate speech: The Fourth Circuit held that vanity license plates are private speech subject to First Amendment protections. The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles had recalled a driver’s license plate that read, “FTP&ATF.” [Joe Dodson]

Previously on Sidebar

Witches aren't real, and no one ever should have been accused of being one. So, why did we send 60,000 people to their deaths for a crime they couldn't possibly have committed?

There are no tricks here as we examine the chilling circumstances behind the notorious Salem witch trials and the ensuing paranoia that led to widespread accusations and tragic executions.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. NASCAR files mystery suit against unidentified defendants

2. Text messages shine light on illicit relationship between D4vd and murdered teen

3. Italy sends citizenship-by-descent dispute to EU court

4. Queens Defenders co-founder sentenced to 43 months

5. Candace Owens trades legal blows with Macrons over transgender accusations

6. Fight to block California antisemitism law ends in defeat

7. DHS strips interview requirement for asylum seekers, expediting deportations

8. First parent convicted of murder for son's school shooting sentenced to 15 years in prison

Water war: Environmentalists and Native American tribes sued to vacate the Bureau of Land Management’s approval of the use of a decommissioned oil and gas pipeline across protected land in the Mojave Desert for a controversial water project. [Edvard Pettersson]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Eastern District of Texas: A judge found members of the National Labor Relations Board and its administrative law judges enjoy unconstitutional protections from removal. The court severed those protections in the National Labor Relations Act and Administrative Act but declined to go further.

» Virginia Court of Appeals: A three-judge panel found that a state statute barring firearm possession by persons convicted of forgery does not violate the Second Amendment.

» Northern District of California: A judge approved a nearly $25 million settlement for roughly 600,000 Grubhub delivery drivers in California after a decade of litigation.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

A federal judge appeared unconvinced Wednesday that he should preliminarily block the Trump administration’s effort to add 62 miles of border wall across the Arizona-Mexico border that would cut through the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation.

Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the tribe’s request was “extraordinary” and suggested no judge had ever ruled in a case like this, noting the weighty national security interests the government claims require a wall to gain “operational control” of the southern border.

The Tohono O’odham Nation is the largest Indigenous nation located along an international border and historically made up large swaths of southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. That status makes it unlikely any case law could directly apply, as any similar reservation is either significantly smaller or on the Canadian border.

The nation says the border wall project would “unilaterally alter” the reservation’s boundaries and result in the destruction of sacred mountain ranges such as the Baboquivari Mountain — the home of the creator god I’itoi — separate O’odham communities and families, interfere with religious rituals and destroy sacred plant and wildlife populations.

Judge Leon’s concerns center on a 1907 Proclamation by President Theodore Roosevelt that established a 60-foot strip of land along the southern border as a “public reservation,” which has allowed the federal government to erect certain structures for border security. In 2004, the government and tribe constructed 52 miles of vehicle barriers within that zone.

The nation says the government would be unable to construct large portions of a 30-foot wall within that 60-foot zone, in part because four mountain ranges straddle the border, or would otherwise require significant blasting that would easily bleed into the reservation. Additionally, more than 60 threatened and endangered species regularly migrate across the border, including the highly endangered jaguar, Sonoran pronghorn and the Mexican gray wolf.

“The migration of animals has everything to do with who we are and why we’re here,” nation Chairman Verlon Jose added. “It wasn’t about the domestic animals — it’s about the wildlife. We speak for them as well; we speak for the four-legged, we speak for all those animals who can’t speak for themselves.” [Ryan Knappenberger]

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

Two customers on opposite coasts filed the first class action against Taylor Farms, blaming the lettuce producer and distributor for the spread of a parasitic infection with thousands of confirmed or suspected cases in the U.S.

Californian Kait Gelbspan and New Yorker Victor Granados say in their complaint that the cyclospora contamination and subsequent food poisoning were preventable. The outbreak reportedly began in mid-May from contaminated food at Taco Bells in the Midwest. [Carly Nairn]

• Supreme six pack: The Supreme Court agreed to consider whether an Alaskan pilot must surrender his plane for illegally carrying a six-pack of Budweiser to a dry village. [Kelsey Reichmann]

• Bad medicine: A Florida man who sought health guidance on ChatGPT sued OpenAI Wednesday, claiming the artificial intelligence chatbot gave him dangerously inaccurate medical advice that led him to delay seeking professional treatment for a pulmonary embolism. [Margaret Attridge]

• Screenagers: A teenager, known in court documents as R.K.C., dropped his lawsuit against Meta in which he claimed the tech giant and other social media companies caused a crisis of depression, anxiety and addiction among underage users. [Hillel Aron]

• Wrestling out of court: A bombshell civil sex trafficking lawsuit against longtime WWE frontman Vince McMahon won’t head to trial after the parties agreed to resolve the matter outside of court. [Erik Uebelacker ]

• Human rights: Ukraine’s war against Russia does not mean every national security suspect belongs in jail while waiting for trial, Europe’s human rights court ruled. [Eunseo Hong]

Previously on Sidebar

Who gets the ticket when an autonomous vehicle breaks the law? And what happens to rideshare drivers when the “human” is removed from the equation?

Hold on to your butts as we take a ride through the self-driving car revolution to see if the future of transportation is a techno-utopia or another way for Big Tech to grab the wheel of our lives.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Danny Masterson asks appeals court to overturn rape conviction

2. Trial for mother accused of murdering 2-year-old son ends in mistrial

3. Trial wraps for Georgia teacher accused in 2-year-old son’s death

4. Astronomers reach a milestone in the search for life

5. Trump demands review of scientific manual used by federal judges

6. ICE makes arrests at NYC immigration court despite court ban

7. Melania Trump files for sanctions against journalist Michael Wolff

8. Utah man charged with hate crime after attack on Muslim mall employee

Fuel reduction: A logging project intended to reduce wildfire risk in Southern Oregon may proceed after a federal judge declined a pair of conservation groups’ request to halt it. [Monique Merrill]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» District of Arizona: A federal court in Arizona denied an insurer’s motion for judgment on the pleadings in a contract dispute brought by several professional models whose image and likeness were used without their permission by a strip club.

» Eastern District of Pennsylvania: A federal court in Pennsylvania allowed a consumer’s negligent misrepresentation claim to proceed against a pet food container manufacturer in her proposed class action alleging her kitten suffocated after opening the locked container and becoming trapped inside.

» District of New Hampshire: A New Hampshire federal court partially denied attorney and journalist Seth Abramson’s motion for summary judgment against the 1st Amendment Praetorians — a right-wing, self-described security and intelligence group — its founder and one of its members suing him for defamation, conspiracy and false-light invasion of privacy after he wrote that they were “militant extremists involved in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

Tensions boiled over as soon as the trial of Kianna Davis — a former Georgia high school teacher charged with killing her 2-year-old son, Karter Ambrose — went to the jury Wednesday.

First came a question from the foreperson about a “combative” juror who said she wouldn’t change her mind “in a million years.” Within the next hour, another note arrived from a juror who claimed the foreperson was “harassing” her about her vote.

Perhaps the divide was predictable considering the disturbing yet limited details of the case.

Ambrose had been throwing up and complaining of stomach pains the day before Davis rushed him to a pediatrician in November 2020, where CPR attempts failed on the lifeless toddler. An autopsy report later revealed his cause of death as a lacerated liver caused by a blunt force injury to his abdomen.

State prosecutors painted the 35-year-old Davis as a negligent mother without any direct evidence or eyewitnesses. She took the stand in her defense, insisting she never saw Ambrose fall or injure himself and claiming her son had been hospitalized before with breathing issues. [Megan Butler]

Jurors returned Friday to review more evidence, but the judge ultimately declared a mistrial after they split on all seven charges. Only one juror thought Davis was guilty of felony murder; on the other hand, only one believed she shouldn’t be convicted on the lesser count of cruelty to children.

Davis faced a potential life sentence if convicted. Her boyfriend, Kiyon Benton, has also pleaded not guilty to murder charges and is set for trial as early as November.

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

Mahmoud Khalil sued the Trump administration, accusing the feds of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 by conspiring with Zionist groups to jail him and other pro-Palestine activists. [Erik Uebelacker]

• AI backlash: A group of current and former Meta employees punched back after the social media giant used an artificial intelligence model to lay off 10% of its workforce, suing over claims the AI system targeted workers who took protected leave. However, a judge denied their bid for a temporary restraining order to restore their employment. [Carly Nairn]

• Predator playground: Roblox tried to use the Section 230 shield against LA County’s claims that the online gaming platform is a breeding ground for sexual predators, but a state judge appeared on the fence as to whether the popular website deserves protection from the public nuisance lawsuit. [Edvard Pettersson]

• Parent-in-crime: A British judge sentenced Kiran Kaur to three years in prison for hiding the knife her son used to kill 18-year-old Henry Nowak, marking the first member of convicted murderer Vickrum Digwa’s family to join him behind bars. [James Francis Whitehead]

• Staying Skibidi: The studio behind the viral YouTube meme series “Skibidi Toilet” prevailed in a copyright battle against a Dubai-based tech company claiming ownership over the multimillion-dollar franchise. [Margaret Attridge]

• Melting ICE: A federal judge ordered a Southern California ICE facility in the desert town of Adelanto to improve conditions at the privately owned detention center, including mandatory 24-hour access to clean water, decent food and adequate sanitation. [Hillel Aron]

• FBI fail: In the latest reckoning with outdated forensic science, the Hawaii Supreme Court tossed a Maui man’s 36-year-old rape conviction and granted him a new trial after an FBI agent’s 1990 testimony on hair evidence was deemed erroneous by the feds. [Carly Nairn]

Previously on Sidebar

Texas's Senate Bill 8 gave private citizens the ability to file civil lawsuits against anyone who provides or helps someone attain an abortion, with a possible award of at least $10,000 per lawsuit. Then California passed a law modeled on Texas, allowing private citizens to sue gun law violators.

What does it mean to put this kind of power into the hands of ordinary people who end up selecting themselves to take up the cause of policing or surveilling others' decisions?

