Alito defended domestic wiretaps, documents say
Documents also say he called for overturning Roe v. Wade
Friday, December 23, 2005
Posted: 3:09 p.m. EST (20:09 GMT)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito defended the right of government officials to order domestic wiretaps when he worked for the Reagan Justice Department, documents released Friday show ...
The release of the memo by the National Archives comes when President Bush is under fire for secretly ordering domestic spying of suspected terrorists without a warrant. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, has promised to question Alito about the administration's program ...
The memo dealt with whether government officials should have blanket protection from lawsuits when authorizing wiretaps. "I do not question that the attorney general should have this immunity," Alito wrote ...
That case ultimately led to a 1985 ruling by the Supreme Court that the attorney general and other high level executive officials could be sued for violating people's rights, in the name of national security, with such actions as domestic wiretaps ...
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/23/alito.ap/ Shoot To Kill
Alito's blank check for cops.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Friday, Dec. 2, 2005, at 6:06 PM ET
Late on an October night in 1974, Memphis, Tenn., police officer Elton Hymon responded to a call about a break in. At the scene, a neighbor said she'd heard glass shattering and pointed to the house next door. Hymon went behind it. He heard a door slam. Someone ran into the yard and stopped at a 6-foot-high chain-link fence at the yard's edge. Hymon shined his flashlight at the person and saw a teenager who he could tell was unarmed. Hymon called, "Police, halt." The teen started climbing the fence. Hymon shot him in the back of the head, fatally. Edward Garner was a 15-year-old black eighth grader. He was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed about 110 pounds. A purse and $10 were found on his body.
After Edward Garner's death, his father sued, arguing that his son's civil rights had been violated. The 6th Circuit, one of the federal courts of appeal, agreed, ruling that Garner's shooting violated the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable seizures. In the process, the court struck down a Tennessee statute based on an 18th-century common-law "fleeing felon" rule, which allowed police to use deadly force against a felony suspect who was trying to elude arrest. In the Garner case, the 6th Circuit said that before shooting a suspect, a police offer must have probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a danger.
In 1984, the Memphis Police Department and the state of Tennessee appealed the 6th Circuit's decision to the Supreme Court. Samuel Alito, then a lawyer in the Solicitor General's office, was assigned to help decide whether the Reagan administration should take sides. "I believe that the decision below is wrong," Alito wrote in a cover note, referring to the 6th Circuit's ruling. In a 15-page memo, he argued in favor of letting states give police the power to shoot to kill at their discretion whenever a suspect flees, whether or not he poses a threat. Alito's memo is written with his usual dispassion. But he's forceful in his belief that the Constitution has no role to play in a cop's decision about whether to shoot an unarmed suspect. Alito's memo is also striking for what it doesn't say. In Memphis and across the country, cops were shooting black suspects at a far higher rate than white ones. (The evidence, beginning with studies dating from the 1960s, is collected in a 2004 article in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science by Northwestern political science professor Wesley G. Skogan and University of Chicago law professor Tracey L. Meares.) Laws like Tennessee's made it easier for the police to shoot unarmed black people, as Edward Garner's father argued in his suit. Alito, however, ignored the racial undertones of the case ...
By a vote of 6 to 3, the court ruled in favor of Edward Garner's father. "It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape," Justice Byron White wrote for the majority. Alito had argued that the court shouldn't set a constitutional standard for police shootings of fleeing suspects, questioning whether the shooting of Garner counted as a "seizure" as defined by the Fourth Amendment. White dismissed both ideas. "Whenever an officer restrains the freedom of a person to walk away, he has seized that person," White wrote. "There can be no question that apprehension by the use of deadly force is a seizure subject to the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment." In fact, none of the justices adopted Alito's position ...
http://www.slate.com/id/2131373/?nav=tap3 Alito ad flap centers on strip search of woman, daughter
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — When police in a small Pennsylvania coal town went to the home of a suspected methamphetamine dealer, they sent for a female meter maid to search the suspect's wife and 10-year-old daughter ...
As a 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge, Alito found it acceptable to search family members even if they were not specifically named in the warrant. But his view came in a dissent to the 2-1 majority opinion written by colleague Michael Chertoff — then a judge, now the nation's Homeland Security secretary — who said that officers went beyond the terms of the search warrant and were liable for potential damages ...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-11-24-alito-search_x.htmAlito's remark on strip search of girl, 10, prompts questions
By Michael Kranish and Alan Wirzbicki, Globe Staff, Globe Correspondent
November 25, 2005
... ''Why do you keep bringing up the fact that this case involves the strip search of a 10-year-old child?" Alito said, according to Solomon, lawyer for the girl ...
