Latest news with #Horwitz
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Federal court rule in Middle TN barring lawyers from speaking publicly on cases scrapped
Lawyers trying cases before Middle Tennessee's federal district court can now speak on social media and to news media about their cases without fear, thanks to a May 15 ruling ending a lengthy court battle. Judges from the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee removed a local court rule that previously prevented attorneys from discussing their cases with the media and the public. The change was the result of a lengthy federal lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm on behalf of Nashville civil rights attorney Daniel Horwitz in October 2024. 'This is a huge win for the First Amendment in Middle Tennessee,' Institute for Justice Attorney Jared McClain said. 'Attorneys have a right to discuss their cases, and the public has a right to know what the government and its contractors are doing wrong.' Horwitz filed the lawsuit after U.S. District Court Judge Jeffery Frensley issued a 2022 gag order barring Horwitz from speaking on social media and to news media against Brentwood-based private prison company CoreCivic. At the time the gag order was put in place, Horwitz served as the attorney for the family of Terry Childress, an inmate who died in February 2021 after his cellmate assaulted him in CoreCivic's Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Hartsville. The case was later settled. Since the order, Horwitz filed numerous lawsuits against the company, but was unable to discuss any of them with news media because of the rule. In January 2025, Horwitz's case was dismissed for lack of standing. But in April, amid an appeal, the court proposed a change to the administrative rule that would have expanded the circumstances in which a judge could restrict a lawyer's speech. More: Speech rights of lawyers in Nashville federal court could change amid gag order fight While the appeal decision is still before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the rule itself has been scrapped after the Institute for Justice submitted a public comment outlining the ways the proposed rule still violated the First Amendment. Now, the rule simply states that attorneys are bound by Tennessee's rules of professional conduct, which the Institute for Justice said 'was always the case.' 'I'm thrilled that my First Amendment rights have been vindicated, but more importantly, I'm thrilled that I can resume informing the public about civil rights abuses across Middle Tennessee,' Horwitz said. 'This important victory also would not have been possible without the dedicated civil rights lawyers at the Institute for Justice and Southeastern Legal Foundation, to whom I will always be grateful.' Ryan Gustin, senior director of public affairs at CoreCivic, said the company respects 'the judicial process in which amendments to local rules are reviewed and modified." "We also stand by our belief that matters involving litigation, and legal rules, policies and procedures should be decided within the court system and not in the press or social media,' he said. The ruling comes as a federal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice continues into the conditions at CoreCivic's Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, due to allegations of extensive understaffing, violence, contraband and sexual misconduct, according to officials. The USA TODAY Network - Tennessee's coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. Have a story to tell? Reach Angele Latham by email at alatham@ by phone at 931-623-9485, or follow her on Twitter at @angele_latham This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Middle Tennessee federal court rule on lawyers speaking out scrapped
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Federal Court Scraps Rule That Gagged Tennessee Civil Rights Attorney From Criticizing a Private Prison
After a nearly three-year legal battle, a Tennessee civil rights attorney will no longer be gagged from criticizing a private prison. The local federal court has scrapped a rule that restricted lawyers from publicly commenting on their cases. The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee amended the court's local rules last week to remove a provision that assumed out-of-court statements by attorneys were prejudicial. The court proposed amending the rule last month following a federal lawsuit filed by the Nashville-area attorney Daniel Horwitz. In 2022 a federal magistrate judge issued a gag order against Horwitz barring him from making public comments in a wrongful death lawsuit he was pursuing against CoreCivic, a private company that operates the state's Trousdale Turner Correctional Center (TTCC). The judge also ordered Horwitz to delete dozens of past tweets about the company and threatened him with contempt. Horwitz, represented by the Institute for Justice and the Southeastern Legal Foundation, sued the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee and four district court judges last year, arguing that the gag order and rule violated his First Amendment rights and chilled his speech. "I'm thrilled that my First Amendment rights have been vindicated, but more importantly, I'm thrilled that I can resume informing the public about civil rights abuses across Middle Tennessee," Horwitz said in an Institute for Justice press release. Horwitz is a prolific civil rights litigator in Tennessee. He has represented, among others, a software company illogically targeted by the state cosmetology board, a woman challenging the rejection of her personalized license plate on First Amendment