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Trial wraps for Georgia teacher accused in 2-year-old son’s death

2. Texas judge releases grisly evidence from murder trial of Karmelo Anthony

3. Danny Masterson asks appeals court to overturn rape conviction

4. Hunter Biden wins $1.7 million in punitive damages against Patrick Byrne

5. Judge voids Trump's $1.8 billion settlement with IRS

6. Judge cautions Melania Trump against trying to sanction journalist Michael Wolff

7. Meta employees sue over use of AI in workforce reduction

8. Class action claims CeraVe baby ointments identical to adult versions

Albertsons, a supermarket that also served as the second-largest pharmacist in the state of Washington between 2006 and 2022, is on trial over its role in exacerbating the opioid crisis by giving hundreds of millions of prescription drug pills to “red flag” customers during that span. [Hillel Aron]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» San Francisco Superior Court: A judge found enough evidence to proceed to an evidentiary hearing over potential racial bias in the case of Nima Momeni, a tech worker convicted of fatally stabbing Cash App founder Bob Lee.

» D.C. Circuit: A three-judge panel supported the EPA’s delayed 2027 deadline for steel mills to comply with stricter emission standards after industry groups argued they couldn’t meet the initial 2026 deadline due to national security and infrastructure needs.

» Court of Justice of the European Union: The EU’s top court backed Spain’s decision to drop terrorism-related prosecutions and financial liability claims tied to the Catalan independence movement as part of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s deal with separatist parties to remain in power after an inconclusive 2023 election.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

Three years after the verdict, a federal judge says President Donald Trump can no longer procrastinate paying E. Jean Carroll the $5 million he owes her after a Manhattan jury found him liable on civil rape claims.

Trump “has been stalling this case for years,” U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in a memorandum accompanying his order.

“A jury unanimously concluded that he sexually abused and defamed plaintiff and awarded her damages accordingly. The judgment on that verdict has been upheld on appeal. En banc rehearing has been denied. The Supreme Court has denied certiorari without dissent. It is time for him to ‘do equity’ and pay the judgment,” the Bill Clinton appointee wrote.

Kaplan ordered the clerk to disburse the payment after the Supreme Court denied Trump’s writ of certiorari last week. Tuesday night, Trump requested that Kaplan withhold the payment pending his petition to reconsider. Kaplan denied the request.

Following the May 2023 verdict, Trump signed a stipulation and order requiring that the payment be disbursed upon affirmation by the Supreme Court or upon a denial of writ of certiorari. Trump argued that the order requires the court to await the Supreme Court’s response to his newest petition to reconsider.

Kaplan didn’t buy it.

“Defendant in effect is asking the court to redraft in his favor the contract to which he agreed,” he wrote.

Trump has repeatedly denied the accusations against him and called Carroll’s story a “hoax.” [Nina Pullano]

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

A federal judge blocked the federal government from rounding up free-roaming horses in a national forest spanning Arizona and New Mexico while a lawsuit challenging the removals proceeds.

U.S. District Judge Krissa Lanham granted a preliminary injunction to the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros, barring federal agencies from classifying the horses as “unauthorized livestock,” “ferals” or “strays” and preventing them from capturing and removing unbranded or unclaimed horses within the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. [Carly Nairn]

• Open doors: A federal judge ordered private prison company GEO Group to allow Washington Department of Health inspectors into the Tacoma detention center it operates under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. [Edvard Pettersson]

• Free speech: A New York man sued the Trump administration for sending federal agents to his house in retaliation for an email comparing Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota to Nazi Germany. [Ryan Knappenberger]

• Shrinking Crocs: A federal judge tossed fraud claims by Crocs customers that the shoe company misled consumers about shoes shrinking in heat, but advanced one claim over design defect. [Margaret Attridge]

• Political slaying: Tyler Robinson, in the hours before turning himself in for the shooting death of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, supposedly spoke in person with his roommate and lover one last time. [Alan Riquelmy]

• Covert detention: European Court of Human Rights ruled that Lithuania violated the rights of Abd al-Rahim Hussein al-Nashiri by hosting a CIA black site where the Saudi national was held for five months in 2005. [Eunseo Hong]

• Woke win: Part of Florida’s “Stop WOKE” Act limiting discussions on race, gender and diversity unconstitutionally restricts the speech of college professors, a divided 11th Circuit panel ruled Tuesday. [Kayla Goggin]

Previously on Sidebar

Law professors Lenora Ledwon and Stacey Lantagne talk to Sidebar co-host Amanda Pampuro about the lawless world of Harry Potter. The full episode examines fictional legal codes, tinhatting and originalism.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Texas judge releases grisly evidence from murder trial of Karmelo Anthony

2. Danny Masterson asks appeals court to overturn rape conviction

3. Costco accused of selling protein powder contaminated with lead, arsenic

4. Reality TV star facing murder charge deemed incompetent

5. Judge cautions Melania Trump against trying to sanction journalist Michael Wolff

6. Lionel Messi asked to apologize for Argentina players’ racist chant

7. Climate change could redraw California wine country maps

8. Jury finds Larry Millete guilty of murdering missing wife

Salmon run: A federal judge declined on Thursday to halt Northern California water infrastructure projects that a group of environmental nonprofits says will harm several vulnerable fish species. [Carly Nairn]

Rulings on our radar 📡

»Central District of California: A man in San Francisco was sentenced to a year of home confinement, followed by three years of supervised release, for stealing rare Chinese manuscripts dating back to the Qing dynasty from the UCLA library.

»Fifth Circuit: A Texas federal court improperly granted summary judgment in favor of the government after an injured motorist was struck by a vehicle operated by a Customs and Border Protection agent.

» 11th Circuit: An Alabama federal judge’s decision to partially strike down a state law banning sex offenders from living with their children withstood 11th Circuit scrutiny. The court concluded all parents have a “fundamental right to live with” their children, but granted the state some authority to regulate that right.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court released divided opinions upholding birthright citizenship, shattering party-candidate spending limits, and counting snail mail ballots postmarked in time, while supporting the presidential power to fire board commissioners, except when it comes to the Federal Reserve. [Kelsey Reichmann, Ryan Knappenberger, Megan Butler]

While the nine justices spent much of the last nine months reading briefs, listening to arguments and pondering the legal questions at issue in these cases — and others, so many others — that’s not all they’ve been doing. Annual financial disclosures released this week reveal the side hustles many Supreme Court justices take on when they’re off the bench.

Last year, Joe Biden-appointed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cashed a $1.2 million book advance from Penguin Random House while Donald Trump appointees Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch brought in $850,000 and $300,000 in book income, respectively. Barack Obama appointee Sonia Sotomayor brought in $87,000 in royalties.

In all, the justices earned $13 million off their books. Jackson, who netted $4 million, became the highest-paid author on the court.

Sotomayor also disclosed accepting $4,300 worth of concert tickets to attend a show in Puerto Rico that some speculate was either Bad Bunny or someone who shares his label, along with $600 in tickets to attend a theater in Kansas City.

Another patron of the arts, Jackson received a $2,500 painting from a Chicago-based artist to hang in her chambers.

Other justices collected five-figure payments for taking on teaching gigs, including Chief Justice John Roberts who pocketed $25,000 from New England Law. Justices Amy Comey Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, both Trump appointees, each earned around $33,000 from Notre Dame Law School. The bench’s most senior judge, George W.H. Bush-appointee Clarence Thomas, made $18,000 teaching at Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law.

Roberts was appointed by George W. Bush along with Justice Samuel Alito who, according to D.C. reporter Benjamin S. Weiss, has obtained financial disclosure extensions 15 years in a row. In the past, Alito has revealed attending concerts with a German princess and speaking gigs.

While teaching and writing books are meant to be supplemental income, these private gigs increase justices’ annual pay significantly. Early Supreme Court justices earned $3,500 in the late 1700s, roughly equivalent to a modern salary of $127,000. Over the years, that’s increased to $306,600—about three times what the MIT Living Wage Calculator estimates one needs to make ends meet as a single parent with three kids in D.C.

Even if some members of the nation’s high court underdisclose their finances, the reports offer a rare look at their hidden hustle for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A juggling act that makes them appear, if for a moment, just like the rest of us.

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

The European Court of Human Rights’ Grand Chamber struck out a challenge to the Estonia’s total prison smoking ban, which prisoners argued caused nicotine withdrawal and violated their right to protection from inhuman treatment. [Eunseo Hong]

• Game play: Epic Games, Roblox and Microsoft asked a California judge to compel the mother of a 14-year-old to arbitrate her claims that their video games are designed to be addictive to minors and are therefore harmful to her child’s mental health. [Edvard Pettersson]

• SLAPP back: Despite already beating an anti-SLAPP lawsuit from journalist and Trump biographer Michael Wolff, first lady Melania Trump is keeping the litigation going by pushing for sanctions against Wolff over what she calls his “frivolous” case. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Cuffs off: Britain’s police watchdog is investigating two police officers for potential gross misconduct over their handling of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, who died after officers handcuffed him instead of treating him despite his repeated pleas that he had been stabbed and could not breathe. [James Francis Whitehead]

• Press pass: A federal judge blocked the Pentagon from enforcing an escort requirement for journalists to enter the building, marking the third time Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s national security claims have faltered in court. [Ryan Knappenberger]

• Extra insurance: A California judge indicated she would likely reject a petition by a nonprofit to block California from allowing insurance companies to recoup losses suffered during the January 2025 wildfires by hitting customers with special fees. [Hillel Aron]

• True crime: As the search for “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie’s mother Nancy enters its sixth month, a man unrelated to the kidnapping pleaded guilty to two counts of harassment for requesting ransom from Guthrie’s daughter and son-in-law. [Joe Duhownik]

Previously on Sidebar

After years of bitter infighting, contested elections, financial disputes and a physical altercation at a town meeting, the tiny Plains community’s government effectively collapsed. Hartman, Colorado has become an unlikely case study in how a century-old abandonment law leaves residents to confront what happens when a town can no longer govern itself.

