# data[].attributes.body
New Jersey is trying legalize single game sports.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
New Jersey's long struggle to legalize single-game sports betting within the state will likely end, one way or another, with a Supreme Court decision focusing on a broad constitutional issue.

On Tuesday, the Justices took the cases of Christie v. NCAA and New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association, Inc. v. NCAA, which will be considered as one case by the Justices later this year. The cases' acceptance by the Court marks a big victory, by itself, for those who see legalized betting, a la Nevada, as a potential windfall for the state.

In the Christie case, New Jersey's attorney general's office and veteran litigator Ted Olson finally got the issue at the finish line after a series of appeals that go back to 2014. The Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association's case made much of the same arguments.

Both lawsuits asked the Justices to consider if a federal law that limits sports betting in New Jersey violates the 10 th Amendment's anti-commandeering clause.

The anti-commandeering clause has received a lot of attention recently in an unrelated matter - as the primary defense made in several lawsuits against the Trump administration's sanctuary cities polices.

The 10 th Amendment simply reads that, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Since 1976, several Supreme Court decisions have found that it was the amendment's intent to limit the ability of the federal government to "commandeer" state officials or a state legislative process.

In New York v. United States (1992), Justice Sandra Day O'Connor found that a federal waste-management law "would 'commandeer' state governments into the service of federal regulatory purposes, and would for this reason be inconsistent with the Constitution's division of authority between federal and state governments." And in Printz v. United States (1997), Justice Antonin Scalia said that a federal gun control law that forced local law enforcement to perform handgun background checks went against the 10 th Amendment's principles. "The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States' officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program," Scalia said. "Such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty."

In the New Jersey sports betting cases, the Third Circuit federal appeals court in 2013 ruled against a state challenge to the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. The statute had allowed Nevada and several other states to have sports betting, but New Jersey decided not to apply for permission to do so. Instead, decades later it enacted its own law to control sports betting. The Supreme Court didn't take an appeal from the state in 2014.

New Jersey then repealed existing state oversight regulations on gambling in another attempt to enact sports betting and make it "a purely private matter." Again, the NCAA and the major professional sports organizations sued New Jersey. And again, New Jersey lost in court. But the case was heard by a full en banc appeals court, with nine judges voting against the state and three judges dissenting.

In its second plea to the Supreme Court, New Jersey argued that the en banc appeals court went too far. "The majority thus reached the remarkable and unprecedented conclusion that the Constitution's federal structure affords to Congress the power to prohibit States from repealing their own laws," it said. "This Court's review is essential to ensure that the anti-commandeering doctrine continues to serve its function of preserving our federalist system."

The Trump Justice Department, in addition to the sports organizations, asked the Supreme Court to deny the case for a second time, citing numerous conflicts between the federal law and the state laws, and the lack of legal challenges from other states.

But at least four Supreme Court Justices saw enough in New Jersey's appeal to ask for full arguments at the Court, most likely later this year.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New Jersey bets on 10th Amendment in Supreme Court case

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New Jersey's long struggle to legalize single-game sports betting within the state will likely end, one way or another, with a Supreme Court decision focusing on a broad constitutional issue. On Tuesday, the Justices took the cases of Christie v. NCAA and New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association, Inc. v.

# data[].attributes.body
No searches without a warrant.
They can't search the people without a warrant.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Supreme Court takes on major Fourth Amendment case | CNN Politics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Supreme Court grappled with a major case involving privacy in the digital age on Wednesday, discussing how to apply established legal rules to rapidly changing technology.

# data[].attributes.body
Innocent till Proven Guilty
Michael Cohen is pleading the 5th amendment which means he's innocent till proven guilty.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
michael cohen asserts fifth amendment rights in stormy daniels case - cnnpolitics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Michael Cohen asserts Fifth Amendment rights in Stormy Daniels case

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Michael Cohen, the longtime personal attorney for President Donald Trump, filed court papers Wednesday indicating he would assert his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination regarding his involvement in a hush money deal involving porn star Stormy Daniels and the President.

