Tag: judges

Texas Appeals Court Slashes Alex Jones’ $50 Million Sandy Hook Judgment by More Than $43 Million

A Texas appeals court on Friday delivered a significant victory to Infowars founder Alex Jones, drastically reducing the massive $50 million judgment against him in one of the Sandy Hook defamation cases.

The Texas Third Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that the trial court abused its discretion by allowing parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis to exceed the state’s strict statutory cap on punitive (exemplary) damages.

The court ordered the punitive damages reduced from roughly $45.2 million down to $1.5 million, $750,000 for each parent, in line with Texas law, according to Reuters.

Jones still faces the roughly $4.1 million in compensatory damages the jury awarded, plus interest and fees, bringing the total Texas judgment to around $5.5–6 million.

More than $43 million was wiped from the judgment. That is a massive cut from the original figure.

In the 2022 trial, a jury found Jones liable and awarded the parents more than $50 million. Texas law generally caps non-economic punitive damages at $750,000 per plaintiff.

The trial judge allowed the parents’ lawyers to amend their claims after the liability verdict but before the final damages ruling, arguing that the trauma somehow counted as a “disability” that would let them blow past the cap.

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Court: First Amendment Protects Recording Police in Public

Here’s a ruling that is at the same time a major victory and a disappointment for digital and civil rights. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has for the first time recognized that the First Amendment protects the right to record law enforcement activity in public.

This is the ninth US federal circuit court to do so, and as an appeals ruling it is binding in Connecticut, New York, and Vermont.

But the same ruling, issued on Monday, upheld the qualified immunity of the officers who made the arrest, which means the plaintiff, Keith Massimino, loses his case despite the court establishing the principle in his favor.

Massimino was arrested on October 30, 2018, for filming the outside of the Waterbury Police Department from a public sidewalk. The incident was far from an isolated one, as the man, represented by the ACLU of Connecticut, describes himself as a “First Amendment auditing hobbyist.”

During the 2018 incident, officers Matthew Benoit and Frank Laone confronted him, and Massimino gave them vague responses about his purpose, and refused to show his ID, which the officers said was a “lawful order.”

He was arrested for obstruction under a Connecticut statute (obstructing, resisting, hindering or endangering a peace officer), held for several hours, and released. The charge was dismissed in May 2021.

In August 2021, Massimino sued the two police officers with three claims: a First Amendment claim (right to record police), a Fourth Amendment claim (unlawful detention and arrest without probable cause), and a malicious prosecution claim.

But even though the Second Circuit panel recognized the First Amendment right, they upheld the district court’s decision to grant the officers qualified immunity because the right had not been “clearly established” in the Second Circuit at the time.

And although the right is now clearly established in that circuit, thanks to this ruling, that came too late to help Massimino in his case.

The ruling is a victory of sorts, as it means that going forward, police in Connecticut, New York, and Vermont may no longer expect to have qualified immunity if they arrest someone for filming them in public.

The court also rejected Massimino’s Fourth Amendment and malicious-prosecution claims, finding that the officers had reasonable suspicion to stop him and probable cause to arrest him after he refused to show his ID.

But in the opinion written by Judge Myrna Pérez, the court held that the right to record “encompasses Massimino’s recording of the exterior of a police station from a public sidewalk,” and had this to say: “When the government wants to preserve its privacy, it may build a fence or close a door – but not ban speech.”

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Judge John Roach Recused from Karmelo Anthony Murder Appeal After Defense Challenged His Post-Trial Comments About the Verdict

A Texas judge has granted a motion to recuse Collin County District Judge John Roach Jr. from presiding over the appeal proceedings for Karmelo Anthony, the 19-year-old who was found guilty of murder in the fatal stabbing of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

This development comes as Anthony’s new legal team continues its aggressive push for a new trial, citing alleged “irregularities” while the underlying facts of the killing remain undisputed.

Anthony, who is black, was convicted in June after a nearly weeklong trial for the April 2, 2025, stabbing of Metcalf, who was white, during a rainy track meet at David Kuykendall Stadium in Frisco.

Witnesses testified that Anthony was in the tent belonging to Metcalf’s Memorial High School team, refused repeated requests to leave, reached into his bag, and warned “Touch me and see what happens” before pulling out a pocketknife and stabbing Metcalf in the chest.