Can the small town be saved, or has it already become a ghost town in waiting?

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Judge halts enforcement of Virginia’s assault weapons sale and purchase ban

2. Virginia judge blocks assault weapons ban six days before implementation

3. Texas judge releases grisly evidence from murder trial of Karmelo Anthony

4. Danny Masterson asks appeals court to overturn rape conviction

5. Judge cautions Melania Trump against trying to sanction journalist Michael Wolff

6. New York law doesn’t permit filming in NYPD precinct lobbies, court rules

7. California father pleads guilty to dosing children with psychedelic mushrooms

8. Death penalty remains on the table in Charlie Kirk murder case

Crocs asked a federal judge to dismiss claims that certain models of its shoes shrink considerably when exposed to heat or sunny weather. [Edvard Pettersson]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Rhode Island Supreme Court: A man who discovered his ex-wife had cashed a winning $4 million lottery ticket a few weeks after their divorce failed to convince the Rhode Island Supreme Court to vacate a final judgment of divorce and declare the ticket a marital asset.

»Eastern District of California: An asylum-seeker sent to an immigration detention center in California City after being arrested for shoplifting bananas from a store — which he says was due to a mistake at a self-checkout register — must be immediately released from custody. Immigration authorities violated the asylum-seeker’s procedural due process rights by detaining him for nearly seven months without providing him with a hearing.

» Arizona Supreme Court: The Arizona Supreme Court largely upheld a voter-approved state law requiring groups that spend more than $50,000 on political ads within an election cycle to disclose the identity of donors who gave more than $5,000, writing that disclosure “helps maintain public confidence in democratic processes.”

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

When Damon Lindelof adapted the great graphic novel “Watchmen” for HBO in 2019, one of his greatest challenges was bringing the dystopian feel of Alan Moore’s 1986 series into the modern age.

One year out from the Covid-19 pandemic and six years before Trump 2.0, Lindelof’s choice to cover the faces of law enforcement feels eerily prescient as does Moore’s four-word question graffitied in city alleys: Who watches the watchmen?

As Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has directed federal immigration enforcement officers to cover their faces while detaining individuals, the question remains as important as having a uniform policy.

On opposing coasts, California and New York passed legislation banning both local and federal law enforcement from wearing masks. In between, Durango, Colorado, residents circulated “No Secret Police” petitions to put the issue to voters in a local election. Each of these measures met a distinct fate. [Amanda Pampuro]

In February, a federal judge blocked California’s “No Vigilantes Act,” prompting the Durango City Council to ask a La Plata County District judge to review and reject the citizen petition. After the Ninth Circuit affirmed the Golden State decision, it seemed the scales of justice settled behind backing the government’s right to dress federal law enforcement officers. [Edvard Pettersson]

This week, however, as the Empire State and the federal government filed dueling lawsuits against each other, another federal judge declined to block New York’s mask ban from taking effect Friday morning, refreshing the question of whether locals can mandate they meet the human face of an arresting officer rather than a thin cloth veil. [Erik Uebelacker]

Just as it’s difficult to see the identity of who stands behind a mask, it remains to be seen how the Second Circuit will weigh in and whether the nation will ultimately tip toward one coast or the other. The ultimate decision will not only shape American interactions with law enforcement but who gets a say in making those choices.

On July 4, the nation will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In the years since, the debate over states rights, federal powers and voter choice is far from settled. And so, the question bears repeating.

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

A Maine federal judge signed off on the Pine Tree State’s request to take control of a 130-year-old sunken shipwreck off the coast of Bar Harbor over the claims of a private salvage company seeking ownership rights to the wreckage.

Sailing from Saco, Maine, loaded with granite paving stones, the Delhi is believed to have sunk in 1893, after it struck ice about six miles off Somes Sound near Mount Desert Island, Maine, within view of the shore. [Josh Russell]

• Courthouse news: A federal judge sided with free speech activists who challenged the government’s erection of a $270,000 fence around a federal building in an Oregon college town, blocking off a plaza traditionally used as a public meeting ground. [Monique Merrill]

• Fire alarm: A federal judge declared a mistrial after a jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on the charges against a former Uber driver accused of starting a brushfire in the early hours of Jan. 1, 2025, that days later morphed into the devastating Palisades Fire. [Edvard Pettersson]

• Vampires welcome: Hawaii cannot require gun owners to get permission to carry on private property, the Supreme Court ruled, finding the state’s so-called “vampire rule” violates the Second Amendment. [Kelsey Reichmann]

• Climate change: As an unprecedented heat wave continued to tear through Europe, the Paris Judicial Court issued a landmark verdict for the environment: TotalEnergies must take its customers’ emissions into account as part of its climate responsibilities. [Lily Radziemski]

• Judgment day: Frozen bank accounts, canceled credit cards and blocked travel led three International Criminal Court judges to sue the Trump administration arguing they were being punished for the cases they decided. [Eunseo Hong]

• Minor win: YouTube and its parent company Google reached a confidential settlement with an unnamed defendant in a second bellwether trial over the effects of social media on minors. [Hillel Aron]

• ICE out: A federal judge blocked a new set of policies implemented by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including the new practice of arresting noncitizens at immigration courthouses, because the agency didn’t go through the proper rulemaking process. [Hillel Aron]

Previously on Sidebar

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to legally recognize same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges hits its 11-year anniversary today, as a radically different court is now tasked with parsing through a fresh slate of thorny questions affecting the LGBTQ+ community.

In honor of the 10th anniversary last year, Kirk McDaniel and Kelsey Reichmann examined the future of Obergefell in a post-Dobbs world.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Texas judge releases grisly evidence from murder trial of Karmelo Anthony

2. Virginia judge blocks assault weapons ban six days before implementation

3. New York law doesn’t permit filming in NYPD precinct lobbies, court rules

4. Trump DOJ nominee made and deleted hundreds of offensive social media posts about lawmakers, police, judges

5. Reality TV star facing murder charge deemed incompetent

6. These Colorado candidates are pitching primary voters on flipping seats in November

7. Supreme Court gives border agents parole power over certain green card holders

8. Justices rule against Maryland woman fighting involuntary hospitalization

An environmental nonprofit sued the National Marine Fisheries Service in a bid to push the federal agency to issue protection guidelines for the sunflower sea star, one of the largest sea star species in the world, which has seen an estimated 6 billion casualties in the last decade. [Carly Nairn]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Northern District of California: A federal court found in favor of an El Salvadoran man who has been unable to access his own immigration records after being arrested by ICE agents outside a bank and then released.

» District of Maine: A federal court in Maine granted a noncitizen detainee’s habeas motion and ordered his release because “there are no adequate detention facilities in Maine to which [this detainee] could be returned,” and being locked up “substantially impairs his right to counsel at a critical moment.”

» Northern District of California: A California federal court declined to dismiss influencers and bloggers’ consolidated class action against PayPal over its Honey browser extension, which overrode affiliate links so PayPal could take a commission from viewers and readers’ online purchases.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

If John Adams drank cider for breakfast, James Madison had whiskey with lunch and George Washington finished off the day with wine, it’s unlikely they thought imbibing should be a barrier to gun ownership.

At least that’s according to Justice Neil Gorsuch, who penned the majority opinion for the Supreme Court tanking unlawful gun possession charges against a Texas marijuana user.

In 2022, federal agents searched the Dallas home of Ali Danial Hemani, who was born in Texas and holds dual citizenship in Pakistan. During the search, he surrendered his Glock pistol and admitted to occasionally smoking pot.

Six months later, Hemani was charged with knowingly possessing a gun while being an unlawful user of a controlled substance.

After a trial court dismissed the charge as a violation of Hemani’s Second Amendment rights, and the Fifth Circuit affirmed, the federal government asked the U.S. Supreme Court to revive the case.

To pass the historical analog test set out in the 2022 case NYSRPA v. Bruen, federal prosecutors likened Hemani’s casual toking to founding-era prohibitions on habitual drunkenness. But the high court refused to draw the line between the century-old prohibition on excess to Hemani’s charge, finding that would amount to a blanket ban on misuse of drugs the founding fathers hadn’t even heard of.

“Put simply, on the government’s telling, §922(g)(3) sweeps in large numbers of people without regard to whether their substance use has the kind of incapacitating effect on them that historical habitual drunkard laws normally required,” wrote Gorsuch, a Donald Trump appointee.

In the wake of Bruen, the high court has also affirmed the government’s ability to remove weapons from domestic abusers and declined to review a petition to restore gun ownership to a reformed woman with check fraud on her record.

Gorsuch also pointed to the government’s recent efforts to decriminalize marijuana use as putting it “awkwardly positioned to suggest that the millions of Americans who now regularly use marijuana are categorically and unusually dangerous.”

But the win for Hemani is just a win for Hemani, and a narrow one at that.

According to D.C. reporter Kelsey Reichmann, “the decision didn’t address efforts to ban addicts or anyone presently intoxicated from possessing a firearm. And [Gorsuch] said prosecutors could try to bring a charge under the same statute accompanied by individualized proof that a defendant’s drug use rendered him a danger to himself or others.”