# data[].attributes.body
Freedom of speech, religion, assembly, petition, and press.
This man criticizing an Officer is a bit of a jerk but he can do it due to the first amendment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Officers can arrest people who refuse to stop video recording inside station houses, the Police Department said. Credit Credit James Estrin/The New York Times

After Instagram video of a man berating a sergeant inside a Harlem police station went viral last week, the Police Department issued a memo telling officers they can arrest people who refuse to stop recording inside police buildings.

Police officials said in the Aug. 15 memo that taking photos and recording video or audio in police buildings is prohibited, and officers can order civilians who are doing so to stop. If they refuse, the memo said, officers should order the civilians to leave the premises. If they still fail to comply, they can be arrested for trespassing.

Police officials say the memo, which also covers disruptive behavior like threats, was intended to provide clear guidance to officers about their authority in an era when smartphones have given nearly everyone the ability to record police activity and share it widely. But civil liberties advocates and city lawmakers are concerned that the recording ban violates the public's First Amendment rights. Police unions have said the guidance is not specific enough about how officers should enforce it.

The debate is the latest front in an ongoing tug-of-war playing out in New York City, and across the country, over how much the public should know about the police officers who patrol their neighborhoods.

The ban is part of a broader policy added to the official police manual in June that acknowledges individuals' rights to record police activity on public streets, parks and private property. But police officials say department facilities have long been off-limits to recording.

Ann Prunty, a longtime Manhattan prosecutor who is now the assistant police deputy commissioner of legal matters, said that although police station lobbies and waiting areas are open to the general public, they are also frequented by crime victims, undercover officers and other people who need privacy.

"That space has to be a safe space for them to come and be confident that they're not going to see their images broadcast in some video the next day on YouTube or on Instagram," she said.

Courts have held that the government can place reasonable restrictions on when, where and how individuals can exercise their rights under the First Amendment to record the police, said Jonathan M. Smith, the former chief of special litigation in the Department of Justice's civil rights division. But the justification for the recording ban is "just not credible," he said, because if the police are genuinely concerned about certain people being filmed, then officials should be protecting those people from being seen at all.

"There may be individual circumstances in which you could restrict, but a rule that says you can't go into the public portion of a police facility and videotape, I think that violates the Constitution," said Mr. Smith, who is currently the executive director of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration has struggled to find equilibrium between civil liberties groups and the City Council, who have pushed for greater transparency about police conduct, and unions that have sought to insulate officers from public scrutiny.

The mayor on Monday said he was disgusted by the Instagram video at the Harlem police station and others that have surfaced in recent days showing "inappropriate" behavior by civilians toward the police. One showed a man weighing marijuana on the back of a police car parked in Brooklyn.

"They are not acceptable," he said. "Anyone who thinks it's cute, it's not cute. Knock it off, show them respect."

But police labor union leaders fault city officials - including the mayor, the police commissioner and the City Council - for policies that they say have created a hostile work environment for officers and emboldened criminals.

"Everyone feels if they do something and it gets escalated, they're going to be held accountable as if they're to blame," Edward D. Mullins, the sergeants' union president, said. "It's almost as bad as tolerating the behavior."

Courts have ruled that the First Amendment protects the public's rights to record police officers in public, and the City Council is considering legislation that would enshrine those rights in city codes, mirroring a California law enacted in 2015. At the same time, jurists and lawmakers have limited those rights to situations where they do not interfere with officials carrying out their duties, violate laws or infringe on private rights.

The police commissioner, James P. O'Neill, has publicly committed to a neighborhood policing strategy that views police stations as shared public spaces. When officials unveiled designs last month for a new precinct in the South Bronx with 800 square feet of community space, he said it was a model for future projects.

"Our message to New Yorkers going forward, these are your station houses," he said.

The recording policy does not explain how the ban in police buildings applies to public events, like officer recognition ceremonies and precinct community council meetings, but Ms. Prunty said it would not apply at official events.

Darius Charney, the lead plaintiffs' lawyer in a federal lawsuit that forced the Police Department to scale back its aggressive street-stop policy, said the policy imposes "overly broad" limits on the public's right to record police officers. But it also restricts enforcement to behavior that "affects the use of the space or the ability of police operations to function properly," he said, citing the policy.