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/11/25/alitos_remark_on_strip_search_of_girl_10_prompts_questions/?page=full Alito's telling dissent in machine gun case
He sought to limit reach of Congress
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005
For John Roberts, it was a "hapless toad'' in the path of a California housing development that represented the limits of the federal government's power to regulate activities within a state. For Samuel Alito Jr., it was a machine gun.
In a lone dissenting opinion as a federal appeals court judge in 1996, Alito argued that the federal ban on possessing machine guns was unconstitutional ...
The machine gun case was decided by the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned as unconstitutional a federal law banning gun possession near schools. The Supreme Court said congressional power over interstate commerce does not extend to guns that might have been obtained within the state and were not being used for any commercial purpose -- the first ruling to overturn a law on interstate commerce grounds since the 1930s ...
Critics of Alito's 1996 opinion point out that the machine-gun law has been upheld by every federal court that has considered it. Rybar, the Pennsylvania gun dealer, appealed his case to the Supreme Court, which denied review ...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/02/MNG0DFHNR71.DTL An unsettling Alito dissent in a sexual harassment case
... Today we want to tell you about a sexual harassment case called Pirolli v. World Flavors. We know about this case only because it was turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee in response to a request for all of Judge Alito’s unpublished opinions. This case was brought by a mentally disabled man (with an IQ of 75) named Kenneth Pirolli, who was employed to stack boxes, pick up trash, and scrub floors. He filed a sexual harassment case against his employer, alleging that co-workers attempted to forcibly sodomize him, beat him, stuffed him into garbage bags, posed vulgar and sexual questions and propositions to him, and abused him in other appalling ways. He claimed that he reported the incidents to his supervisor but the conduct continued.
The majority of the Third Circuit panel that heard the case ruled that it could go forward under established caselaw on sexual harassment. The court concluded that a reasonable jury, viewing the entire course of conduct Pirolli alleged, could view the conduct “as having occurred because of
sex and as severe and pervasive enough to create an abusive work environment.” On that basis, the court allowed the case to proceed, reversing the lower court’s grant of summary judgment for the employer. The court noted that although Pirolli’s lawyer had not adequately briefed the relevant issues, “manifest injustice” would result if the court did not hear the case.
Judge Alito, however, dissented. He would have thrown out the case. In his dissent, he explained that Pirolli‘s brief failed to point to specific parts of the record describing the conduct on which his claim was based. By contrast, his colleagues on the court had no problem determining what Pirolli was alleging ...
http://www.nominationwatch.org/2005/12/we_read_the_cas_1.html Alito Sees No Wrong in All-White Juries
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet
Posted November 4, 2005
... Riley was tried, convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. But Riley did his homework. He produced ironclad statistical data that showed that prosecutors deliberately removed black jurors in his trial as well as in three other first-degree murder trials within a year of his trial.
Prosecutors didn't even bother to challenge Riley's contention that they dumped the blacks, and that they did the same in other capitol cases that involved both black and white defendants. Prosecutors ignored the appellate court's request to submit evidence to counter Riley's claim of intentional racial bias. The judges that heard Riley's appeal had a near smoking gun admission to justify setting aside his conviction, or so it seemed.
Enter Alito. He ignored Riley's meticulously gathered data that showed a pattern and practice of racial bias by prosecutors, and ignored the 1986 Batson ruling that forbade the use of peremptory challenges exclusively to bump blacks from a jury, and that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.
Writing for a two-judge majority, Alito upheld Riley's conviction. He even stole a page from the prosecutor's playbook, and didn't bother to cite any stats, evidence, expert analysis or case law to justify the decision. In 2001, the full 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals held that Riley had marshaled overwhelming factual evidence to prove prosecutor bias, and reversed Alito's decision ...
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/27842/ Alito CAPs His Bid
Eyal Press
Campus newspapers aren't generally known for making waves inside the Beltway. Recently, however, the Daily Princetonian published a story that merits attention from senators gearing up for the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito, George W. Bush's nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. As Chanakya Sethi reported in a November 18 article for the paper, in 1985 Princeton graduate and conservative Republican Alito sought to impress his colleagues in the Reagan Administration, where he was applying to become deputy assistant attorney general, by touting his membership in an organization called Concerned Alumni of Princeton.