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

What could have been a straightforward Manhattan murder case may now be confounded by the politics of the for-profit healthcare system in the United States, with talk of Luigi Mangione mounting an “extreme emotional disturbance” defense at his upcoming state trial for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Record conspiracy: An Arizona man seeking to clear his name of a decades-old murder conviction was denied access to the Pima County records he says could uncover a decades-old conspiracy against him. [Joe Duhownik]

• Lost Boss: An unhoused Colorado man sued two officers and the city of Wheat Ridge in federal court over the shooting and killing of his best friend, a brown and white rescue dog named Boss. [Amanda Pampuro]

• Hidden fees: Three California consumers filed a proposed class action against MoneyLion, accusing the financial technology company of concealing the true cost of its loans by labeling interest charges as turbo fees, tips and membership fees while advertising some products as carrying “0% APR.” [Lily Roby]

• Skating by: A federal judge probed San Francisco over a 2023 mass arrest after an unsanctioned skateboarding event known as the Dolores Park Hill Bomb, saying the plaintiffs’ movements prior to being detained seemed unlikely to be of one cohesive group. [Carly Nairn]

• Royal conviction: The son of Norway’s Crown Princess was sentenced to four years in prison after he was found guilty of all but four of 40 charges, including two counts of rape, along with domestic abuse, violating restraining orders and drug charges. [Lasse Sørensen]

• Good signs: President Donald Trump’s controversial executive order to selectively strip national parks of educational information sets a “dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization,” according to the federal judge who ordered the government to restore altered signs. [Erik Uebelacker]

• XXXAI: A federal judge refused to toss copyright claims from an adult film producer that says Meta illegally downloaded its pornography to train artificial intelligence. [Carly Nairn]

Previously on Sidebar

Amid an explosion of nationwide injunctions coming from single-judge divisions in the federal court system where litigants strategically filed their lawsuits, this episode of Sidebar brings you inside the business of judge shopping.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Trump settles lawsuit with his niece over his tax records

2. Reality TV star facing murder charge deemed incompetent

3. Washington Post hit with class action over ‘surveillance pricing’ scheme

4. Defense rests in Karmelo Anthony murder trial after student witness grilled over inconsistent statements

5. Spain lawfully intervened in risky home birth, rights court says

6. Democrats slam Kash Patel over FBI team’s lavish bonuses

7. Rebecca Grossman’s husband gets grilled on stand about family’s wealth

8. Appeals court to review UK judge sparing teen rapists jail

The Ninth Circuit delivered a victory to the Yurok Tribe and fishing advocates, affirming a lower court’s finding that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation must comply with the Endangered Species Act when operating the Klamath Irrigation Project. [Margaret Attridge]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Supreme Court of Pennsylvania: “Skill games” may no longer operate outside the reach of Pennsylvania gambling laws after the state Supreme Court found the devices do qualify as “slot machines” under the state’s Gaming Act and are therefore subject to criminal prohibitions on gambling devices.

» Supreme Court of Canada: A lower Canadian court should not have declared the appointment of a monolingual, anglophone Lieutenant Governor in New Brunswick constitutional because it “has the effect of relegating the official language in which that person is not proficient to a secondary status and of undermining, through the symbolic effect of the appointment itself, the rights of the province’s Francophones.”

» Northern District of Illinois: An online advertising platform must face claims of illegally intercepting website visitor communications and sharing the personal data with Temu through real-time advertising and cookie syncing that may violate federal regulations restricting the transfer of Americans’ sensitive personal data to foreign adversaries.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

It takes a single spark to start a fire. But tracing the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history back to its source is akin to finding a match in a 23,000-acre haystack.

This month, an LA jury will decide whether to place responsibility for the destruction on one man charged with arson over an incident that occurred one week before flames engulfed the City of Angels.

Federal prosecutors say 30-year-old Uber driver Jonathan Rinderknecht hiked to a trailhead overlooking the wealthy neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in the early hours of Jan. 1, 2025, dreaming of burning the whole city to the ground.

Prosecutors hope to sway the jury with nearby security footage, cellphone data and Rinderknecht’s own YouTube watch history featuring repeated viewings of a French rapper’s video lighting things on fire.

Toward the end of 2024, Rinderknecht even “asked ChatGPT to create apocalyptic images of forest fires with poor people fleeing and rich ones from a distance enjoying themselves,” reporter Edvard Pettersson wrote from court this week.

After the New Year’s Day fire sparked and spread, Rinderknecht tried to report the flames to 911, but was beaten by other callers with better cellphone reception. When he passed firetrucks on his way out, Rinderknecht returned to the scene and filmed the apparent extinguishment of the Lachman Fire.

Nearly a week later, however, prosecutors say, smoldering embers still present on the hillside reignited in powerful Santa Ana winds, stirring up the ferocious firestorm that engulfed Pacific Palisades and nearby Malibu, destroying nearly 7,000 structures worth tens of billions of dollars.

While prosecutors will ask the jury to connect the dots, Rinderknecht’s defense attorney aims to persuade them that his client was an unlucky bystander at both events. Even if the Palisades Fire was the result of arson, Rinderknecht’s defense theorizes the Lachman Fire may have instead been sparked by nearby fireworks.

Just as the path of fire can be highly unpredictable, it remains to be seen how the jury will decide whether to douse the charges against the flame-infatuated defendant.

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

An en banc panel of 11 Ninth Circuit judges will rehear the appeal by a photographer who sued celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D for using his photo of Miles Davis to ink an image on a friend’s shoulder after a jury found the tattoo wasn’t substantially similar to the photograph. [Edvard Pettersson]

• Fatal filings: A federal jury convicted a Phoenix Marine of threatening to kill whoever won the 2024 presidential election in official documents he filed at federal courthouses in Arizona detailing his plans. [Joe Duhownik]

• Inspecting ICE: A federal magistrate judge found New York City Democrat Brad Lander not guilty of a petty obstruction charge stemming from his arrest last fall when he tried to inspect immigrant holding rooms in Lower Manhattan. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Brick trick: An armed serial Lego thief was sentenced to 45 years in Texas prison under the state’s strengthened organized retail theft law. [David Lee]

• Terminal track: A Texas jury found 19-year-old Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder and quickly sentenced him to 35 years in state prison over the fatal stabbing of an unarmed white teenager at a suburban track meet. [David Lee]

• Pro se: A unanimous Supreme Court revived a personal injury lawsuit against a trucking company, after finding a lower court erred in dismissing the case based on omissions in the victim’s bankruptcy filings without first considering whether the mistakes were intentional. [Kelsey Reichmann]

• Blame game: While convicting Gene Evin Atkins of dozens of other charges, a jury found him not guilty of first-degree murder and deadlocked on a second-degree murder charge over his role in a deadly 2018 police shootout outside a Trader Joe’s in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake. [Hillel Aron]

Previously on Sidebar

Forrest Fenn hid a treasure chest somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, inspiring at least one hunter to hide his own treasures and countless others to explore U.S. public lands. But even treasured public parks suffer abuse, neglect and the constant threat of being sold off by zealous policymakers. Listen to this one on your way out to someplace quiet.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Prosecutors rest in Karmelo Anthony murder trial after testimony on track meet stabbing

2. Judge blocks Trump’s sweeping freeze on immigration benefits for 39 countries

3. Defense rests in Karmelo Anthony murder trial after student witness grilled over inconsistent statements

4. Rebecca Grossman’s husband gets grilled on stand about family’s wealth

5. Reality TV star facing murder charge deemed incompetent

6. Rebecca Grossman’s husband dodges finance questions in punitive damages trial over boys’ deaths

7. Texas jury finds Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder

8. OnlyFans creator sentenced to four years for fetish suffocation death of California man

Western conservation groups prevailed in their federal Endangered Species Act claims about the negative impacts of road and vehicle access to grizzly bears and bull trout in the Bitterroot National Forest. [Alan Riquelmy]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Northern District of Mississippi: Four attorneys, two on each side of a city contract dispute, were sanctioned for improper use of artificial intelligence with fines ranging from $1,000 and $3,500. In the judge’s words, technology “can produce words” but it “cannot attach sincerity, truth, or responsibility to what it writes. That remains the sacred duty of the lawyer.”

» South Carolina Supreme Court: A grocery employee, who was granted immunity from prosecution after he fatally shot a customer in self-defense, is also immune from civil action related to the incident since lawmakers intended for the state’s castle doctrine to protect citizens from any lawsuit when acting in self-defense.

» District of Maine: Police officers must face First Amendment claims brought by a man who regularly films law enforcement and was arrested while observing police out on I-295.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

The town of Hartman in eastern Colorado has been without a mayor since October 2025. It’s been without a government board since January. The water tank’s chlorine ran out in May and the water pump is expected to shut off any day.

I could say I learned about Hartman’s plight through a March lawsuit filed in Prowers County District Court asking a judge to order an election and jumpstart the government — but that would be a lie. Courthouse News reviews every district-level civil suit filed in Colorado every single day.

That means I must have seen the lawsuits filed in the years leading up to the collapse in real time, including Hartman’s June 2022 lawsuit forcing out the board that long controlled the town, and the complaint asking the court to certify the old board’s recall petitions filed six months later.

So I saw signs of Hartman’s plight years before the government collapsed and overlooked them — just as many county, state, and federal officials did — until I read Dawn Railsback’s March 20 plea for help, asking the court to reset the town’s ability to hold an election.

“Without a functioning governing body, the town cannot lawfully operate, maintain, or fund its public water system,” Railsback warned. “Residents currently have no access to lawful decision-making, no election or representation, and no statutory authority capable of entering contracts.”

In the weeks following the government’s collapse, state lawmakers worked to prevent residents from losing running water. Rather than hold the election Railsback prayed for, state representatives opted to tweak a century-old law passed to revive roads through 19th-century ghost towns and expedite the ability to declare Hartman abandoned.