Metcalf died while being held by his twin brother.

The jury deliberated for less than three hours before rejecting Anthony’s “self-defense” claims and handing down the 35-year sentence.

Following the conviction, Anthony’s trial team was replaced by a pro bono appellate group led by attorney Russell Wilson.

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Obama-Appointed Judge Who Blocked FBI from Moving Headquarters to Reagan Building Donated Almost $6k to Dems

The Obama-appointed judge who ruled that the FBI cannot relocate its headquarters to the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center has donated thousands of dollars to Democrats and has a history of ruling against President Donald Trump.

Judge Theodore D. Chuang, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, found on Monday that the administration’s plan cannot proceed. As CBS News reported:

Last November, the state of Maryland sued Patel and the bureau, alleging that the Trump administration had attempted to “unlawfully sabotage” the 2023 plan and illegally divert funding that Congress had designated for the plan — over $323 million — away from it.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang sided with Maryland, writing in a 47-page opinion that the Trump administration’s move to divert the funding and cancel the plan was “arbitrary and capricious and not in accordance with law,” in addition to other violations of federal law.

In December, FBI Director Kash Patel said that moving the headquarters to the Reagan Building would save billions in taxpayer funds.

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The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

We argued that electronic device searches at the border should require a warrant based on probable cause, but at minimum, regardless of whether an officer searches by hand or with forensic software that plugs into a device and downloads its entire contents for search, the same Fourth Amendment standard should apply to all device searches at the border.

Unfortunately, the court rejected that argument and ruled that a lower standard applies to manual searches, allowing the government to conduct extraordinarily invasive electronic device searches without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply because the border officer chooses to search by hand rather than with a forensic tool.

The Border Search Exception Meets Your Phone

The Fourth Amendment requires that government searches of persons or property be reasonable, which usually means obtaining a warrant based on probable cause from a judge.

But a warrantless search can still be reasonable if it falls within an exception to the warrant requirement, including the exception that allows officers to search your belongings at the border. The border search exception allows warrantless searches of persons or property crossing the U.S. border, including the functional equivalent of the border such as international airports, given the government’s interests in controlling who and what may enter the country.

Historically, courts have categorized border searches of luggage, vehicles, and personal effects as “routine” and thus reasonable even if conducted without any suspicion that the traveler has engaged in wrongdoing; courts have also held that more invasive “nonroutine” searches, such as certain body searches and searches that damage property, require reasonable suspicion.

But a person’s privacy interests in the personal data on a phone or laptop are extraordinarily different than their limited privacy interests in the contents of their suitcase.

The Supreme Court addressed cell phone privacy in Riley v. California (2014), holding that the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement did not apply to cell phones, thereby generally requiring a warrant for phone searches, at least at the interior of the country. The court recognized the unprecedented privacy interests people have in their cell phones and how even brief manual searches can reveal the “sum of an individual’s private life,” including our political affiliations, religious beliefs, sexuality, and more. Accordingly, the Supreme Court held that because electronic device searches bear “little resemblance” to searches of bags or physical containers, they should be evaluated differently.

Following Riley, the Fourth Circuit considered two border device search cases involving forensic searches, in which border officers used external software to extract and analyze a device’s data.

In U.S. v. Kolsuz (2018), the Fourth Circuit held that a forensic search of a cell phone at the border “must be considered a nonroutine border search, requiring some measure of individualized suspicion” of a transnational offense, but the court declined to decide whether the standard is only reasonable suspicion or instead a probable cause warrant.

Then in U.S. v. Aigbekaen (2019), the Fourth Circuit held that a forensic device search at the border in support of a purely domestic law enforcement investigation requires a warrant. The court also reiterated the general Kolsuz rule for a forensic border-related device search: the “Government must have individualized suspicion of an offense that bears some nexus to the border search exception’s purposes of protecting national security, collecting duties, blocking the entry of unwanted persons, or disrupting efforts to export or import contraband.”

In Belmonte Cardozo, manual searches were finally before the court.

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OUTRAGEOUS: Fourth Circuit BLOCKS Trump Admin from Arresting Criminal Illegal Aliens Hiding in Churches — Claims Policy “Burdens” Religious Exercise by Scaring Off Illegal Aliens

The radical left just handed another massive victory to the open-borders mob!