"The memo is therefore confusing at best," he said.

Mr. Mullins, the sergeants' union president, said the policy was "too ambiguous" about how officers are supposed to decide whether to make an arrest. A spokeswoman for the Police Department could not say whether anyone had been arrested under the policy, and it was unclear if the city's district attorneys would prosecute such arrests.

In the Instagram video tirade, the man makes crude sexual remarks to a sergeant inside the 28th Precinct on Frederick Douglas Boulevard and West 123rd Street when the officer asks, "Are you going to put me on Facebook?"

The sergeant, Freddy Lopez, then moves toward the man, who is in a waiting area across a low wall, and orders him to stop recording because "the law says you can't." When the man presses for specifics, the sergeant hesitates before turning around and asking a female officer sitting at a desk for handcuffs that never materialize.

The video ends with Sergeant Lopez going to a desk and picking up the phone. The police said the man was not arrested.

In a video message to police officers, Chief of Department Terence A. Monahan said the recent videos showed "horrendous" conduct toward officers and commended Sergeant Lopez for acting professionally and correctly telling the man his behavior was prohibited. "And while the individual subsequently stopped the recording and was allowed to leave the precinct, I want to emphasize that the Legal Bureau has indicated that an arrest was completely appropriate in that situation," he added.

The man did not respond on Monday to a direct message seeking comment. According to The Daily News, he went to the precinct on Aug. 13 to reclaim his Suzuki dirt bike, which the police seized in July after chasing a rider who discarded the bike and fled on foot. Sergeant Lopez would not release it to him.

Councilman Donovan Richards, a Queens Democrat and the chairman of the public safety committee, said the man's behavior was despicable. But he noted that the recording ban created a double standard in police stations, where civilians with cellphones are forbidden from recording encounters that police officers with department-issued smartphones and body cameras can. He said he would raise the issue this fall, when his committee considers the Right to Record Act, which would prohibit police officers from interfering with efforts to record them.

Supporters of the measure say it would help to protect the public from unlawful arrests but would also shield officers from false accusations of abuse and misconduct. But police unions say it is redundant and they have suggested that the city would be better served by a law requiring civilians to keep a minimum distance from officers carrying out their duties.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Viral Video Prompts Memo on Recording In Police Facilities. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Video of Man Berating Officer Opens Debate Over Recording in Police Stations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After Instagram video of a man berating a sergeant inside a Harlem police station went viral last week, the Police Department issued a memo telling officers they can arrest people who refuse to stop recording inside police buildings. Police officials said in the Aug.

# data[].attributes.body
The Right to Bear Arms
This Judge is doing a Gun control case.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Emergency workers transported a man who was shot in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in 1994. Credit Credit Shepard Sherbell/Corbis, via Getty Images

Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.
WASHINGTON - Though I've been lucky to have been insulated from gun violence most of my life, it was at the core of the identity of my hometown, Washington, D.C.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, Washington recorded more killings per capita in a year than any other American city eight times between 1985 and 2012, earning the nickname "murder capital." The city's homicide rate peaked in 1991 when there were 482 killings, or about 80 for every 100,000 people.

I was aware of the arguments for and against regulating firearms partly because my father was a federal judge who handled one of the seminal cases in the city's fight over gun rights. In 2003, Washington was sued in response to a local law, then one of the strictest in the nation, that prohibited residents from owning handguns. The law required all firearms, including rifles and shotguns, to be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock." However, the law excluded weapons registered before 1975 and those possessed by active and retired law enforcement officers.

My father, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, was assigned to a related case, District of Columbia v. Heller, and he ruled in favor of the city.

The verdict was eventually appealed and overturned at the appellate court which concluded that the Second Amendment protects a person's right to possess a firearm for purposes outside of military service or law enforcement, such as self-defense in one's home.