Whether this will save Hartman or expedite its demise remains to be seen. To untangle the knotty disputes that left the town trapped, I enlisted the help of Kirk McDaniel from Sidebar by Courthouse News. Listen here:

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

A Hawaii resident is suing the state’s Hawaiian Home Lands program and the U.S. Department of the Interior, arguing that a blood-quantum requirement barring him from applying for a public homestead lease is government-sanctioned racial discrimination. [Jeremy Yurow]

• PACER 2.0: In unveiling legislation that would force the judiciary to completely overhaul PACER and replace it with a modern, centralized public repository for court documents, one bill sponsor said, “Americans should not have to sell plasma or wrestle with clunky government websites just to read public court records.” [Benjamin S. Weiss]

• Bullseye: Wayne LaPierre, the embattled former CEO of the National Rifle Association, lost his appeal of a court order requiring him to repay about $4.3 million to the organization he led for decades. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Court orders: An Arizona man stood trial on charges related to filing court documents detailing a plan to kill the president that he claimed he never intended to go through with. [Joe Duhownik]

• Party dues: The former chief executive of Scotland’s governing nationalist party appeared in court as prosecutors detailed how he embezzled more than half a million dollars from party coffers over 12 years, purchasing one motorhome, nine vacuums and an egg poacher. [James Francis Whitehead]

• Self-defense: A dual Iranian-Iraqi national, charged with coordinating nearly 20 terror attacks and attempted attacks throughout Europe and the United States, spoke out against the U.S. when pleading not guilty to an eight-count indictment. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Pro se: The Supreme Court granted an appeal from a Texas inmate who represented himself as he sought transfer from prison to home confinement citing a 2018 criminal justice reform law. [Kelsey Reichmann]

• Police tape: A Fifth Circuit panel appeared divided on media companies’ constitutionality challenge of a Louisiana law allowing police officers to order people not to come within 25 feet of them. [Christina van Waasbergen]

• Unbearable: Three environmental nonprofits sued federal agencies challenging a redefinition of what constitutes secure habitat for grizzly bears and an approval for a Montana logging project they say will greatly impact grizzly conservation efforts. [Carly Nairn]

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Reality TV star facing murder charge deemed incompetent

2. Damages Demanded After Double Murder

3. Co-founder of ‘green’ bank gets 14 years for defrauding lenders, investors

4. Nevada voters pick governor, 2nd Congressional District candidates in primary

5. Federal judge halts Kennedy Center shutdown, orders Trump’s name removed

6. LA jury awards $176 million to parents of two brothers killed in hit-and-run by socialite

7. Appeals court unlikely to intervene in ‘Scandoval’ revenge porn lawsuit

8. Former judges accuse Trump of deceiving court with fraudulent ‘anti-weaponization’ settlement

The city of Philadelphia butted heads with the Trump administration, arguing in the Third Circuit the Interior Department had no right to dismantle an exhibit on the nine people enslaved by George Washington in his Philadelphia home. [Jackson Healy]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Northern District of Illinois: A blind man’s federal disability claims stand against the substance abuse treatment provider that purportedly denied him inpatient treatment because he was considered a liability. The man claims the denial caused him to relapse and worsened his depression.

» District of Nevada: A federal court in Nebraska approved a consent judgment between the U.S. government and Nebraska, ruling the state’s law extending eligibility for in-state tuition benefits to those in the U.S. without authorization violates the supremacy clause.

» Middle District of Louisiana: Amazon obtained summary judgment against a contract maintenance worker’s negligence and premises liability lawsuit filed after he “suddenly lost consciousness and began convulsing on the floor” while working alone in a warehouse.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

If there is a gun in the story, Chekov told us to expect it to be fired. In this story, everyone agrees who held the gun and who was gravely injured. Everyone agrees it was Sept. 10, 2024, and that 17-year-old Jack Howard had been wandering Brent Metz’s property in Conifer, Colorado, with a friend, scouting for a scenic homecoming photo shoot.

The disagreement, as posited by each side’s firearms expert, is whether Metz intended to shoot Howard or whether his Sig Sauer P320 pistol misfired, making both men victims of an unlucky accident.

In support of four felony charges levied against Metz — which could result in a lifetime firearms ban — prosecutors called Derek Watkins, an engineer who holds 28 patents for firearm design and previously worked for Remington Arms.

At prosecutors’ request, Watkins subjected the firearm to several stress tests and issued a 92-page report in which he concluded the gun contained no manufacturing defects to support the misfire theory. The engineer also pushed back on the notion that the P320’s striker safety mechanism rendered it inherently unsafe, arguing the gun’s design should support the needs of the user.

To rebut Watkins’ findings, defense attorneys called in Edward Wilks, a man who boasts a decadeslong career in law enforcement and owns a gun shop in Rifle, Colorado.

Wilks told a jury in Golden, Colorado, he found no need to subject the pistol at issue to the same tests as Watkins, and offered his findings in a single page.

“The moment I heard it was a Sig Sauer P320, I went ‘oh there we go again,’” Wilks recalled.

While many firearms have a manual safety that must be turned off prior to engaging the trigger, the P320’s striker safety switch is built into the trigger and is therefore designed to disengage when a person pulls the trigger. Wilks said other design flaws put it at high risk of misfiring, including a firing pin that is positioned “fully cocked like a bow and arrow.”

In his lab, Wilks simulated how dirt and the slight touch of the trigger could cause the firearm to discharge with little effort.

Both victim and defendant testified, and their attorneys cited their chosen expert’s version of events. This is not the first time the question of Sig Sauer P320 safety has been questioned in court, and it is unlikely to be the last.

Ultimately which expert persuades the jury remains to be seen when court resumes next week.

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

Leo Garcia Venegas was born in Florida and is therefore a U.S. citizen. Although he is of Hispanic descent and speaks limited English, he possesses a birth certificate, a Social Security card and a REAL ID in the state of Alabama, where he has resided for the past 12 years.

None of those documents prevented him from being detained three times in the past year by federal immigration enforcement officials as they at times tackled him, bound him and accused him of lying about his residency status. [Gabriel Tynes]

• Fishy standing: A federal judge found a group of Indonesian fishermen lacked standing to sue Bumble Bee Foods over the working conditions on fishing boats that sold the company tuna. [Monique Merrill]

• Love hurts: The musician who wrote “The Lt. Governor Owes Me Money” sued North Carolina’s former lieutenant governor, claiming the politician maliciously sued him to revive a stagnant political campaign. [Sydney Haulenbeek]

• Classified ghost: Former President Joe Biden sued the Justice Department in an effort to block the planned release of audio and transcripts of private interviews with a ghostwriter that were used in a special counsel investigation regarding his handling of classified documents. [Ryan Knappenberger]

• Show’s over: A performer who has used the name “Confessions of a Showgirl” for a column in the Las Vegas Weekly about her job experiences as well as for a live show asked a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction against Taylor Swift’s use of “The Life of a Showgirl.” [Edvard Pettersson]

• Seaside: A suspected pirate ship, a panicked crew and a three-month detention off West Africa ended with the International Tribunal for the Law finding Equatorial Guinea illegally seized and held a giant oil tanker that belonged to the Marshall Islands. [Eunseo Hong]

A California appeals court indicated it is unlikely to block the revenge porn lawsuit filed by reality TV personality Rachel Leviss against Ariana Madix, her onetime fellow “Vanderpump Rules” cast member. This, of course, is not the first time the drama that fuels episodes of Bravo’s hugely successful “Real Housewives” franchise has jumped off the screen and into court. [Hillel Aron]

Previously on Sidebar…

From claims of an unsafe work environment and intentional infliction of emotional distress made by cast members against producers, to sexual assault by their costars, how much of what we see is actually ... well, real? Tune into this Season Four episode to find out.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Feds say visa holders seeking permanent residency must return to home countries

2. Legal groups file new ethics complaint against Pam Bondi

3. Trump endorsement looms over Republican race for South Carolina governor

4. Boxer Floyd Mayweather accuses ex-manager of $175 million swindle

5. Melania Trump wins dismissal of Michael Wolff’s anti-SLAPP suit

6. Appeals court unlikely to intervene in ‘Scandoval’ revenge porn lawsuit

7. Cleveland Guardians pitchers ask judge to toss rigged betting charge

8. House Democrats take on the Supreme Court shadow docket

A Washington state man accused of throwing a large rock at an endangered Hawaiian monk seal pleaded not guilty in federal court one misdemeanor charge each of violating the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. [Jeremy Yurow]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Northern District of Alabama: The University of Alabama will not be ordered to reopen women and Black-centered student magazines since the court found “no evidence” to support the students’ argument that the closings were a “facade for viewpoint discrimination.” The university replaced the shuttered publications with “one magazine open to content by and for all students, regardless of sex or race.”

» New York Court of Appeals: Instead of his requested reversal of conviction, a man found guilty of murder will receive a reconstruction hearing after learning his trial record was left incomplete and rife with phrases such as “blah blah blah” and “untranscribable.”

» Eastern District of Pennsylvania: A consumer pleaded himself out of accusing Amazon of deceptively advertising $100 gift cards for $50 since admitting he was intentionally seeking out pricing errors “makes it implausible to conclude that he believed the advertised price was genuine.”

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

I’ve been sitting here for 20 minutes, hemming and hawing over the word “miracle.” I can’t remember a time I’ve used it in print before, but I fear using it once risks making it a habit, and that declaring a miracle more than once in a decade takes the extra out of the extraordinary.

But it’s hard to come with another word to describe the medical fluke that saved a man from execution in a decades-old case rife with red flags — beginning with the fact that he represented himself during the trial that sealed his fate.

Marcellos Anderson and his mother Delois were reported missing from Memphis, Tennessee, in February 1994. Within a week, investigators found them buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery along with Frederick Tucker, hidden beneath a casket and a thin piece of plywood. The bodies were bruised and bound. Delois had been strangled to death with a red sock. Marcellos and Frederick had both been shot, but investigators doubted the wounds had been fatal, leading them to conclude the victims had been buried alive.

Prosecutors charged three men with the murders, including Tony Carruthers who was 25 years old at the time. In the months leading up to trial, however, Tony cycled through six teams of lawyers and the trial judge left him to represent himself through the capital punishment case.

Tony’s post-conviction attorneys have since pointed out several red flags that they argue call his conviction into question, including a lack of physical evidence tying him to the crime scene and prosecutors’ reliance on a paid informant’s testimony.

In addition, advances in forensic science allowed testing of DNA from a blanket found at the crime scene, which belonged to neither Tony nor his co-defendants. The DNA results were actually used to spring co-defendant James Montgomery on a plea deal in 2015.

The third defendant, Jonathan Montgomery, took his own life prior to standing trial.

After losing all attempts to appeal his 30-year-old sentence, Tony sent one last plea to the U.S. Supreme Court requesting a stay of execution for time to test the DNA evidence and fingerprints that he argued could fully exonerate him from the crime. In a single sentence, the court denied the petition for stay.