grounds, and a family who was terrorized by a drunk, off-duty NYPD officer who called them racial slurs and threatened to shoot them. CoreCivic is one of Horwitz's most frequent courtroom opponents: He had represented plaintiffs in nine separate lawsuits against the company since 2020 when he filed his suit. Horwitz often tweeted about chronic understaffing and wrongful deaths at TTCC. In one tweet he wrote that "the degree of profit-motivated deliberate indifference—which is regularly killing people—is obscene at a level that even I find surprising." CoreCivic argued, and a federal magistrate judge agreed, that the comments were prejudicial under a local court rule that attorneys "must not make any extrajudicial statements (other than a quotation from or reference to public records) that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know will be disseminated by public communication and will have substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative matter, including especially that will interfere with a fair trial." That rule also put the burden of proof on the lawyer to show that the extrajudicial comments were not prejudicial. After more than two years of unsuccessfully trying to challenge the gag order in his various lawsuits against CoreCivic, Horwitz sued the district court and four federal judges, arguing that the rule violated his First Amendment rights. Horwitz's suit argued that his speech was substantially restricted over two years for fear of sanctions and of having his clients' cases dismissed. For example, when the Department of Justice announced an investigation into conditions at TTCC last year, citing many of the same reports of understaffing and violence that Horwitz relied on in his now-deleted tweets, Horwitz had to turn down news outlets' interview requests. A U.S. District Court judge dismissed Horwitz's suit last year, finding that he lacked standing to challenge the rule. Horwitz appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. But last month, while that appeal was pending, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee proposed amending the rule at issue. After public comment, the court ultimately scrapped the restriction altogether; the rule now simply states that attorneys are bound by the Tennessee Rules of Professional Conduct. The Institute for Justice points out that being able to use social media and press interviews to publicize clients' stories is vital to the work of public interest law firms like itself. "Discussing cases with the media and public is a huge part of public interest litigation, including the work that we do here," said the institute's president and chief counsel, Scott Bullock, in a press release. "This case showed the importance of being able to talk with the public, because the judges ultimately changed the rule due to public comment." In a statement to Reason, Ryan Gustin, CoreCivic's senior director of public affairs, said: "We respect the judicial process in which amendments to local rules are reviewed and modified. We also stand by our belief that matters involving litigation, and legal rules, policies and procedures should be decided within the court system and not in the press or social media." After the gag order was repealed, Horwitz celebrated by making up for lost time. "CoreCivic's Tennessee prisons are chronically understaffed death factories," he posted on the social media network BlueSky, "and it is outrageous that the [Tennessee Department of Correction] not only has done nothing meaningful to ensure CoreCivic's compliance with minimum contract requirements, but has lobbied to ensure that CoreCivic does not incur meaningful consequences." The post Federal Court Scraps Rule That Gagged Tennessee Civil Rights Attorney From Criticizing a Private Prison appeared first on
Sydney Morning Herald
04-05-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
The family-run butchery that understands the simple secrets to success
Joshua Horwitz has a refreshingly honest perspective on what it takes to be successful in business. 'The food industry is simpler than people give it credit for,' he says. 'If someone has a meal they enjoy, they tell their friends.' He would know. Horwitz is part of the family behind Field to Fork, a group of farm-to-table butchers that has been operating in Sydney's eastern suburbs since 2014. Field to Fork was founded by his mum, Paula, 11 years ago and has grown to encompass four retail butcheries, two takeaway grills and a 'pop-up' homewares store that's now been open for over three years. Field to Fork has built its name on creating delicious food you can't help but rave about, whether that's South African-style biltong or ready-made 'homestyle meals' for the days you just don't feel like cooking. A recipe for success It's that great-tasting food – and service with a smile – that Horwitz thinks have been simple ingredients to Field to Fork's success. '[If you] focus on providing fresh, delicious food at a reasonable price and the rest will probably fall into place,' he says. 'At the end of the day, customers want to be treated with respect and honesty and maybe share a memorable meal with their loved ones, and that's the message we try to instil in our retail teams.' Horwitz has been working at Field to Fork since its first shop opened in Bondi in 2014. He started out as a cleaner, then began serving customers, later undertook a butchery apprenticeship through TAFE and now serves as Operations Director alongside his brother, Sam. Having filled just about every role there is, Horwitz has seen first-hand the challenges a small business faces – even one as successful as Field to Fork. Top of the list is staffing.