In a shocking decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals just upheld a ridiculous injunction that literally stops our brave ICE and CBP agents from arresting illegal aliens who are hiding out in “houses of worship.”

Senior Circuit Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, an Obama appointee, wrote the opinion. She was joined by fellow Obama appointee Pamela Harris and Bush appointee G. Steven Agee.

For decades, federal immigration agencies generally restricted enforcement actions at or near houses of worship and other so-called sensitive locations.

The Biden administration’s 2021 policy required prior approval for most operations in protected areas, while preserving exceptions for emergencies, national-security threats, hot pursuit, and other urgent circumstances.

On January 20, 2025, the Trump administration rescinded that framework and told officers to use discretion and a ‘healthy dose of common sense.’ A later ICE directive put case-by-case decisions in the hands of senior field officials.

DHS made its position unmistakable in the public announcement: ‘Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.’ The administration said it would no longer tie the hands of ICE and Border Patrol agents.

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Judge Issues ARREST WARRANT for Perennial Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein After She Pulls a No-Show in Court Over 2024 Cop Assault Charges

A judge issued an arrest warrant Monday for perennial Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein after both Stein and her attorney failed to appear for a scheduled court hearing.

An order filed by St. Louis Judge Karma Johnson states that neither Stein nor her lawyer appeared Monday morning, First Alert 4⁠ reported.

Stein, the Green Party’s recurring presidential standard-bearer, is charged with first-degree trespassing and fourth-degree assault.

Both charges are misdemeanors and arise from an April 27, 2024, anti-Israel protest at Washington University in St. Louis.

Court documents say the demonstration began in Forest Park before moving onto the university’s Danforth Campus. Protesters reportedly entered the area around Olin Library, erected tents and refused repeated orders to leave.

Police delivered a final warning at approximately 7:41 p.m., according to court records.

Rather than disperse, protesters allegedly locked arms and chanted “hold the line” as officers moved forward.

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30 Dead, 17 Fatal Crashes, and a Judge Tells DHS to Wait

Thirty people were killed in 17 crashes in 2025 involving what the left’s dictionary calls “non-domiciled commercial drivers” who, under the Trump administration’s current rule, would no longer qualify for those licenses.

The issue isn’t foreign CDL drivers; plenty of lawful immigrants and foreign-born drivers safely operate commercial trucks daily. The issue is whether somebody who can’t adequately read road signs, understand warnings, communicate with police, or follow instructions in English should be behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound commercial vehicle on an American highway.

That’s a safety standard, not a nationality test.

When crashes expose drivers who apparently couldn’t meet that basic standard, the question becomes unavoidable: Who licensed them, who failed to catch it, and why were they still on the road?

Senior U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga put DHS’s access to roughly 17 million commercial driver records on hold Friday. His administrative stay is temporary, and he hasn’t ruled the subpoena unlawful. 

DHS must file its opposition Monday, the states reply Wednesday, and Trenga has scheduled a hearing for Thursday.

DHS wants five years of records from the Commercial Driver’s License Information System, including names, birth dates, license numbers, states of record, and Social Security numbers. The subpoena says the information would be used to investigate illegal practices at CDL schools, criminal fraud involving CDLs issued to illegal aliens, and civil immigration enforcement.

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Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Judges?

There is growing interest in whether an “ai” or, artificial intelligence judge can make better rulings than a human one.  

This is understandable as many legal decisions are either wrong or flawed in some critical way.  

Partisan politics and “lawfare” also continue to corrupt the legal system to a degree that has undermined its fundamental credibility, including public trust.

No one knows better than President Trump who was maliciously prosecuted as a civilian. 

Down in the trial courts where legal arguments start, many of the facts of a case get ignored by the court, or never get a fair hearing because they are denied on technical grounds, or from favoritism, or corruption.  

Critical facts are also not discovered or recognized due to human error, or lack of relevant subject competence.

When a case then gets bumped up to an appeal, the appellate courts are even more removed from facts. They may reverse on procedural mistakes, or if a particular statute or law was thought to be seriously misinterpreted, but appellate courts are notorious for affirming lower court rulings because sending a case back to the trial court implicates their judicial colleagues and hurts their record.