On Thursday, Tony, now 59, was brought into the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. To administer the lethal injection, corrections officials inserted a primary IV line into Tony’s vein. That would have been the end, but protocol calls for a backup line.

For more than an hour, Tony’s attorneys later relayed, officials worked to insert a another needle into a second blood vessel while he groaned in pain. Because prison officials could not locate a second vein, they ultimately aborted the procedure. And Tennessee Governor Bill Lee granted Tony a one-year reprieve, buying him 365 more days on Earth. One of which might be enough to uncover the key to proving the innocence he has long stood by.

So many things about Tony’s case are actually pretty ordinary. In her reporting, Kelsey Reichmann points out botched lethal injections have become more common in recent years, with Alabama putting the practice on hold and other death row prisoners choosing oxygen deprivation or firing squads instead. And it’s far more unusual for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in a death penalty case than it is for them to walk away. Not to mention the fact that overturning wrongful convictions, particularly highly scrutinized death penalty cases, happens every year.

And yet, I keep coming back to the word “miracle,” which the Webster dictionary tells me “is an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.”

Something unexpected saved a man’s life after the formal channels of justice failed to do so.

If this isn’t a miracle, then what is?

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

New York’s ban on concealed firearm carry in urban public parks passed constitutional muster at the Second Circuit — with judges noting gun bans were part of the original plans to build New York City’s iconic Central Park. The appeals court did however decline to restore the state’s restriction on private property. [Nina Pullano]

• Peak interest: Conservationists in Oregon are crying foul over a potential land deal between a ski resort and the U.S. Forest Service on top of iconic Mount Hood that they say violates the law and was made without public input. [Quinn Welsch]

• Luigi’s backpack: A New York judge agreed to suppress evidence from Luigi Mangione’s backpack, finding that some of the items inside were unlawfully searched by police officers during his 2024 arrest at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Prison sweep: A Ninth Circuit panel afforded little patience to Arizona officials asking it to remand a federal judge’s order for more than 600 new medical staff, among other reforms, at nine state prisons. [Joe Duhownik]

• Union don’ts: Amazon asked an 11th Circuit panel to set aside a landmark decision by the National Labor Relations Board declaring it illegal to make employees attend captive audience meetings, urging them to reject union representation. [Kayla Goggin]

• War room: Judges will now decide whether a man dubbed “the angel of death” should stand trial on 17 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity linked to a detention complex that prosecutors say was a hub of torture, rape and killings after Libya fractured into rival governments following the fall of Moammar Gadhafi. [Eunseo Hong]

• Speech limits: A Georgian food courier who went viral on TikTok for screaming “go fuck your mothers” at city officials over traffic reforms lost his free speech fight after Europe’s top human rights court ruled the rant crossed the line into punishable abuse. [Eunseo Hong]

This week on Sidebar…

Who gets the ticket when an autonomous vehicle breaks the law? And what happens to rideshare drivers when the “human” is removed from the equation? Hold on to your butts as we take a ride through the self-driving car revolution to see if the future of transportation is a techno-utopia or another way for Big Tech to grab the wheel of our lives.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. San Diego artist reaches $450K settlement over bubble show citation

2. Valve moves to dismiss Counter-Strike gambling lawsuit in New York

3. Iowa inmates get second shot at challenging county jail fees

4. Daily Mail staff smeared poop on walls to protest sexist editor: Lawsuit

5. TikTok influencer accused of trying to hire hitman in custody dispute

6. Hawaii Legislature passes first-in-nation bill targeting Citizens United ruling

7. Gun retailers fire back at Virginia’s ban on assault weapons

8. Megafarm can’t stop excessive groundwater pumping lawsuit in Arizona

The makers of a puppy-poop-themed chew toy spoofing Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey asked the Ninth Circuit to let the company out of the doghouse and overturn a permanent injunction purporting to protect the distiller from trademark tarnishing. [Joe Duhownik]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Texas Supreme Court: Finding judicial intervention unnecessary, the Texas Supreme Court denied motions from the governor and attorney general seeking to have Democrats who left the state to break quorum last summer removed from office. Any punishment for breaking quorum should be dispensed by the House members to preserve the balance of powers, the court found.

» Virginia Court of Appeals: A lower court did not violate a criminal defendant’s confrontation rights when a confidential informant who feared for his life was allowed to testify against the defendant while covering his facial tattoos with a mask and a do-rag that left just the area from his nose to the middle of his forehead visible to the jury.

» Western District of Pennsylvania: 14,000 delivery drivers must now file individual lawsuits within 60 days in the appropriate forums after a federal judge severed their nationwide class action claims finding they did not arise from the same occurrences and would require individualized proof.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

What does a secret Chinese police station in New York look like? According to federal prosecutors, one such operation may blend seamlessly between a Marriott and an urgent care center, using driver’s license services and ping-pong tables as a front.

Arguing the purported community center was really a “Police Overseas Service Station,” federal prosecutors asked a jury to convict 64-year-old Lu Jianwang, also known as Harry Lu, of being an unregistered agent of China surveilling Communist Party dissidents on behalf of his handler in Beijing.

In covering the week-long trial, New York reporter Erik Uebelacker met Lu’s supporters who packed into the courtroom to back the leader of the American Changle Association, which represents the interests of 300,000 Chinese people living in the Big Apple.

While Lu admitted he regularly communicated with Chinese officials, he said he did so, “not to spy on dissidents, but to help Chinese citizens renew their driver’s licenses remotely,” Uebelacker wrote.

But prosecutors showed jurors text messages in which Lu appeared to tell Chinese law enforcement about New Yorkers who challenged the Chinese Communist Party’s rule.

Prosecutors initially charged Lu alongside a co-defendant, Chen Jinping, in 2023. Chen pleaded guilty at the end of 2024 to working as an unauthorized agent of the Chinese government.

After eight hours of deliberation, the jury found Lu guilty of acting as an unauthorized agent of a foreign government and one count of obstruction of justice, but acquitted him of a related conspiracy charge. Sentencing awaits in both cases.

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

The chief executive officer of one of the most profitable artificial intelligence companies in the world testified in a blockbuster jury trial that pits OpenAI’s Sam Altman against one of his co-founders, the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also took the stand, detailing his reasons for inking partnership agreements for almost a decade between Microsoft and OpenAI’s for-profit entity. [Carly Nairn]

• Data leaks: A class of customers is accusing collectible pop culture figurine company Funko of illegally tracking, collecting and selling their private browsing activity. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took legal action against Netflix, claiming the streaming service spies on Texans by illegally gathering users’ data without their knowledge. [Monique Merrill, Jaelyn Rodriguez]

• Dog days: What began with a family dog barking at a mailman has escalated into a trial in federal court, with a U.S. Postal Service worker denying claims he repeatedly pepper-sprayed the dog and exposed two young children to chemicals that caused their asthma. [Quinn Welsch]

• Eyesore: A Long Island CVS shopper sued the Swiss-American pharmaceutical company Alcon for deceptive business practices, accusing it of marketing its over-the-counter eye relief products as “sterile,” despite a recall stemming from FDA inspection observations at the manufacturing facility. [Josh Russell]

• Paywall: Meta can no longer simply post, profit and walk away from Europe’s news industry after the European Union’s top court on backed Italy’s push to force tech giants into paying publishers for the journalism keeping their platforms alive. [Eunseo Hong]

• Trial on trial: After determining a court clerk improperly influenced the jury that convicted embattled former attorney Alex Murdaugh of mudering his wife and son, the South Carolina Supreme Court ordered a new trial. [Steve Garrison]

• Warrant: Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs crept further into his inner circle after the International Criminal Court unsealed an arrest warrant for former Philippine police chief Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa over killings tied to the campaign. [Eunseo Hong]

• Court math: A Colorado man sentenced to three years in federal prison after violating a probationary sentence forbidding him from threatening public officials prompted an en banc appellate panel on Monday to reconsider the 10th Circuit’s resentencing guidelines down to the meaning of “resentencing” itself. [Amanda Pampuro]

This week on Sidebar…

Who gets the ticket when an autonomous vehicle breaks the law? And what happens to rideshare drivers when the “human” is removed from the equation? Hold on to your butts as we take a ride through the self-driving car revolution to see if the future of transportation is a techno-utopia or another way for Big Tech to grab the wheel of our lives.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Hawaii Legislature passes first-in-nation bill targeting Citizens United ruling

2. NY Rep. Mike Lawler recounts antisemitic insults from Rand Paul’s son at DC bar

3. Judge in Charlie Kirk case won’t forbid cameras from courtroom

4. Fifth Circuit wrestles with constitutionality of congressional proxy voting

5. California’s wild race for governor boasts a Trump-backed immigrant, a billionaire endorsed by soci…

6. Georgia faces competitive primary with top GOP seats up for grabs

7. Daily Mail staff smeared poop on walls to protest sexist editor: Lawsuit

8. Former MLB pitcher Scott Erickson grilled in civil trial over crash that killed two young boys

A federal judge blocked a proposal to allow logging on 3,200 acres of public land in Western Oregon which conservation groups said would have felled thousands of acres of old-growth trees. [Hillel Aron]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Massachusetts Court of Appeals: The Massachusetts lottery commission correctly refused to renew a convenience store owner’s sales agent license upon learning he had been acquitted of raping his wife, because “the burden of proof of deficient moral character in a licensing proceeding is by a preponderance of the evidence,” satisfied by the criminal trial transcripts.

» Virginia Court of Appeals: A bench trial conviction of impersonation and abduction stands against a Virginia man who used red-and-blue lights on his minivan to pull over a motorist, who he then tried to hug as he apologized.

» Northern District of California: The Hershey Company could not totally dodge class claims from consumers who say the company sells Lily’s branded chocolates labelled “no sugar added” or “less sugar” without providing any kind of reference food, as required by the FDA.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

Have you ever sat in court and wondered what would happen if everyone simply listened to each other?

I thought I was alone in that supposition until I covered a court hearing for (now Senior) U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson a few years ago and heard him ask the parties why they didn’t simply pick one of the many easy middle ground options available, instead of making him order one of them to do something they didn’t want to do.