TimesLIVE
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- TimesLIVE
Death loves a heartache
Not only did Brooks then have to deal with a court case about that matter, she discovered that their family medical insurance had been cancelled the moment Tony had died, but she had not been informed. 'Who kicks widows and orphans off? And I'd paid for it; the rapacious amount that you have to pay. We had been completely exposed to the craziness of the American potentially bankrupting health system without being informed of that. So much of what happened was just wrong, and I'm not alone here. It's not 'woe is me.' This is a system that is just so far off the track in lacking empathy for people.' It's perhaps not surprising that it took her another three years and a decision to hunker down to write, alone in a shack on remote, sparsely populated Flinders Island, off Tasmania, to deal with 'that howl had become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free,' she writes. As she now explains: 'It took me a long time to realise that because I was too busy pretending that I was OK when I wasn't OK.' It took her a year to 'crawl back' to her desk to complete her acclaimed 2022 novel Horse, then she put on a brave front throughout her book tour for it. 'Twenty minutes of amusing patter about the woes of taking up horseback riding in your 50s — I mean it was all a big performance and I was exhausted, honestly, and that's when I realised something had to change.' Her narrative alternates between America in 2019, where she relives the weeks following Horwitz's death, and Flinders Island in 2023, where she could be alone with her memories, particularly of her husband. 'I could just think about him, undistracted by any of the normal or even pleasant disruptions of my ordinary life. He was a big personality. He was very funny, but he was also a man of immense moral purpose. Dedicated to trying to understand what made people think the way they thought and do the things they did. Totally open-hearted, very generous and funny. Funny hilarious — that's what I miss the most.' Brooks and Horwitz were not just partners in marriage but also partners in their work. During their years as foreign correspondents they had reported together and often had joint bylines, recounts Brooks. 'Then we both turned to a different kind of book writing [but] we were still each other's first and last editors. We talked about our work constantly.' Horwitz, an esteemed historian as well as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was on tour promoting his 10th book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide when he died. 'He would have loved to have known the outpouring of appreciation for him from noted American historians. I don't think he knew how much he was loved and admired for his take on American history.' Having won his Pulitzer for his reporting on the income inequality that was developing in America during the 80s and 90s and the reasons for it, Horwitz was a very early examiner of the American political divide. 'His 1996 book Confederates in the Attic looked at how all the unfinished issues of the civil war were still in play, and they really doubled up into the active politics of America in the decade that followed that book. And when I watched that mob invading the capital on January 6,' says Brooks, 'I thought, Tony probably knows about a quarter of those guys. He specialised in those neo-confederate groups, their mentality and the question of why the country is so divided.' Before she met Horwitz, who needed to live in America, Brooks says her life had been directing her to Flinders Island, so she chose to stay there in solitude as a way of glimpsing what might have been. 'His whole life's work was understanding that crazy country and he needed to be there to do it. And I could do what I do really anywhere, so that was the one marital battle that I had to surrender.' Already at work on a new novel, Brooks says it was only after reliving the loss of her husband that she realised the recommended clinical treatment for PTSD and complicated grief is exactly what she did. 'You have to keep reliving it and trying to remember more detail every time. I learnt that. And gradually on Flinders, I was able to set aside all this stuff I'd been carrying. The biggest thing that happened there was the realisation that I had to stop being angry about not having the life that I'd expected to have and be grateful for the one I do have. 'You cannot control what happens,' she adds, 'you can only control how you respond to it.'
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Speech rights of lawyers in Nashville federal court could change amid gag order fight
A rule in Middle Tennessee's federal court district at the center of an ongoing lawsuit that allows judges to place gag orders on attorneys could see changes soon, but the proposed changes may not allow for more free speech. After prominent Nashville attorney Daniel Horwitz filed a lawsuit against a U.S. District Court judge over a 2022 gag order barring him from speaking on social media against Brentwood-based private prison company CoreCivic, the case was dismissed in January for a lack of standing. Now, amid an appeal, the court has proposed a change to the administrative rule that allows for the gag orders in the courts, expanding the circumstances in which a judge can restrict a lawyer's speech. Lawyers with the nonprofit public interest law firm Institute for Justice argue the changes will only exacerbate the First Amendment issues at the center of the case. 'We think the rule is still bad,' said Jared McClain, attorney at the Institute for Justice and counsel for Horwitz's case. 