Law

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Manhattan on Thursday, less than a week after he was socked with a $148 million damage award for defaming two Atlanta election workers.

Giuliani listed debts as high as $500 million and about $10 million in assets in bankruptcy papers filed in Manhattan federal court. Last week’s mammoth judgment came after a Washington, D.C., jury determined his campaign of lies against Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss provoked a deluge of vicious and life-altering threats.

The suit is one of many criminal and civil cases facing the former mayor and Trump lawyer as he drowns in legal bills, some of which he’s acting as his own lawyer. This summer, he put his $6.5 million townhouse on the Upper East Side on the market.

Giuliani did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment.

In a landmark decision, the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that former president Donald Trump is disqualified from appearing on the state’s primary ballot next year.

The Justices’ 4-3 ruling concludes that Trump engaged in an insurrection with his words and actions around the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and therefore cannot hold the nation’s highest office again.

“We are also cognizant that we travel in uncharted territory,” wrote Colorado’s Supreme Court in its unsigned 213-page decision.

This is the first time a state’s high court has concluded the 14th Amendment’s Civil War-era Disqualification Clause applies to both the office of the presidency and the actions of the former president. Supreme Courts in Minnesota and Michigan dismissed similar complaints.

“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” wrote the Justices. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

In a statement, the Trump campaign called the ruling "a completely flawed decision" and said it would swiftly file an appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

[A]round 2000, chatter that Thomas was dissatisfied about money circulated through conservative legal circles and on Capitol Hill, according to interviews with prominent attorneys, former members of Congress and Thomas’ friends. “It was clear he was unhappy with his financial situation and his salary,” one friend said.

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During his second decade on the court, Thomas’ financial situation appears to have markedly improved. In 2003, he received the first payments of a $1.5 million advance for his memoir, a record-breaking sum for justices at the time. Ginni Thomas, who had been a congressional staffer, was by then working at the Heritage Foundation and was paid a salary in the low six figures.

Thomas also received dozens of expensive gifts throughout the 2000s, sometimes coming from people he’d met only shortly before. Thomas met Earl Dixon, the owner of a Florida pest control company, while getting his RV serviced outside Tampa in 2001, according to the Thomas biography “Supreme Discomfort.” The next year, Dixon gave Thomas $5,000 to put toward his grandnephew’s tuition. Thomas reported the payment in his annual disclosure filing.

Larger gifts went undisclosed. Crow paid for two years of private high school, which tuition rates indicate would’ve cost roughly $100,000. In 2008, another wealthy friend forgave “a substantial amount, or even all” of the principal on the loan Thomas had used to buy the quarter-million dollar RV, according to a recent Senate inquiry prompted by The New York Times’ reporting. Much of the Thomases’ leisure time was also paid for by a small set of billionaire businessmen, who brought the justice and his family on free vacations around the world. (Thomas has said he did not need to disclose the gifts of travel and his lawyer has disputed the Senate findings about the RV.)

By 2019, the justices’ pay hadn’t changed beyond keeping up with inflation. But Thomas’ views had apparently transformed from two decades before. That June, during a public appearance, Thomas was asked about salaries at the court. “Oh goodness, I think it’s plenty,” Thomas responded. “My wife and I are doing fine. We don’t live extravagantly, but we are fine.”

A few weeks later, Thomas boarded Crow’s private jet to head to Indonesia. He and his wife were off on vacation, an island cruise on Crow’s 162-foot yacht.

Manhattan’s billionaire condo buyers would lose the ability to keep their identities secret in real estate deals if a measure before Governor Kathy Hochul becomes law.

Limited liability companies have been listed in public records as the buyers of countless New York luxury apartments — almost all of the deals legitimate. But it’s also well-documented that the secrecy of LLCs makes them useful in concealing financial crimes. By the end of next week, Hochul must sign or veto a bill that would create a public database of shell companies, unmasking their rich, famous and sometimes criminal owners.

Advocates argue the measure would root out so-called bad actors who hide behind LLCs to launder money — such as financier Jho Low, whose penthouse at Manhattan’s Time Warner Center was seized in a US government corruption probe. But opponents say it’s a violation of owners’ privacy, and an unnecessary move that would duplicate a similar federal law taking effect on Jan. 1.

I am a bit of a law junkie, but not a lawyer by any means. With the Bob Menendez superseding indictment today an old question came up. I feel like I should know this but...

Does a superseding indictment have to be a more "serious" charge? (Sorry for the terminology) this may be a bad example but if someone had already been charged with burglary could a superseding indictment then be unlawful entry?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2320015

The Virginia Court of Appeals overruled a man’s misdemeanor conviction for fleeing from police after ruling the Lynchburg police officer who attempted to make the arrest didn’t get close enough to the suspect to have a realistic chance of grabbing him.

In an opinion revealing what the court described as a legal quirk unique to Virginia, the court found that an officer telling someone to stop from 20 yards away doesn’t satisfy a rule requiring officers to have the “immediate physical ability to place the person under arrest.”

The opinion applies mainly to foot chases, not a separate eluding law that criminalizes fleeing police in a motor vehicle.

This looks to be the first instance of a set of fake electors from the 2020 presidential election being charged with a crime. Eight felony counts for each fake elector.

The woman, whose name Phoenix New Times is withholding to protect her privacy, is one of more than 450 people in Phoenix who have been charged with manifestation of prostitution over the past eight years. The ordinance, which has been called unconstitutional by the ACLU of Arizona, allows the act of flagging down a car or wearing provocative clothing to be used as grounds to cite someone.

In 2014, the city’s prosecution of Monica Jones under the ordinance drew national outcry. Civil rights organizations condemned the arrest of Jones, a transgender activist and social work student. Even celebrities spoke out against the city’s use of the law.

But Phoenix has not stopped using the ordinance, according to data obtained by New Times.

I'm an almost 60-year-old, overweight, boomer. Maybe I ought to get a really short kilt and some flip-flops and take a walk, shirtless, down the street. Provocative enough?