In 2008, the Supreme Court had ruled that the city's handgun ban, and specifically the requirement that lawfully owned rifles and shotguns be kept unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock, violated this guarantee. The ruling also stated that the right to bear arms was not unlimited, and that guns and gun ownership could continue to be regulated.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruling in Heller was used to overturn a subsequent city law that tightly limited the kinds of bullets city residents could own. In response, the city changed the law to prohibit possession of ammunition by anyone who did not have a gun license.

Growing up, I didn't talk much at home about the cases handled by my father, who is now retired. After all, judges are generally a tight-lipped bunch, and I was also a child with my head elsewhere. By the time he ruled in the Heller case, I had been a reporter at The New York Times for seven years. But I do recall him citing the case as one of his toughest to parse.

At the time, I was the Mid-Atlantic correspondent for The Times's National Desk, which meant I was responsible for all news in seven states and in Washington. For obvious reasons, I didn't cover the Heller decision, but during my stint in that job, there was no shortage of shootings that I did cover, including the Amish schoolhouse shooting in 2006, which left five children dead, and the Virginia Tech massacre the following year in which 32 people were killed, many of them college students.

I also covered the debate around guns as it played out locally, where the topic had a distinct resonance. Washington is a fairly liberal city, and its residents have long favored gun control. The city also has a strong presence of conservative lawmakers from elsewhere in the country, who move to the area when they become members of Congress. Because it's a federal jurisdiction and not part of any state, the city has distinctly limited sovereignty over its own affairs. There have been tussles between Congress and the city for decades over "home rule," a notion that pivoted specifically on the city's gun control laws.

Image

Judge Ricardo M. Urbina in his chambers in 2012 in Washington. Credit Katherine Frey/The Washington Post, via Getty Images

Beginning with its efforts to block a handgun ban passed overwhelmingly in the mid-1970s by the City Council, Congress has made no fewer than five attempts over the past four decades to overturn stringent gun laws in Washington. In 2009, when the Senate approved a bill to provide the nation's capital with a voting representative in the House, the measure, which did not become law, came with a controversial amendment that would have repealed most of the city's gun control regulations.

Washington's history of gun violence has contributed to local residents' push for more controls. The city's outlook was also affected by events in October 2002, when a sniper team terrorized local residents. John Allen Muhammad and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, who was 17 at the time, shot and killed 10 people and critically injured three others during a shooting spree that lasted more than three weeks. The duo evaded the police and the F.B.I., who were especially frustrated because they repeatedly found shell casings at the shooting scenes but had no way to trace them to the weapons that had been used. They also had no way to track down potential suspects because the federal ballistics database includes casing information only for guns that have been used in previous crimes.

I covered Mr. Muhammad's trial in Maryland in 2006 as well as his subsequent execution in Virginia three years later. In the wake of these events, many gun control advocates cited the sniper killings as a catalyzing moment in their sense of urgency about the need for better tracking of ammunition. They pushed for federally requiring microstamping, serializing bullets and creating a national database that would record the ballistics signature of every gun sold in the United States, not just those had been used in earlier crimes. Microstamping is technology that imprints a bullet's casing with a microscopic array of characters that can be used to identify the firearm, similar to a license plate number.

Most of these efforts to regulate guns and ammunition have fallen flat. And over the years, as I have studied why, I also have begun to understand why my father has referred to the Heller verdict as one of his toughest.

Over the next several months, The New York Times will publish a number of my stories that explore the regulation and commerce of ammunition, a mix that includes topics like how law enforcement uses shell casings to solve crimes, why millions of Americans make or reload their ammunition at home, and how hunters, concerned about poisoning scavengers, are leading the effort to shift to non-lead bullets. We began this week with a look at California and its position on guns and ammunition, and how the state has emerged as the battleground for this conversation and debate.
[Read: California Tries New Tack on Gun Violence: Ammo Control]

Keep up with Times Insider stories on Twitter, via the Reader Center: @ReaderCenter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Tough Issue to Judge, and Report. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
My Father, a Judge, Said a Gun Control Case Was One of His Hardest. Now I See Why.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. WASHINGTON - Though I've been lucky to have been insulated from gun violence most of my life, it was at the core of the identity of my hometown, Washington, D.C.