Latest news with #Black'sLawDictionary
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Border Czar Squirms Trying to Defend Trump's Plot to Jail Americans Overseas
Border czar Tom Homan has joined Attorney General Pam Bondi in refusing to say whether President Donald Trump's idea to deport Americans to foreign jails is legal. 'I asked you about this the other day [and] you said you had just gotten back, you had not heard about it yet. Just to follow up, do you believe it would be legal to send American prisoners to foreign prisons?' CNN's Kaitlan Collins asked Homan on Thursday. 'I'm in the deportation business, so I don't think you're talking about deportation. I think you're talking about prisoner transfer or extradition,' he said. 'That's a question for Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice, U.S. Marshals.' But Bondi also dodged the question earlier this week when asked by Fox News host Jesse Watters if Trump's musings about sending Americans to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran prison complex where inmates sleep on bare metal racks and are kept in their cells 23 and a half hours per day, is legal. Legal experts say the idea is 'obviously illegal,' but Homan continued to punt. 'I think the thing they're talking about is either extradition or prisoner transfer, and that's a question for the DOJ,' he repeated. Housing Americans who are accused or convicted of committing crimes in the U.S. in foreign jails would not be a form 'extradition.' That's what happens when someone has been accused of breaking the laws of a foreign country and is sent back to that country to stand trial, according to Black's Law Dictionary. Meanwhile, Homan is correct that 'deportation' is a process that only applies to foreign nationals. But legally it's a civil process 'without any implication of punishment or penalty,' according to Black's Law Dictionary and the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute. By that definition, jailing migrants in a Salvadoran mega prison is not 'deportation' either. And yet the U.S. is paying El Salvador $6 million per year to indefinitely jail about 240 Venezuelans and a handful of Salvadorans, the vast majority of whom do not have criminal records. On Monday, Trump met with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and suggested they expand the deal to include Americans. 'Homegrown criminals next,' Trump whispered to Bukele as they entered the Oval Office. 'I said homegrowns the next,' he added, raising his voice. 'The homegrowns. You got to build about five more places.' Later during their meeting, Trump told reporters that Bondi was 'studying the law' to figure out how to deport Americans accused of crimes. 'We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking, that are absolute monsters,' Trump told reporters. 'I'd like to include them.' That night, Bondi refused to say whether the plan was legal. 'Jesse, these are Americans he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country,' she told Watters. 'Crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us a directive to make America safe again.' Deporting Americans clearly violates their fundamental rights as U.S. citizens, according to legal experts. In fact, Americans who were wrongly deported have successfully sued the government for damages. During her interview with Homan, Collins pressed him on the issue. 'You personally would not be involved in sending American prisoners to foreign prisoners, including in El Salvador?' she asked. 'As the border czar, I would not remove U.S. citizens, no,' he said. 'Department of Justice can either do that through a prisoner transfer or extradition. That's out of my lane.'
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Bruce M. Selya, Federal Judge Known for Polysyllabic Prose, Dies at 90
Bruce M. Selya, a federal judge who issued more than 1,800 opinions and was celebrated (and occasionally chided) for a sesquipedalian writing style — that is, his use of long words that sent readers scrambling for a dictionary — died on Feb. 22 in Providence, R.I. He was 90. His family announced his death. A Republican who was active in electoral politics before President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the bench in 1982, Judge Selya issued opinions that did not conform to a predictable conservative ideology. Last year, he was part of a court panel that upheld Rhode Island's ban on high-capacity gun magazines, having continued to work as a senior judge on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston until his death. In 1998, he struck down the use of racial preferences in student admissions to Boston Latin School in the first ruling from an appeals court that restricted affirmative action in public schools, a long-sought goal of conservatives. On the other hand, he sided with a liberal understanding of the separation of church and state when he ruled in 2021 that Boston could bar a Christian group from flying a religious flag at a ceremony outside City Hall. The United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed Judge Selya, saying that the free-speech rights of the religious group prevailed. The U.S. District Court of Rhode Island, where Judge Selya began his career on the bench, called him 'one of the most widely quoted jurists in America.' His best-known law clerk in his 38 years as an appellate judge was Ketanji Brown Jackson, the future Supreme Court associate justice nominated by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. In a memoir, she described Judge Selya as 'a brilliant, meticulous and scholarly practitioner of the law.' In his 22 years as a corporate lawyer before joining the bench, Judge Selya bemoaned the sleep-inducing prose of typical legal opinions. He vowed to enliven his own writing with original vocabulary and colorful figures of speech. He became known for obscure word choices — some extremely so. He preferred perscrutation rather than a simpler synonym, scrutiny; inconcinnate (unsuitable); and rodomontade (boastful talk). The National Law Journal in 2008 published a guide to 'Selyaisms,' compiling some of his favorite recondite words and phrases, to aid lawyers making their way through his opinions. The list included asseverate (declare), crapulous (unrestrained in drinking) and sockdolager (a decisive blow). The judge was also a punster. In a case involving the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, he wrote in his ruling that 'a lingerie manufacturer made a slip,' that 'plaintiffs' own filings place them in the tightest of corsets' and that the union had 'played pantywaist.' To some critics, such writing was needlessly opaque, even sophomoric. Bryan A. Garner, the editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary, once compared the judge to Holofernes, the pedantic schoolmaster who spouts Latinisms in Shakespeare's 'Love's Labor's Lost.' 