Tag Archives: United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit

Religious Liberty Is Part Of Our Constitution

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The following is a June 29th press release from Liberty Council:

ASHEVILLE, NC – The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals handed North Carolina magistrates a huge victory by ruling that the plaintiffs who opposed their religious liberty opt out of same-sex “marriage” lacked standing to challenge the law.

Liberty Counsel represented, among others, Magistrate Brenda Bumgarner, who has an excellent record during her 10 years of service as a magistrate, and who sought a religious opt out of performing “marriages” for same-sex couples. Liberty Counsel filed an amicus brief that argued that SB 2 is not only constitutionally permissible but actually required for magistrates and judges. SB 2 states: “Every magistrate has the right to recuse from performing all lawful marriages under this Chapter based upon any sincerely held religious objection.”

In 2015, Liberty Counsel filed suit on behalf of magistrates seeking accommodation for their religious convictions regarding same-sex “marriage.” The state house and senate passed SB 2 granting an accommodation, and both houses later overrode the governor’s veto. Liberty Counsel dismissed its suit, but then the new law was challenged by those who want to force magistrates to violate their religious convictions and consciences.

“We celebrate this victory for North Carolina magistrates who have the constitutional right to follow their conscience and rights to free exercise without fear of punishment,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. “The LGBT agenda seeks to steamroll over the conscience of everyone, including those who serve in the court system who believes in natural marriage. We were proud to defend Magistrate Brenda Bumgarner and others in this case as it sets a precedent and has an effect on all judges and their sincerely held religious beliefs,” said Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.

If homosexuals want to get married, that is not my concern. If gay marriage is legal, then let them get married. However, I don’t believe anyone who holds a Biblical view on homosexuality should be forced to condone or participate in that marriage in any way. I would also like to note that with all the efforts to force Christians to participate in gay marriages–bake cakes, take pictures, provide pastors, settings, or churches, etc., the same effort has not been made to include the Islamic community in this acceptance of homosexuality, Considering the fact that being a homosexual can result in death in an Islamic country, and being a homosexual in America is barely noteworthy, I find that interesting.

Making Americans Safer

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The Daily Caller posted an article today stating that the Supreme Court will review the lower court decisions blocking President Trump’s temporary travel ban on people from terrorist countries. Until the Supreme Court hears the case, the travel ban will be in effect.

The article explains exactly what the Supreme Court’s decision to take the case means:

“We grant the government’s applications to stay the injunctions, to the extent the injunctions prevent enforcement of 2(c) with respect to foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”

Two classes of foreign national from the six countries named in the order may still enter the United States; aliens with relatives in America, or individuals with a meaningful connection to corporate entities and educational institutions in the United States will not be affected by the order.

“To prevent the government from pursuing that objective by enforcing 2(c) against foreign nationals unconnected to the United States would appreciably injure its interests, without alleviating obvious hardship to anyone else,” the Court wrote.

The Court also will allow the order’s ban on refugee entry to take effect, with the same exceptions it provided for the travel ban.

As such, most of the president’s order will take effect within the next few days.

Hopefully, this will limit the ability of terrorists to carry out the same type of attacks we have seen in England and Europe recently.

Let’s Keep Voting Until We Get It Right

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There have been some strange lower court decisions regarding North Carolina in recent years. A voter ID law, passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor was overturned, while similar laws in other states were allowed to stand. Then the states voting districts were challenged, after they had been redrawn at the request of the courts. It makes your head spin. Today the Supreme Court of the United States weighed in on the redistricting matter.

The Carolina Journal reports today:

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a lower court’s ruling striking down 28 North Carolina legislative districts as cases of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. But the high court has rejected the idea of holding special legislative elections this year.

The Supreme Court had issued a stay on Jan. 10 blocking a three-judge panel’s order of a special election. Today’s unsigned Supreme Court order chides the trial-court panel for ordering a special 2017 legislative election without making a convincing argument why that remedy is needed.

Justices say their trial-court colleagues should have used an “equitable weighing process” to determine the proper remedy for dealing with the racially gerrymandered election maps. “Rather than undertaking such an analysis in this case, the District Court addressed the balance of equities in only the most cursory fashion,” the Supreme Court order states. “As noted above, the court simply announced that ‘[w]hile special elections have costs,’ those unspecified costs ‘pale in comparison’ to the prospect that citizens will be ‘represented by legislators elected pursuant to a racial gerrymander.’