'And we think that this rule is still burdening Horwitz and every other attorneys' First Amendment rights in the Middle District of Tennessee.' Horwitz, a First Amendment lawyer in Nashville, alongside the Institute for Justice, filed the lawsuit in October after U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffery Frensley issued the gag order on Horwitz in July 2022, ordering him to delete tweets about a legal case against CoreCivic. Gag orders issued by judges usually bar an individual — whether an attorney, witness or litigant — from making public comments on an ongoing case, usually with the aim to preserve neutrality in the proceedings. Rules explicitly allowing gag orders to be placed on attorneys exist in the Middle and Eastern Districts of Tennessee, but not West. Pursuant to the gag order, Horwitz was required to delete tweets about, and stop publicly discussing, lawsuits he previously brought against CoreCivic. At the time the gag order was placed, Horwitz served as the attorney for the family of Terry Childress, an inmate who died in February 2021 after his cellmate assaulted him in CoreCivic's Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Hartsville. The case was later settled. More: 'They don't care': After another unexplained death at Trousdale Turner prison, family fights for justice 'The only purpose of gagging me here, and making me delete statements, is raw censorship," Horwitz said in an interview in response to the original gag order. After Horwitz's lawsuit was dismissed, his lawyers filed an appeal. Then, on April 10, the court proposed a change to the rule. The local court district, by a majority of its judges, can adopt the new rule. If passed, it would would affect all lawyers in Middle Tennessee practicing in federal court. Ryan Gustin, senior director of public affairs at CoreCivic, said in a statement that the company respects the process in which such local rules are "reviewed and modified." "Our legal department will certainly review any changes to these rules, should they become modified and adopted," he said. The proposed rule lists three categories of speech that, while not new, will now be considered to 'ordinarily' have a prejudicial effect on the proceedings, instead of the previous version of the rules, which stated that these were 'potentially' prejudicial speech categories. In the newly proposed rules, the court does not define what 'ordinarily' means. The categories include, but are not limited to, statements made on: The 'character, credibility, or criminal record of a party, witness, or prospective witness' The performance or results of any 'examinations or tests' or the 'refusal or failure of a party to submit' such things Information that the lawyer 'knows or reasonably should know' is likely to be inadmissible as evidence and could create a 'substantial risk of prejudicing an impartial trial.' In a notable nod to the lawsuit, the proposed rule change also begins with the sentence, 'Lawyers should try matters in court, not in the media' — nearly identical to the sentence read to Horwitz by Frensley, when the gag order was placed upon Horwitz and spurring this entire saga. 'The first sentence of the rule is now essentially lifted from (Horwitz's) gag order,' McClain said. 'That feels like a little bit of a thumb in the eye.' The proposed changes also expand the situations in which a judge can place restrictions on the speech of lawyers and others. Previously, such an order was considered a 'special order in widely publicized and sensational cases.' The proposed new rule gets rid of any descriptive language, simply stating that a judge may place such an order on any case 'at the motion of either party or its own.' 'The government is full-throatedly defending the merits of the rule that we challenge, as they are simultaneously proposing amendments to get rid of those things,' McClain said. The proposed rule is currently in an open-comment period until May 1. After comments are reviewed the rule could go into effect on May 15: the night before a notable filing deadline for Horwitz's case. Lawyers should have equal First Amendment rights, McClain said, and silence enforced on lawyers only acts to quiet the impact of important cases. But according to McClain, the court, along with CoreCivic, has argued that Horwitz is not necessarily gagged—just constrained to vague limitations. 'Their argument is that he's not currently gagged; that he's always free to talk,' McClain said. 'And then if he talks, anything that he says could be deemed 'offensive,' and then CoreCivic can institute an action against him.' McClain said this is a classic burden on Horwitz's free speech, and has more far reaching effects than simply a lawyer's well-curated social media feed. 'Horwitz is a licensed attorney, and if he's threatened with contempt, and one of the punishments in that enforcement action is that he could have his client's case dismissed,' he said. 'So Daniel can't just play it fast and loose with these rules. He needs to err on the side of caution, which means airing on the side of silence.' In Horwitz' case, being silenced on the topic of CoreCivic means being silent about a large quantity of his cases—some of which may have helped spur a federal investigation. Horwitz' gag order lawsuit was filed shortly after the U.S. Department of Justice announced in late August that it was launching a civil investigation into the conditions at CoreCivic's Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, due to allegations of extensive understaffing, violence, contraband and sexual misconduct, according to officials. And since that initial gag order, Horwitz has filed six more lawsuits against CoreCivic while repeatedly asking the court to allow him to speak about his cases. According to the Institute for Justice, in some cases, motions sat for many months without the court deciding Horwitz's First Amendment arguments. All of the CoreCivic cases were either settled or transferred to other districts before motions on Horwitz's speech could be heard. 'If I were a lawyer in this district, I would not feel comfortable saying much that implicates the three remaining categories of (speech), because I don't know what 'ordinarily' means,' McClain said. 'I've seen how the court applies the rule in the past: It doesn't apply consistently with strict scrutiny or with the least restrictive means…and I would be really nervous, especially if I'm litigating against someone like CoreCivic, who has used this rule as a cudgel.' The USA TODAY Network - Tennessee's coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. Have a story to tell? Reach Angele Latham by email at alatham@ by phone at 931-623-9485, or follow her on Twitter at @angele_latham This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville federal court: Proposal could impact lawyer speech rights