In law school, the judges, moreover, were originally trained almost entirely by reference to these abstract appellate cases, and usually don’t get their hands dirty on the nitty gritty of trial court facts.  

This is a mistake, and often produces judges with a sense of the law as a separate, rarified intellectual exercise.  This also lets personal bias creep into their method of thinking because bias can hide behind obscure law language that often appears little more than a legal “magic spell.”  

The term “legal reasoning” is an old concept, but it comes with costs: it rests on interpretations of prior rulings, or precedent — and the majority of those have problems.  The errors therefore keep compounding. Those errors are rarely caught by subsequent judges who assume the facts are settled.   

But another factor that is slowly bringing the use of AI into the legal system, involves the widespread corruption, and human abuse, of the law itself.  Partisan judges can rule based on political party allegiance, and sometimes without recognizing it. That’s how the human mind works.  AI doesn’t. 

The term “lawfare” also didn’t come out of thin air: it is the human manipulation of the normal legal system by lawyers or prosecutors who bring malicious charges, and then rely on judges who are not difficult to persuade.  That is partly because most judges have limited if any experience in business, technology and even work: they came out of law school, went straight into law or worked as law clerks, and their entire frame of reference is the internal culture of the system they are in. The charges have all the appearances of legal formalities that they are used to, so they get processed as if they were legitimate. 

Judges are also under pressure to manually process their caseloads, consisting of mountains of paperwork that clog up the system, most of which is never carefully studied, or read. Their own careers, and retirement interests, can short-circuit their willingness to think hard about the arguments before them. Judges are also risk-averse, especially when cases and facts may be controversial. AI doesn’t worry about controversy.

Law professor and federal appellate judge, Frank Easterbrook, in his increasingly criticized ruling in Klaassen, is an example. It concerned Indiana University student appeal over constitutional violations of their medical privacy. The court ruled against them by relying on an antiquated, irrelevant case from the year 1906. The court used “precedent” not to reason, but to simply process a decision, and ignored medical evidence, political facts, and law itself. At the time, judges were “all in” on the Dr. Fauci fraud, which was also reinforced by institutions including the CDC and NIH, which made any doubts, in their minds, beyond the necessity of critical thinking. 

What would an AI judge have ruled?  It would have been more capable, theoretically, of making a massive sweep, and test, of statistical data concerning documented COVID medical risk, the chemical analysis of vaccines, the regulatory lapses, and corporate profit accounting, including from medical providers.  

The constitutional law interpretations of the First Amendment, and the Establishment Clause of religious rights, were also clear, but ignored by the court. Judges on the bench, and in the Bar, can be motivated to protect their own closed system: legal precedent, even if utterly irrelevant to new facts, is a method of reinforcing that system.  AI has no culture to protect. 

Some elite law schools, such as the University of Chicago, are claiming that they are providing a “template for law schools around the world” by the way AI is simply added into their curriculum.  In some cases they are providing public presentations that report on how AI compares with human judges in case decisions. Their larger teaching posture, however, is that AI is just an elective, and creates no underlying disruption to the traditional law degree. It is still business as usual.  They’re likely wrong.

What schools like UChicago are really representing, is an AI policy for the ABA law school system, asserting their legacy institutional domain over technology which threatens to replace them.  Apparently, doing things the way they’ve always been done is their template for the future. 

The entire legal system from schools to firms to courts, don’t have a firm grasp on what the larger AI strategic implications are. Few are acquainted with, or understand, the AI data centers that are being built across the U.S.  The number of such centers already reaches into the thousands. 

So, what are they for?  

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Judge Blocks DHS From Obtaining 17 Million Commercial Driver’s License Records

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Department of Homeland Security from obtaining 17 million Commercial Driver’s License records.

US District Judge Anthony Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee, entered an administrative stay and prevented the Trump Administration from obtaining the records it subpoenaed.

Judge Trenga also ordered the DHS to immediately return any subpoenaed documents and not inspect the records.

The judge said he needs more time to consider the motion to quash the subpoenas.

On Friday, 21 Democrat state attorneys general and DC filed lawsuits challenging the records request.

The blue state attorneys general sued the Department of Transportation (DOT), the DHS and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Last month, President Trump unveiled his “Freedom Haulers” initiative to license veteran truck drivers and crack down on illegal alien truck drivers.

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