The question, what I’ve come to think of as Judge Jackson’s Patented Peace Proffering, has taken many forms over the years, but I’ve never seen him miss an opportunity to ask: Can’t you just work things out?

If they could, one presumes, they wouldn’t be in court. And yet, the question never fails to catch every well-dressed articulate attorney off-guard — they’re prepared to answer every single question except that one.

Once, a government attorney stammered they simply couldn’t speak for the entire department they represented right then and there. Another time, another government attorney tried saying it wasn’t their burden to agree to do anything.

“It’s their burden, you’re right,” Jackson said. “My question is a practical question. Why won’t the government just stipulate to do what they said they would do? We can work around the language. I told you guys over the phone ‘why don’t you talk over the weekend and see if you can come up with something?’”

I can’t say when or why Jackson developed this particular line of patter. Unfortunately much of his work from his early days at Holland and Hart has been practically lost to history, lying in dusty basement filing cabinets across the Centennial State. I had just entered high school when he was named chief judge for Colorado’s First Judicial District and I graduated college the year Barack Obama appointed him to the federal bench. Likewise, I can only wonder whether he’s encountered a truly hopeless case where he didn’t even bother trying to extend the olive branch.

But just yesterday, he made it sound so easy to broker an agreement on the operation of a supercomputer between the nation’s leading climate research lab and the National Science Foundation — which has taken a staunch stand against anthropogenic climate change under the current president.

“I’m just thinking if the United States and Iran can negotiate some resolution to the war that’s going on, it should be child’s play to negotiate the operation and maintenance of a computer in Cheyenne, Wyoming,” Jackson said. “But you’ll never know unless you try.”

Now, I’ve yet to see the suggestion work in an immediately measurable way, like opposing sides putting down their notes and shaking hands or filing a joint motion to dismiss two days later. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Or isn’t worth trying. Or doesn’t circle around anyone else’s brain incessantly while they’re driving home. And I have to believe it never hurts to ask.

How else is peace supposed to grow if you don’t try to plant the seed everywhere?

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

A dusty 1899 map resurfaced in The Hague, dragging a century-old border fight between Guyana and Venezuela back into the spotlight. The prize is Essequibo, a vast, resource-rich stretch of land that makes up most of Guyana and has turned a long-simmering dispute into a modern geopolitical flashpoint. [Eunseo Hong]

• Courthouse News: A federal judge refused to let Virginia’s court administration escape a lawsuit by Courthouse News and Lee Enterprises claiming officials are imposing a prior restraint on speech by barring attorneys from sharing public records with journalists. [Sydney Haulenbeek, Bill Girdner]

• Hurri-pain: Ye, the rapper previously known as Kanye West, went on trial in a copyright infringement dispute over his use of an instrumental track for an early version of his Grammy-winning single “Hurricane” during a 2021 listening party. [Edvard Pettersson]

• Molotov defense: The man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and threatening to burn down the company headquarters pleaded not guilty to a series of state charges, including attempted murder. [Margaret Attridge]

• Verdict watch: A jury found the city of Los Angeles not liable in the killing of 14-year-old Valentina Peralta, who was hit by a police officer’s stray bullet during a shootout in a department store. [Hillel Aron]

• Booked: A federal judge denied most of Nvidia’s motion to dismiss a proposed class action brought by authors accusing the company of training its artificial intelligence systems on pirated copies of their books. [Jeremy Yurow]

This week on Sidebar…

Grab your passport, doughty listener. We’re headed across the Atlantic to see how justice works in England and France, and why it looks so different from the U.S. Which system comes out on top? The answer depends on whether you like meatpies and what you think justice is supposed to do.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. DOJ charges Mexican officials, including governor of Sinaloa, with drug trafficking

2. Prosecutors detail grisly evidence in murder case against musician D4vd

3. Shuttered California school must face claims over child’s death

4. Penis costume protester prevails in court

5. Judge rebukes ex-DOJ attorney for AI-generated brief

6. Feds say Hawaii crime boss orchestrated his own death to shield millions in assets

7. New California governor poll shows Becerra and Steyer in tight Democratic race

8. With just weeks until trial, Justin Baldoni PR firm loses bid to toss Blake Lively suit

A bear control program allowing the Last Frontier State to kill an unlimited number of bears across a 40,000-square-mile swath of southwest Alaska may proceed after conservationists failed to convince a judge to block the program. [Monique Merrill]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals: The Ninth Circuit upheld a California federal court’s dismissal of a putative class action against Reddit over the meaning of the term “click.”

» Middle District of Pennsylvania: A federal court granted class certification to child support debtors who say they were forced to work for $5 a day at a Pennsylvania recycling center while jailed for unpaid support.

» Eastern District of Pennsylvania: Three white Montgomery County morgue transport workers may pursue their race discrimination claims against the county and its coroner that replaced them with a Black-owned contractor after emphasizing diversity initiatives.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

Does making something "for the benefit of all mankind” require the venture be “unconstrained by the need for a financial return?” And can the entity’s corporate status under U.S. law protect it from becoming evil?

One can’t help but ask those questions when a San Fransisco jury is being asked to decide whether OpenAI burned early investor Elon Musk by shifting its corporate structure after his departure.

The corporate parent of ChatGPT, OpenAI was founded near the end of 2015 as a nonprofit research lab during a time when the idea of artificial general intelligence still belonged in the realm of science-fiction. One of the startup’s earliest supporters, Elon Musk, was already known for pursuing ideas that danced on the edge on nonfiction, from interplanetary travel to automated cars, and apparently nonprofit AI.

In his 2024 lawsuit, Musk says he donated millions of dollars to the early nonprofit, only for co-founder Sam Altman to take funding from Microsoft and turn it into a billion-dollar for-profit public benefit corporation right after Musk left.

For the sleight, Musk wants the jury to award him $150 billion in damages — almost 4,000 times his initial donation of $38 million.

In defense of OpenAI, Altman’s attorneys counter that Musk is acting out of jealousy.

“ChatGPT became a household name, Mr. Musk didn’t like that one bit,” defense attorney William Savitt told the jury during opening arguments.

The question of whether OpenAI does indeed still exists for the “benefit of humanity” is unlikely to be answered through charitable trust and unjust enrichment claims, but the trial still promises to put some of Silicon Valley’s greatest venture capitalists and CEOs on the witness stand.

In court, San Fran reporter Carly Nairn also picked up voir dire drama — with the judge refusing to disqualify a juror just because they called Musk a “world-class jerk” — and took note of Musk claiming he wanted to steer the course of AI toward good, for in the wrong hands “it could kill us all.”

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

Thirteen years ago, former LA County Assessor John Noguez was arrested on bribery charges resulting from a property valuation scheme that prosecutors say cost taxpayers $12 million. Now, he is finally getting his day(s) in court in a trial expected to run six months following three months of jury selection. [Hillel Aron]

• Birth tourism: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused a Houston-area medical center of unlawfully helping Chinese citizens secure U.S. citizenship for their children. [Jaelyn Rodriguez]

• Auction block: A Texas appeals court left The Onion’s proposed licensing deal for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars platform up in the air, just hours before a planned state court hearing to finalize the deal. [Cameron Thompson]

• Tracking device: With their own security settings top of mind, the Supreme Court considered how the government could use cellphone location data to solve crime — and whether users knowingly agree to being tracked when they scroll past the clause in the terms of service. [Kelsey Reichmann]

• Amazon alibi: Prosecutors began to lay out their case against singer D4vd, detailing some of the evidence they plan to present to prove the musician murdered a 14-year-old girl with whom he had a sexual relationship, including the online wishlist they claim he ordered to dismember her corpse. [Hillel Aron]

• Spam filter: A class of shoppers accuses fast-fashion retail giant Fashion Nova of violating a Washington state law by sending repeated emails with subject lines that create a false sense of urgency. Meanwhile, California consumers are going after Chinese retailer Temu for “modern spam abuse.” [Monique Merrill, Hillel Aron]

• Satanic panic: A death row inmate asked a Fifth Circuit panel to overturn his sentence, arguing the prosecution violated his First Amendment rights by introducing evidence of his conversion from Buddhism to Satanism at his resentencing trial. [Christina van Waasbergen]

This week on Sidebar…

Grab your passport, doughty listener. We’re headed across the Atlantic to see how justice works in England and France, and why it looks so different from the U.S. Which system comes out on top? The answer depends on whether you like meatpies and what you think justice is supposed to do.

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. DOJ charges Mexican officials, including governor of Sinaloa, with drug trafficking

2. Prosecutors detail grisly evidence in murder case against musician D4vd

3. Shuttered California school must face claims over child’s death

4. Penis costume protester prevails in court

5. Judge rebukes ex-DOJ attorney for AI-generated brief

6. Feds say Hawaii crime boss orchestrated his own death to shield millions in assets

7. New California governor poll shows Becerra and Steyer in tight Democratic race

8. With just weeks until trial, Justin Baldoni PR firm loses bid to toss Blake Lively suit

A New York federal judge accepted federal prosecutors’ resolution of a U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctions dispute over the funding of the criminal defense for ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. [Josh Russell]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Second Circuit Court of Appeals: A Brazilian noncitizen with a valid work permit who was arrested in September 2025 on an administrative warrant is entitled to bond because to conclude otherwise would amount to “the broadest mass-detention-without-bond mandate in our nation’s history for millions of noncitizens.”

» Tennessee Court of Appeals: County mayors, congressional representatives and other government officials lack standing to challenge the Tennessee governor’s deployment of state National Guard members for the Memphis Safe Task Force.

» Mesa County District Court: After the Colorado Court of Appeals vacated former elections clerk Tina Peters’ 9-year sentence, the original trial judge denied a request for bond and declined to disqualify himself from resentencing her on four convicted felonies and three misdemeanors related to her role in leaking voting machine data.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

From death row inmates to divorced couples, large corporate conglomerates, and truck drivers, thousands of Americans petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case every year. In a good term, the nine justices might consider 100 cases. In a rough year, like this, fewer than 60 cases are selected.

