State Supreme Court

WASHINGTON -- In a major defeat for the campaign to gain a right for homosexual couples to marry, the Hawaii Supreme Court has reinstated a law that allows a marriage license only to a man and a woman.Hawaii was one of two states where gay rights advocates had been hoping to establish same-sex marriage as a right under the state constitution. That effort ended with the state highest court's decision, issued late Thursday.The issue of same-sex marriage remains open in Vermont, where the state Supreme Court held a hearing on a similar test case nearly 13 months ago. That court has set no deadline for a final ruling.

DENVER - A Texas judge allowed parents yesterday to begin retrieving more than 400 children taken by the state during a raid on a polygamist sect's compound in April. District Judge Barbara Walther issued the order after the state Supreme Court ruling last week that found Texas authorities had overreached when they moved the children into protective custody. On Friday, Walther refused to sign an agreement between the state and lawyers for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that would have provided for the children's release.

WASHINGTON - The legal consequence of Palm Beach County's use of the "butterfly" ballot in the presidential election - and the possibility that a fight over that ballot could lead to a new election - now rests with the Florida Supreme Court. In a brief order, a state appeals court sent on to the state's highest court the question of whether the only remedy for the confusion said to result from the butterfly ballot is to nullify all the votes in the county and hold a new election. The seven-member state Supreme Court asked lawyers involved in the case to file arguments by this afternoon on all issues - including whether the justices should take on the case now. A group of voters, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, contends that the design of the punch-card ballot in Palm Beach County misled people who intended to cast ballots for Al Gore into voting instead for Patrick J. Buchanan of the Reform Party.

ALBANY, N.Y. -- For Vincent Scala, the debate over the civil confinement of sexual predators pits his personal beliefs as "a card-carrying member of the ACLU" against his family ties. In June, Scala's cousin, Concetta Russo-Carriero, was stabbed to death as she walked to her car in the parking garage of a White Plains, N.Y., shopping mall. The homeless man arrested and charged with the crime was released in 2003 after spending nearly 24 years in prison for rape and being repeatedly denied parole.

THE FLORIDA RECOUNT has started -- again -- thanks to a decision yesterday by the Democratic state Supreme Court that said discarded ballots in 67 counties must now be examined. Meanwhile, the Republican Florida Legislature is poised to bypass the legal wrangling over vote-counting and name its own slate of presidential electors early next week. You can see where this is headed: a bitter, partisan power struggle between Florida's highest court and its Legislature over the laws of that state.

WASHINGTON -- Four hours before going on the air with a story about unclean meat, CBS-TV got permission yesterday from a Supreme Court justice to show film taken secretly inside a South Dakota packing plant.Justice Harry A. Blackmun set aside a state judge's order that would have barred the show "48 Hours" from including a two-minute videotape as part of a story titled "Bum Steer."The justice relied on the long-standing view of the court that judges should almost never stop the press from publishing a story and that any punishment for harm done by a story should be imposed afterward, not before.

WASHINGTON -- The still-spreading campaign to limit the terms of members of Congress met another defeat in court yesterday as the Arkansas Supreme Court nullified the idea, moving the issue onto a faster track toward the U.S. Supreme Court.The state Supreme Court, with only one justice dissenting, said the Arkansas constitutional amendment approved by the state's voters in November was a move to ban "a broad category of persons from seeking election to Congress."By making past service a disqualification, the state court said, the amendment adds a restriction that is not in the Constitution and could be put there only by a federal constitutional amendment.

WASHINGTON - The Gore campaign is well into planning a challenge to the outcome of the Florida presidential tally, even though all votes have not been counted and the courts have not issued final rulings on cases that will influence the outcome. Of course, there will be no challenge by Vice President Al Gore if he is declared the winner in Florida. So far, there has been no sign that George W. Bush is preparing for a challenge if Gore prevails. No challenge will be made until next week, at the earliest, because the Florida Supreme Court delayed everything yesterday by forbidding state election officials to announce a Florida winner for now. Under Florida law, a challenge can not be made until a winner has been declared.

If you were comatose and had been dependent on your family since suffering brain damage in childhood, would you trust them to make decisions about your medical treatment -- or a group of people you'd never met?Most of us, I think, would readily choose our families -- and, fortunately, our families' right to have their choices take precedence over the wishes of strangers was recently upheld by a state Supreme Court in another important right-to-die case.In September, Indiana's highest court affirmed the right of the Lawrance family to discontinue tube feeding for their daughter Sue Ann. The family's decision had been challenged by a religious advocacy group for the disabled, who saw the decision an attempt to willfully starve their daughter to death.

WASHINGTON - Raising the legal stakes in the Florida election fight, George W. Bush's campaign argued yesterday that it would be unconstitutional and violate federal law if a state court rules as his Democratic rival has asked. In what appeared to be a warning that Bush lawyers are poised to take the dispute to the U.S. Supreme Court, his campaign argued against any ruling that would uphold recounting of votes by hand and require those votes to be added to the final tally. "Allowing the manual recounts to proceed," Bush's lawyers told the Florida Supreme Court, "would violate the United States Constitution."