Launched in 1972, the year Alito graduated, CAP had an innocuous-sounding name that disguised a less benign agenda, which included preventing women and minorities from entering an institution that had long been a bastion of white male privilege. In a 1973 article in Prospect, a magazine CAP published, Shelby Cullom Davis, one of its founders, harked back to the days when a gathering of Princeton alumni consisted of "a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds." Lamented Cullom Davis: "I cannot envisage a similar happening in the future with an undergraduate student population of approximately 40% women and minorities, such as the Administration has proposed." Another article published that same year bemoaned the fact that "the makeup of the Princeton student body has changed drastically for the worse" in recent years--Princeton had begun admitting women in 1969--and wondered aloud what might happen if the university adopted a "sex-blind" policy "removing limits on the number of women." In an unsuccessful effort to forestall this frightening development, the executive committee of CAP published a statement in December 1973 that affirmed unequivocally, "Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposes adoption of a sex-blind admission policy."
By the time Alito was readying his 1985 job application with the Reagan Administration, the admission of women and minorities was well established at Nassau Hall, but this did not stop CAP from lamenting the consequences. "People nowadays just don't seem to know their place," fretted a 1983 Prospect essay titled "In Defense of Elitism." "Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children." By this point the editor of Prospect was Dinesh D'Souza, who brought to its pages a new level of coarseness aimed at those who did not know their place. "Here at Princeton homosexuals are on the rampage," complained a 1984 news item in Prospect--this after a gay student group had dared to protest being denied permission to hold a dance at a campus club. Another article poked fun at Sally Frank, a Princeton alumna who was suing the university for denying women access to all-male eating clubs. It noted that a Rhode Island woman who'd won a discrimination suit against a mining company had subsequently died in an on-the-job accident. "Sally Frank, take note," it quipped ...
Is the Princeton graduate slated to replace the first female Supreme Court Justice proud of his affiliation with an organization that attempted to prevent women and minorities from receiving the same education he did? If not, why did he flaunt his membership in it? What does this say about his character, and about the kind of place he would ultimately like America to be?
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051212/press Alito's rulings and dissents put him at odds with workers
A single mother finds she's now unable to take time off work in a medical emergency.
An African-American woman who was promoted twice in her first few years on the job loses out on her next promotion and isn't granted her day in court to prove her race discrimination case against her employer.
Newspaper reporters working over 40 hours a week are denied overtime pay for their extra hours.
These violations of workers' fundamental rights have one thing in common: Judge Samuel Alito's rulings would have made them possible ...
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/index.php?ntid=67480&ntpid=1 Alito remarks backed strong presidential powers
By Charlie Savage and Rick Klein, Globe Staff
November 5, 2005
WASHINGTON -- In 1989, Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. denounced the high court's decision that year upholding a Watergate-era law that allowed independent counsels to investigate wrongdoing in the White House, arguing that the decision amounted to a ''congressional pilfering" of presidential power ...
In the 1989 speech, Alito said the Supreme Court's decision on independent counsels was ''stunning" and praised Scalia's dissent. At the time, many legal analysts considered Scalia's view on presidential power as extreme, Golove said. But after independent counsel investigations stung the Clinton administration as well as Reagan's, Democrats and Republicans in Congress decided to let the law lapse in 1999.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/11/05/alito_remarks_backed_strong_presidential_powers/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+National+News In 1985 memo, Supreme Court nominee advocated Roe overturn
... In his memo, an excerpt of which you'll find below, Alito recommended that the U.S. Solicitor General file amicus briefs in connection with appeals of two Court of Appeals decisions that struck down Pennsylvania and Illinois laws regulating abortion. While noting that the U.S. Supreme Court, which had agreed to review the two appellate decisions, was unlikely to reverse Roe, Alito, an Assistant to the Solicitor General, surmised that the high court "may be signalling an inclination to cut back. What can be made of this opportunity to advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, of mitigating its effects?" In the amicus briefs, Alito recommended, "we should make clear that we disagree with Roe v. Wade and would welcome the opportunity to brief the issue of whether, and if so to what extent, that decision should be overruled" ...
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1130051alito1.html 
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