“That minimal reasoning would appear to justify a special election in every racial-gerrymandering case — a result clearly at odds with our demand for careful case-specific analysis,” the order continues. “For that reason, we cannot have confidence that the court adequately grappled with the interests on both sides of the remedial question before us.”

“And because the District Court’s discretion ‘was barely exercised here,’ its order provides no meaningful basis for even deferential review,” according to the Supreme Court.

North Carolina will be forced to redraw the districts until everyone is happy with them, but I am thankful that we don’t have to have another election this year. That would have been very expensive for the state and totally unnecessary.

We need national voter ID. I realize that individual states are in charge of their elections, as it should be, but there needs to be a requirement that voters identify themselves as eligible voters before they vote. Almost all free countries have some form of voter identification, and America needs to join them.

 

Quietly Taking Away The Rights Of American Citizens

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There was much discussion about the Second Amendment during the presidency of Barack Obama. President Obama was the most successful gun salesman of all time. That became obvious at local gun shows when sales dropped precipitously after November. However, President Obama left a legacy in the courts that may not protect the rights of gun owners.

A website called cheaperthandirt posted a story on January 29th about a decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The article reports:

The case, United States v. Robinson, has been a roller coaster of conflicting opinions ever since Mr. Robinson first moved to have the evidence in the case against him suppressed for violation of his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. The issue presented by the case is whether police officers, having reason to believe a person is in possession of a firearm, can legally treat the individual as dangerous, even if they have no reason to believe the possession is illegal and even if the person’s behavior is not overtly threatening.

On March 24, 2014, an anonymous tipster called the Ranson, W. Va. police department claiming to have seen an African-American male in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven load a handgun, conceal it in his pocket, and leave the lot as a passenger in bluish-green Toyota Camry driven by a white female.

Within minutes, a police officer responded to the location and observed a vehicle less than a mile away from the 7-Eleven matching the description provided by the caller. The officer observed that the occupants of the car were not wearing seatbelts, which allowed him to execute a lawful traffic stop under West Virginia law. Mindful of the anonymous tip, the officer ordered Robinson, who was in the passenger seat, out of the car.

Meanwhile, back-up had arrived. The second officer approached the car, opened the passenger side door, and asked Robinson if he had any weapons. He would later testify that Robinson’s only reply was to give him a “weird look.” The officers then had Robinson place his hands on top of the car and frisked him for weapons, finding a firearm in his pants pocket.

Both officers testified that Robinson was cooperative throughout the encounter and that they never observed any gestures indicating he intended to use any weapons against them.

After the frisk, one of the officers realized that he recognized Robinson from prior criminal proceedings. Confirming that Robinson had a felony record, the officer arrested him for felon in possession of a firearm. The case was then tried in federal court.

Under Supreme Court precedent from 1968 (Terry v. Ohio), police officers who believe a suspect they have detained for investigation but have not arrested can conduct a limited “pat down” of the suspect’s outer clothing when they have reasonable suspicion that the suspect is “armed and dangerous.” This was the basis for the search the officers used to find the incriminating firearm in Robinson’s pocket.

But Robinson claimed that the officers had no reason to believe that he posed any danger to them and therefore that they had no legal authority to frisk him. He noted that people may lawfully carry firearms in West Virginia, that the police had no information at the time of the frisk that his carrying was unlawful, and that he did not act aggressively or uncooperatively toward the officers.

The article goes on to explain that when the case was originally heard by a magistrate judge, the judge agreed with Mr. Robinson and asked that the evidence of the firearm be disallowed. The district court judge rejected the recommendation. Mr. Robinson then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The article reports the majority opinion from the three-judge panel:

Judge Pamela Harris’s majority opinion stated:

[I]n states like West Virginia, which broadly allow public possession of firearms, reasonable suspicion that a person is armed does not by itself give rise to reasonable suspicion that the person is dangerous for Terry purposes. Where the state legislature has decided that its citizens may be entrusted to carry firearms on public streets, we may not make the contrary assumption that those firearms inherently pose a danger justifying their seizure by law enforcement officers without consent. … Nor will we adopt a rule that would effectively eliminate Fourth Amendment protections for lawfully armed persons … authorizing a personally intrusive frisk whenever a citizen stopped by the police is exercising the constitutional right to bear arms. [Quotation marks and citations omitted].

President Obama’s Justice Department then asked the entire Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the decision. The decision was then reversed.

The article further explains:

The majority insisted that the “armed and dangerous” language in Terry really meant “armed and therefore dangerous” (emphasis in original). In other words, “the risk of danger is created simply because the person, who was forcibly stopped, is armed.”