Alexandru Paleologu, 86, a leading Romanian intellectual, senator and diplomat, died Thursday in Bucharest after a long illness. He had been awarded a top prize for diplomatic excellence by President Traian Basescu the previous day. Mr. Paleologu served briefly as Romania's ambassador to France after the fall of communism in 1989 but resigned in a falling-out with President Ion Iliescu over his belief that Mr. Iliescu had not distanced himself sufficiently from...

SAN FRANCISCO - Gays and lesbians have a right to marry under the California Constitution, a state judge here ruled yesterday, striking down state laws that limit marriage to "a man and a woman." "No rational basis exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners," wrote San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer. "Same-sex marriage cannot be prohibited solely because California has always done so before." The ruling does not mean that gay couples in California can immediately wed. The decision will be stayed at least temporarily to allow an appeal, which opponents of gay marriage say they plan to file.

SAN FRANCISCO - The California Supreme Court ruled unanimously yesterday that San Francisco's mayor overstepped his authority by issuing same-sex marriage licenses. By a 5-2 vote, the court also declared the more than 4,000 marriages of gay and lesbian couples that had been sanctioned by the city "void from their inception and a legal nullity." Opponents of gay marriage celebrated the opinion, which sharply rebuked Mayor Gavin Newsom's actions as "unauthorized and unlawful." State law requires marriage to be between "a man and a woman."

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- "Roy's Rock" may be gone, but its weight is still being felt. The 5,300-pound granite Ten Commandments monument that ignited a nationwide dispute last year is gone from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court, locked away in a closet and replaced by a display as innocuous as a sixth-grade diorama. The man behind the monument, ousted Chief Justice Roy Moore, is still trying to get his job back. But the rock's defenders may be exacting revenge. In last week's state Republican primary, a former top aide of Moore's, a lawyer without any judicial experience, knocked off a sitting justice who had voted to remove the marker.

CONCORD, N.H. - Just as meddling with Social Security is considered a forbidden political third rail in presidential politics, New Hampshire has one of its own - personal income and sales taxes. Neither has ever been levied here, and candidates who have tried to buck the tradition have been buried by it. But three-term Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen touched the third rail after her 2000 re-election by proposing a sales tax, which failed, and she is still standing tall enough to be the likely Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, without a primary challenger, in November.

YORK, PA. - Ruling that the prosecution of nine white men for the ambush killing of a black minister's daughter in 1969 has been delayed long enough, a Pennsylvania judge ordered yesterday that the murder trial of Mayor Charlie Robertson and his co-defendants go forward. Defense attorneys had argued that charges should be dropped because the 32-year delay in prosecution had violated the defendants' due-process rights and because fading memories, lost evidence and the deaths of potential witnesses made it impossible for them to get a fair trial.

WASHINGTON - Florida's Supreme Court made strenuous efforts to write a strictly down-home election decision yesterday, one out of the reach of any higher court. But it may take the U.S. Supreme Court to say whether the attempt succeeded. That somewhat curious prospect comes about because the legal strategists for Texas Gov. George W. Bush do have a right to ask the justices in Washington to take on the case. But the justices do not have to agree to do so. And a simple refusal to hear any Bush appeal - perhaps a refusal that might even come in a one-sentence order with no explanation - would end this case.

DENVER -- A Denver district judge ruled yesterday that a ballot issue passed by Colorado voters banning gay rights laws violates the United States Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.In light of the ruling, groups that had been calling for a boycott of Colorado said they were suspending their campaign, which had cost the state about $38 million in lost convention business.Colorado Attorney General Gale Norton said the state would appeal the ruling to the Colorado Supreme Court, but the court LTC has already indicated that it would almost certainly strike down the measure, which was passed by voters a year ago.The referendum, known as Amendment 2, which was never enforced, would have repealed laws in Denver, Boulder and Aspen prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals in jobs and housing, and it would have forbidden the passage of any such law in the state.

WASHINGTON - Very late in the Florida election dispute, members of the state Supreme Court raised the notion of a total statewide recount as the proper solution to awarding the state's 25 electoral votes and hence the presidency and that it was probably too late to conduct it. The same point had been made by Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls in his sweeping rejection of Vice President Al Gore's bid to have up to 14,000 "undervotes" in Palm Beach and...

THE FLORIDA RECOUNT has started -- again -- thanks to a decision yesterday by the Democratic state Supreme Court that said discarded ballots in 67 counties must now be examined. Meanwhile, the Republican Florida Legislature is poised to bypass the legal wrangling over vote-counting and name its own slate of presidential electors early next week. You can see where this is headed: a bitter, partisan power struggle between Florida's highest court and its Legislature over the laws of that state.