This year’s docket includes oral arguments that will shape the nation we live in, with questions of birthright citizenship, Roundup-induced illnesses, immigrant parole rights and veteran benefits all at stake.

This week, Courthouse News’ SCOTUS reporter Kelsey Reichmann caught wind of one case examining when federal courts can review state court decisions.

What piqued Reichmann’s interest wasn’t the rights or the ripple effects, so much as the attorneys, who boast nearly 100 SCOTUS arguments between them. Former U.S. solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar, who argued Dobbs and defended the Corporate Transparency Act during the Biden administration, represented a Maryland resident who was involuntarily admitted and medicated for psychiatric issues.

Defending the University of Maryland Medical System, and thus the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, stood legendary high court litigator Lisa Blatt. Her clients have ranged from school districts and inmates to the Warhol Foundation and Jack Daniels.

Blatt’s unique argument style has both entertained and outraged the justices over the years, with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch once forcing her to apologize to another arguing attorney after accusing him of lying. Here as then, she didn’t hold back.

“You don’t even have any state in front of you here so, no, you’re not going to overrule Rooker,” Blatt jabbed, eliciting laughter throughout the courtroom. “I mean, sorry, I don’t think you’re going to do that. Not in an April case. Not happening.”

A case asking the high court to clarify limitations of federal court jurisdiction over state court judgments was hardly on anyone’s SCOTUS previews, but Reichmann said T.M. v. University of Maryland Medical System Corp. ended up “a good show for everyone there.”

“More reporters were interested in this case than the Verizon case, which was arguably a more important legal case,” she added.

Read more about the high court grand slam no one expected here.

The Courthouse News — and more on that Verizon case — keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

Six children who traveled from Ecuador to the jungles of Colombia, across the southern U.S. border and up to New York City found the greatest barrier to being reunited with their immigrant parents was the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services which placed the children with a nonprofit, requiring the parents to hire a lawyer and undergo DNA testing to regain custody. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Secret agent: FBI Director Kash Patel sued the The Atlantic claiming he was defamed in an article asserting the agency head has engaged in several bouts of excessive drinking and is in danger of losing his position. Meanwhile congressional Democrats asked Patel to submit to alcohol testing. [Ryan Knappenberger, Benjamin S. Weiss]

• Auction block: The father of singer Amy Winehouse lost a high court battle against two of her closest friends, after a judge rejected claims they wrongly profited from selling the late star’s clothes and personal items. [James Francis Whitehead]

• Judging the judge: An Alaskan tour company’s attorney cited the case’s former federal judge’s “pathological tendency to lie” and documented workplace impropriety as impacting his impartiality over the company’s suit against the U.S. Forest Service over guided helicopter skiing operations permits. [Monique Merrill]

• 2A: The 11th Circuit declined to overturn the conviction of a Florida man prosecuted for possessing a machine gun conversion device, ruling the longstanding ban on machine guns does not violate the Second Amendment. [Alex Pickett]

• Chemo class: Opening statements began in the first of six bellwether trials that will shape the future of more than 3,000 consolidated lawsuits accusing a global medical technology company of pushing dangerous products that cause septic infections and other life-threatening injuries. [Joe Duhownik]

• Unearthed: The California Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in San Diego Superior Court against Poway, claiming the city failed to enforce environmental review standards after the discovery of multiple human remains and thousands of cultural artifacts during construction for a luxury hotel. [Alex Pickett]

Satirical news outlet The Onion says it has reached a new deal to buy the assets of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ platform Infowars, more than a year after a federal bankruptcy judge blocked a previous agreement.

Previously on Sidebar…

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Penis costume protester prevails in court

2. Supreme Court takes up religious freedom case from Colorado preschools

3. Preserved for billions of years, organic compounds found on Mars

4. New California governor poll shows Becerra and Steyer in tight Democratic race

5. DOJ to judge: Ignore Trump’s statements on Hudson Tunnel in fight over funding

6. UK bans cigarette sales for future generations

7. House Ethics Committee releases list of sexual misconduct investigations amid lawmaker scandals

8. Accused Charlie Kirk shooter seeks to push back preliminary hearing

Travelers filed a federal class action in the Eastern District of New York accusing JetBlue of surreptitiously collecting consumer data to bolster a “dynamic surveillance pricing” scheme that makes flying costlier for passengers. [Erik Uebelacker]

Before the U.S. Supreme Court, AT&T and Verizon bemoaned the $100 million in federal penalties they face for selling customers’ data to a third party offering a location-finding service to law enforcement officials. [Kelsey Reichmann]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» 11th Circuit Court of Appeals: A federal appeals court revived a tortious interference lawsuit brought by the Frida Kahlo Corporation against the Mexican artist’s grand-niece and her Mexican corporation, over false cease-and-desist letters over the use of Frida Kahlo trademarks on phone covers and in planned exhibitions.

» Supreme Court of California: An inmate’s death sentence was reversed because California recognizes legal standards for incompetency which should be applied retroactively, distinguishing whether a defendant is competent to stand trial, and whether a defendant can represent themselves.

» Multnomah County Circuit Court: After purchasing an orange juice at a Northeast Portland Trader Joe’s, a woman said in her product liability suit she took a sip and swallowed what she thought was the tip of a human finger. She spit out a piece of rubber glove and went to urgent care.

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News

Most people see a nice plate and focus on the food. But Ghislain M. knew gold when he saw it. Or rather royal porcelain, well worth its weight in gold going for a strangely good price on Facebook, of all places.

But Ghislain M. wasn’t the only person to recognize rare pieces of antique tableware — a great craftsman always recognizes their own work.

“The Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres — the prestigious ceramics house that has supplied French leaders with tableware since the reign of Louis XV — also raised alarm bells when it saw some of its pieces available for sale on sites like Facebook and Vinted, prompting an investigation,” reporter Lily Radziemski wrote from court this week the sentences were handed out that shut down the royal heist once and for all.

The thief, referred to in court as Thomas M., was hired to care for the presidential Élysée Palace’s inventory from 2020-2025. Facing mounting debt and encouragement from his partner, Damien C., he pocketed priceless pieces, forged the inventory sheets, and posted them online. Most of the goods were sold to 30-year-old Ghislain M. for about 17,000 euros, even though others valued the antiques at nearly 400,000 euros.

Once an attendant at the Louvre, Ghislain M. fell in love with collecting and devoted much of his mediocre pay to building his own treasure trove. As punishment for being blinded by passion, Ghislain M. was given a 12-month suspended sentence.

To clean his sticky fingers, Thomas M. will serve a 24-month sentence — half out on an electric monitor and half suspended. The real punishment however is a court-imposed lifelong ban on attending luxury goods auctions, likely limiting Thomas M.’s future tables to be set with plastic peasant wares from the hypermarket just like the rest of us.

Bon appétit.

The Courthouse News keeps rolling below.

Here’s what else happened in court this week

Spirit Airlines wrongly withheld $2.8 million in security service fees from the Transportation Security Administration, an 11th Circuit panel unanimously ruled, in support of the TSA’s determination that the budget airline should have handed over security fees collected from customers who canceled their flights. [Kayla Goggin]

• Stray bullets: The LAPD officer whose bullet accidentally killed 14-year-old Valentina Peralta in a department store in 2021 testified in a civil trial that he immediately fired three shots as soon as he saw a suspected attacker. [Hillel Aron]

• Western water: Idaho defended its laws governing water rights in front of a federal appellate panel, as the U.S. government asked the court to declare unconstitutional the state statute creating a new forfeiture proceeding for stockwater rights. [Carly Nairn]

• Monopoly tickets: A federal jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable for antitrust violations, concluding a sprawling Sherman Act case that took on two of the biggest names in live events. [Erik Uebelacker]

• Bunker before ballroom: A federal judge wrote in a 10-page opinion that the government can only proceed with construction necessary for the president and his staff’s personal security at the White House complex, which does green light compleition of a 90,000-square-foot ballroom. [Ryan Knappenberger]

• Borrowed downloads: Saving a show for the subway ride home might feel like making your own copy, but Europe’s top court blocked related fees on tech companies like HP and Dell, sharpening the line around what counts as a “private copy.” [Eunseo Hong]

• Drug run: An Arkansas man seeking to fill his prescriptions 70 miles closer to home brought his battle against a pharmacy benefit manager to the Eighth Circuit, pushing for enforcement of state regulations over a federal law that sets nationwide standards for employee benefits plans. [Christina van Waasbergen]

Here’s what you’ve been reading

1. Penis costume protester prevails in court

2. ‘I thought it was me as a doctor:’ Trump downplays controversial post depicting himself as Jesus Ch…

3. Nevada Supreme Court rules against Michele Fiore in suspension case

4. Democrats demand Trump undergo cognitive assessment after ‘disturbing’ rhetoric on Iran war

5. New Minneapolis shooting footage contradicts initial ICE account

6. World War III has begun (opinion)

7. Democrats blast Bondi for dodging House deposition

8. Fourth Circuit bows to Supreme Court in DOGE Social Security data fight

A municipal judge in Fairhope, Alabama acquitted Renea Gamble of all remaining misdemeanor charges stemming from her decision to wear a inflatable 7-foot penis costume at an anti-Trump “No Kings” protest in October 2025. [Gabriel Tynes]

Rulings on our radar 📡

» Northern District of California: A federal court tossed claims from minor political parties who say California’s “top-two” primary system is unlawful and makes it needlessly difficult for third parties to get on the ballot.

» District of Maine: Maine’s challenge will proceed against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for terminating a $9 million salt marsh grant in retaliation for the governor defying an executive order prohibiting trans girls from participating in school sports.

» Southern District of Mississippi: A public school for gifted students in Mississippi lost summary judgment on racial discrimination and retaliation claims brought by a fired Black administrative assistant who was accused of having “disrespectful body language” and “resting bitch face,” and was called “a cancer in this organization.”

• Monthly sports & entertainment: Under the Lights

• Triweekly podcast: Sidebar

• Daily: Courthouse News