'Many of his words are not in most dictionaries and have been obsolete for a long time,' Mr. Garner told The New York Times in a 1992 article about the judge's literary style. 'To say 'perscrutation' instead of 'examination' is ludicrous.' The judge did not accept the reprimand. 'There are no such things as obscure words; there are just words that are temporarily abandoned,' he told The Boston Globe in 2006. 'It's part of my responsibility to resuscitate them.' Juan R. Torruella, a fellow appellate judge on the First Circuit, told The Globe that he admired and sometimes repeated Judge Selya's unique vocabulary. 'One of his favorite words, 'struthious,' I like very much,' he said. 'If people have to look it up, that's OK. It makes them think about his decisions.' struthious, adj., designating or of an ostrich or ostrichlike bird Bruce Marshall Selya was born on May 27, 1934, in Providence to Herman Selya, a chemical engineer, and Betty (Brier) Selya. He attended Classical High School in Providence and went on to Harvard, earning an A.B. from Harvard University in 1955 and a Bachelor of Laws degree from Harvard Law School in 1958. He practiced corporate and real estate law from 1960 to 1982 in Providence, where he was active in state Republican politics. He ran unsuccessfully for attorney general in 1964 and was a longtime fund-raiser and kitchen-cabinet adviser to John H. Chafee, a governor and four-term U.S. senator from Rhode Island. Mr. Selya managed Mr. Chafee's first Senate race in 1976, and in an act of political patronage Mr. Chafee urged President Reagan to nominate him to the federal bench. He became the first Jewish federal judge to serve in Rhode Island, according to Jack Reed, the U.S. senator from that state. Judge Selya was with the district court from 1982 to 1986, when Mr. Reagan named him to the First Circuit appeals court, which oversees much of New England as well as Puerto Rico. He is survived by his wife, Cindy (Anzevino) Selya; his daughters, Dawn Selya and Lori Ann Young; his sister, Susan Jane Rosen; six grandchildren; and two great-granddaughters. A previous marriage, to Ellen Barnes, ended in divorce. In 2005, Judge Selya was appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which takes a second look at denials of government requests for wiretaps in national security cases. He issued an opinion in 2008 that telecommunication companies must comply with government requests to eavesdrop on certain phone calls and emails of Americans suspected of being spies or terrorists. Judge Selya stepped back from a full workload on the First Circuit appellate court in 2006, assuming senior status. But he continued to hear cases. He told The Providence Journal in 2022 that he worked a five-day week from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. His eyesight had diminished, so his staff read documents to him. 'It doesn't stop me,' he said.
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Lori Falce: Calling everything 'fraud' doesn't make it so
Mar. 14—My favorite part of "The Princess Bride" is when Vizzini, a sly criminal mastermind who is not that sly nor much of a mastermind, responds over and over to events with a shout of "Inconceivable!" The swordsman Inigo Montoya — brilliantly played by Mandy Patinkin — eventually looks at his boss quizzically. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." The line runs through my head frequently these days. It's usually when I hear the word "fraud." The simple definition of fraud is a deception for personal or financial gain. The legal definition, per Black's Law Dictionary, is a scheme "to get an advantage over another by false suggestions or suppression of the truth." President Donald Trump and Elon Musk claim to have found an absolute avalanche of fraud. When asked for examples, press secretary Karoline Leavitt points to things such as contracts for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and climate change. In his joint session speech last week, Trump mentioned a foreign aid program for male circumcision in Mozambique. Musk made the United States Agency for International Development one of his earliest targets because he called the non-governmental organizations frequently contracted "one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world." It doesn't matter if the programs were legally contracted or even if they were authorized by Congress, the branch of government that decides what America is paying to do and why. They are simply stamped with the scarlet letter F. It seems that anything one doesn't like can now be called a fraud. Musk described Social Security as a Ponzi scheme. If so, it's a Ponzi scheme that is the only thing keeping many seniors from starving to death. It's a legally constituted program that millions of Americans have paid into for generations. It doesn't matter. It is now tarred as fraudulent. Let's be clear. I believe fraud happens in our government. Take the pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program, in which boatloads of money were taken, often by people who had no paychecks to protect. The Small Business Administration's inspector general said in 2023 that about 70,000 of the loans made under it were possibly fraudulent. I believe these things have happened under both parties. I believe it has happened in a bipartisan fashion. I believe it has probably been committed in some way since the ink was still wet on the Constitution. In fact, one of George Washington's cronies, second to Alexander Hamilton, was one of our first insider traders. But that doesn't mean everything the government does represents fraud. When we apply the word to programs that are simply not in keeping with the current administration's goals, it devalues the government's broader authority. It means what the government says today means nothing tomorrow. It means signing a document with the government has no lasting bonds between parties. And it makes people look like a foolish, overpuffed huckster in a kids' movie, continually using a word without understanding its meaning. Lori Falce is the Tribune-Review community engagement editor and an opinion columnist. For more than 30 years, she has covered Pennsylvania politics, Penn State, crime and communities. She joined the Trib in 2018. She can be reached at lfalce@