The court also asserted the same “logic” applies, even if possession of the weapon is legal. “The presumptive lawfulness of an individual’s gun possession in a particular State does next to nothing to negate the reasonable concern an officer has for his own safety when forcing an encounter with an individual who is armed with a gun and whose propensities are unknown,” the majority opinion concludes.

Thus, because Robinson was lawfully stopped, and the police officers had reasonable suspicion to believe he was armed, “the officers were, as a matter of law, justified in frisking him and, in doing so, did not violate Robinson’s Fourth Amendment right.”

Incredibly, though the court resolved the case on the broadest constitutional proposition possible, the majority opinion then went on to describe all the circumstances known to the officers that would have allowed them to make an individual “dangerousness” determination under the facts of the case. Thus, the majority essentially admitted that the patently anti-gun holding of the case–that all persons armed with a gun are a per se lethal threat to police officers–wasn’t even necessary to its resolution.

If the majority opinion were not bad enough, Judge James A. Wynn wrote an incendiary concurrence berating the majority for focusing broadly on “weapons” rather than on firearms specifically. Wynn’s opinion argued that the majority’s reasoning also necessitated recognition of two other “key issues.” The first, Wynn wrote, is that “individuals who carry firearms—lawfully or unlawfully—pose a categorical risk of danger to others and police officers, in particular.” The second is that “individuals who choose to carry firearms [therefore] forego certain constitutional protections afforded to individuals who elect not to carry firearms.”

Judge Wynn went on to explain how he believes the law of the Fourth Circuit—which includes Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia—is now that lawful gun owners are second class citizens.

“[T]he majority decision today necessarily leads to the conclusion that individuals who elect to carry firearms forego other constitutional rights,” Wynn wrote, “like the Fourth Amendment right to have law enforcement officers ‘knock-and-announce’ before forcibly entering homes.” He continued, “Likewise, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that individuals who choose to carry firearms necessarily face greater restriction on their concurrent exercise of other constitutional rights, like those protected by the First Amendment.”

Mr. Robinson’s Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure was violated. I understand the feeling the police may have had that they wanted to prevent a crime, but the frisking of a passenger in a car that was stopped because people were not wearing seat belts is over the top. A man carrying a gun in West Virginia is not all that unusual. I hope Mr. Robinson takes his case to the Supreme Court. A person with a gun does not automatically need to give up his Fourth Amendment rights. Admittedly, the case is muddied by the fact that Mr. Robinson should not have had the gun, but that is a separate issue. The police had no reason to frisk a passenger in a car just because the passengers were not wearing seat belts.

 

 

Voter Identification

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I have listened to statements that voter identification laws are racist, that conservatives want to suppress the vote, and that there is no voter fraud in America. None of that is true. However, there are people who genuinely believe that the above is true, and that is a problem. Voter registration groups have not always been honest. There are numerous videos on YouTube by Project Veritas and others showing how easy it is to commit voter fraud. Recently I heard a man from an organization that is working to stop voter fraud talk about bus loads of people brought into North Carolina from other states to register to vote as if they were residents. During the voting, people claiming to be those people show up at the polls and vote. Remember, a fraudulent vote cast in any election means that a legal vote may not count. It is time to be on the alert for voter fraud and to prosecute it to the full extent of the law.

Now about the voter identification thing that is going on in North Carolina. In the primary election this year, a picture identification was required to vote in North Carolina. Voter turnout was actually higher than it had been in the last two primary elections. Voter identification does not in any way suppress the vote. I would also like to point out that in today’s world, a photo id is not something unusual. Admittedly, not everyone drives, but most people at some point in their lives have to cash a check, enter a federal building, or purchase certain drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. I have a basic prescription that the drug store asks for photo identification every time I fill. When I buy some allergy medications, I have to show photo identification. Voter identification is not a burdensome requirement–it is a requirement that ensures that every legal vote counts.

So where are we with the North Carolina law? The Daily Haymaker updated the story today.

The article reported:

Governor Pat McCrory has formally requested U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to stay a ruling by the Fourth Circuit and reinstate North Carolina’s Voter ID law.

“Today we have asked Chief Justice John Roberts to stay the Fourth Circuit’s ruling and reinstate North Carolina’s Voter ID law,” said Governor McCrory. “This common sense law was upheld by the U.S. District Court. Our Voter ID law has been cited as a model and other states are using similar laws without challenges.

“Allowing the Fourth Circuit’s ruling to stand creates confusion among voters and poll workers and it disregards our successful rollout of Voter ID in the 2016 primary elections. The Fourth Circuit’s ruling is just plain wrong and we cannot allow it to stand. We are confident that the Supreme Court will uphold our state’s law and reverse the Fourth Circuit.”
 
