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Conservative judge strikes down abortion ban in stunning ruling, warns that women are not “community property”
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A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban.
Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney quoted “liberty” in a ruling that rejected the controversial ban outlawing abortion after six weeks, before many people know they are pregnant. Abortions in the state will now be allowed until 22 weeks, as they were before the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law the six-week ban.
McBurney had some choice words for politicians in his ruling, writing, “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”
Read the rest on The New Republic
Marcellus Williams deserved more than two paragraphs from the Supreme Court
Less Of This
Last week, the state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle, a St. Louis journalist. No physical evidence connected Williams to the crime of which he was convicted, and the testimony against him at trial—given by his then-girlfriend Laura Asaro and jailhouse informant Henry Cole, both of whom were keenly interested in the available reward money, and both of whom police pressured to cooperate—was inconsistent with the findings at the scene. The bloody shoe prints in Gayle’s home were not made by Williams’s shoes; the fingerprints on the wall were not Williams’s fingerprints; the hair on the floor was not Williams’s hair. Three experts who independently reviewed DNA test results of the knife used to kill Gayle concluded that Williams had not been the one who wielded it.
Read the rest on Balls & Strikes
We can still end the death penalty
Perspective
Austin Sarat is a professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College. Doug Magee is a novelist.
The death penalty in the United States is not really a legal problem. If anyone had any doubt, five different states carrying out as many executions between Sept. 20 and 27 should have made that clear.
All of them were “legal,” sanctioned by judges at all levels of the court system. Whatever their own beliefs about whether the government should be in the killing business, their hands were tied by a growing patchwork of laws that authorize death as a punishment and judicial precedents that obscure its deep immorality.
Among other things, as they did last week, those laws and precedents allow the execution of people with profound cognitive and psychological problems and of victims of child abuse and neglect. As Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree explains, “The overwhelming majority of those facing execution today have what the court termed … to be diminished culpability. Severe functional deficits are the rule, not the exception, among the individuals who populate the nation’s death rows.”
Read the rest on Slate
