Justices rule for Mexican man in sentencing case
WASHINGTON (AP) - A unanimous Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a Mexican man who said he received an unfairly long prison sentence for re-entering the United States after being deported.
The justices ruled Wednesday that Saul Molina-Martinez's rights were violated when a federal judge used the wrong sentencing guideline range to give him a 77-month prison sentence.
Molina-Martinez should have been subject to a guideline range of 70 months to 87 months. But the judge mistakenly placed Molina-Martinez in a higher category that called for a range of 77 months to 96 months.
A federal appeals court ruled that the error didn't violate Molina-Martinez's rights because the judge's sentence was within both the correct and incorrect ranges.
The Supreme Court disagreed and ordered a new sentencing hearing.
Court sides with families of Beirut bombing victims
By Mark Sherman
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for families of victims of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and other attacks linked to Iran to collect nearly $2 billion in frozen Iranian funds.
The court's 6-2 ruling directly affects more than 1,300 relatives of victims, some who have been seeking compensation for more than 30 years. They include families of the 241 U.S. service members who died in the Beirut bombing.
Other families who are not covered by Wednesday's decision also could benefit because they now stand to reap a larger share of a government-administered fund intended for victims of state-sponsored terrorism.
The decision, issued amid a warming in relations with Iran, is important because it is the first time Iran is being made to feel the sting of its past support for terrorism, said Notre Dame law professor Jimmy Gurule, a former Treasury Department official.
"Hopefully, it's also going to have a deterrent effect, or least cause Iran to think twice about supporting terrorist activity going forward," Gurule said.
The ruling also comes as controversy swirls over pending legislation in Congress that would allow families of the Sept. 11 attacks to hold the government of Saudi Arabia liable in U.S. court. The Obama administration, which supported the families in the Supreme Court case, opposes the bill. President Barack Obama met with King Salman in Riyadh on Wednesday at the start of a brief trip to the country.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the opinion for the court rejecting efforts by Iran's central bank to try to stave off court orders that would allow the relatives to be paid for their losses. The money is sitting in a federal court trust account.
Iran's Bank Markazi complained that Congress was intruding into the business of federal courts when it passed a 2012 law that specifically directs that the banks' assets in the United States be turned over to the families. Obama issued an executive order earlier in 2012 freezing the Iranian central bank's assets in the United States.
The law, Ginsburg wrote, "does not transgress restraints placed on Congress and the president by the Constitution."
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented. "The authority of the political branches is sufficient; they have no need to seize ours," Roberts wrote.
Congress has repeatedly changed the law in the past 20 years to make it easier for victims to sue over state-sponsored terrorism; federal courts have awarded the victims billions of dollars. But Iran has refused to comply with the judgments, leading lawyers to hunt for Iranian assets in the United States.
The Supreme Court case involved $1.75 billion in bonds, plus accumulating interest, owned by the Iranian bank and held by Citibank in New York.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit included relatives of the victims of the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia which killed 19 service members, and other attacks that were carried out by groups with links to Iran. The lead plaintiff is Deborah Peterson, whose brother, Lance Cpl. James C. Knipple, was killed in Beirut.
"We are extremely pleased with the Supreme Court's decision, which will bring long-overdue relief to more than 1,000 victims of Iranian terrorism and their families, many of whom have waited decades for redress," said Theodore Olson, the former Bush administration Justice Department official who argued on behalf of the families at the Supreme Court.
Liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in Congress supported the families in the case. "The court made the right decision today. Families of Iranian terror victims have had to wait far too long to recoup these payments. While we can only provide so much comfort to those who grieve, I hope this ruling will help bring justice," said House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Late last year, Congress separately created a fund for terrorism victims who have been unable to enforce court judgments against Iran and other countries. The money comes from an $8.9 billion settlement agreed to by the French bank BNP Paribas for its role in helping Iran and other countries evade international sanctions.
The fund has $1 billion that must be distributed by the end of the year, said Stuart Newberger, a partner at the Crowell & Moring law firm in Washington who represents roughly 500 people in claims against Iran for embassy bombings in Kenya and Lebanon.
Wednesday's Supreme Court decision will reduce the number of people who are eligible to collect from the new fund, Newberger said.
Legislative redistricting plan upheld for Arizona
By Sam Hananel
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - A unanimous Supreme Court says an Arizona commission did not violate the principle of one person, one vote when it redrew the state's legislative districts in a way that created some with more residents than others and improved the prospects for Democrats.
The justices on Wednesday rejected a challenge from a group of Republican voters who claimed the state's Independent Redistricting Commission illegally packed GOP voters into some districts while leaving other Democratic-leaning districts with smaller populations.
A panel of federal judges upheld the new boundaries in 2014, despite finding that some commission members were trying to improve Democratic prospects in the districts. The judges ruled that the commission was trying to comply with a now-nullified provision of the Voting Rights Act.
Officials with the state's redistricting commission argued that slight differences in population were not enough to violate the Constitution's equal-protection clause.
Writing for the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer said the one-person, one-vote principle "does not demand mathematical perfection." He said the challengers failed to show that "illegitimate considerations were the predominant motivation behind the plan's population deviations."
The high court requires a state's legislative districts to have roughly equal numbers of people, but it has long said those numbers don't have to be exact. Differences of less than 10 percent are presumed constitutional unless challengers can show they are the result of discrimination or other invalid reasons.
State Senate President Andy Biggs - whose wife was in the group that sued - said the decision was "unfortunate."
The commission issued a statement saying it was gratified with the decision, which means the legislative maps will be in place through 2020 elections.
In Arizona, the average population difference in redrawn districts was 2.2 percent, with a maximum difference of 8.8 percent. The plan placed more Republican voters in some districts that already were likely to elect GOP candidates and left other districts with smaller overall populations. Those districts have a greater concentration of Hispanic voters and are considered more likely to vote for Democrats.
Arizona voters created the commission in 2000 to take on the politically charged job of drawing new maps every 10 years, instead of leaving it up to the Legislature.
Ultimately, the plan ended up giving Republicans more than their proportional share of seats in the state legislature.
In a separate case last year, the Supreme Court ruled that cutting lawmakers out of congressional redistricting is not unconstitutional even though state legislatures have the power to set the "times, places and manner" of holding congressional elections.
A third challenge to Arizona's congressional maps remains active in court. That state case involves a challenge to whether the commission followed the Arizona Constitution's guidelines on factors it was to consider while drawing the maps.
Republican Vince Leach, now a member of the state House of Representatives, is one of several voters suing. He said the commission didn't properly consider "communities of interest" - areas with geographic or other ties - while drawing the maps. He specifically cited the state's sprawling 1st Congressional District, which includes Flagstaff and much of the eastern part of the state, and has gone Democratic since the maps were adopted in 2012.
"It's very hard to look at the CD1 map and talk about communities of interest, because it's simply not there," Leach said.
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Associated Press writer Bob Christie contributed from Phoenix
Published: Fri, Apr 22, 2016