A formal petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case will follow this request for a stay.

The article further reports:

This IS actually a great move on McCrory’s part.  IF Roberts grants a stay, voter ID can stay alive for the November voting.  An appeal of the 4th circuit’s ruling will be filed by the state with the high court. It likely won’t be heard until 2017.  (However, we may have governor Cooper and attorney general Stein to deal with by then.)  

If this all works the way McCrory hopes, it will mean a lot less chaos and confusion on Election Day –two “crops” the Alinskyites and BluePrinters have been sowing in the state for four years now.  

Stay tuned. Just a note–I am for the suppression of all illegal votes–that’s why I support voter identification laws.

Moving Responsibility As Far As Possible From The Person Who Is Actually Responsible

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Our culture has some very strange ideas about who is responsible for what. Somehow we have forgotten that as people we make decisions all of the time and that those decisions have consequences. Sometimes those decisions have horrible consequences, but when all is said and done, the consequences are the result of an individual’s decisions. A recent lawsuit against Freedom Group, the owners of both Bushmaster and Remington Arms, relating to the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut illustrates the fact that we no longer allow individuals to be held accountable for their actions.

Hot Air posted an article about the lawsuit today.

The article reports:

The mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School had a huge impact on the national discourse and, to some extent, the electoral battlefield, but there’s another fight dragging on as a result of it. Some of the families who lost loved ones during the attack by a deranged madman filed a lawsuit as a result. They weren’t going after the shooter’s estate or even that of his mother, but the parent company of the manufacturer who produced one of the guns used in the attack. Freedom Group, the owners of both Bushmaster and Remington Arms (among others) was their target, claiming that they knowingly sold a dangerous product which wound up being used against the children and teachers at the school. This week the company is pushing back, seeking the dismissal of the case on grounds that it is essentially baseless and conflicts with current law.

I love the way the article explains exactly how the current law is written:

The law in question here is the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which we’ve covered a number of times in the past. It’s a piece of legislation which really never should have needed to be passed, but Congress was forced into a rare bit of productive action when relentless nuisance suits by anti-gun rights groups threatened to bankrupt smaller members of the industry. It essentially says that the manufacturer or retailer can’t be held liable for the production, distribution and sale of safely designed, properly functioning, wholly legal products simply because they are put to an illegal use by criminals or the insane. It’s no different than saying you can’t sue the manufacturer of a properly designed and operational toaster just because your angry girlfriend throws it in the bathtub with you. (The italics are mine.)

You can argue that the guns were not properly secured and got into the hands of a dangerous person, but that is not the fault of the manufacturing company. Had there been a person in the school with a gun manufactured by the same company, there would have been fewer lives lost–does that mean that the product is no longer dangerous, but a safety item?

The article concludes:

It’s easy to understand the sorrow and anger felt by the Sandy Hook families, just as it’s obvious how and why anti-Second Amendment groups would seek to use them as pawns to further their cause. None of that changes the facts on the ground, however. This was an ill considered venture to begin with and we’re in a lot of trouble as a nation if the courts manage to bend reality enough to allow them to prevail.

 

The Legislature Got It Right–The Court Got It Wrong

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Two of the key provisions in North Carolina’s new voting law have been overturned by a a 2-1 ruling of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Yahoo News posted an article yesterday explaining the details.

The two parts of the law that were overturned were same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. The court claimed that to end these practices would disenfranchise some voters. I beg to differ. The reason the legislature ended same-day registration was that it did not provide ample time to check the address information given by the voter. A friend of mine, a North Carolina resident, checked the voter registration in her town and found that there were five people registered at her address that did not live there. I don’t know whether those five people had voted in recent elections or not, but if they did, they cancelled the vote of legal voters–disenfranchising legal voters. Stopping out-of-precinct voting is a good idea because ballots are different in different precincts–precinct elections include local candidates that vary by precinct. If a person votes in the wrong precinct, he may not get to vote for the officials in his precinct–thus he is disenfranchising himself!

The article reports:

State House Speaker Thom Tillis, the Republican challenging incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, said he and state Senate leader Phil Berger, also a Republican, would appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The article at Yahoo attempts to portray the passage of this law as a political issue related to the Republicans wanting to take the Senate. The question we need to ask is, “Why does ensuring the integrity of our elections give a political advantage to Republicans?”

The new North Carolina voting law is a step toward more honest elections. Why are there politicians who are fighting this?