Child Litigants Need to Have Counsel

By Professor Kevin Lapp

This op-ed originally appeared in the Monday, May 13, 2019 edition of the Daily Journal

For the second time in three years, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals avoided answering the urgent issue of whether child respondents in immigration removal (deportation) proceedings have a due process right to counsel at government expense. The case, C.J.L.G. v. Barr, 2019 DJDAR 3782 (May 3, 2019), involved a Honduran adolescent who appeared in immigration court accompanied only by his mother. C.J.L.G. sought asylum based on his fear of persecution for being a member of a particular social group, a legal claim so complex that it regularly confounds attorneys and judges alike. He was also apparently eligible for special immigrant juvenile status (SIJS), but neither C.J.L.G., his mother, nor the immigration judge raised that form of relief at his hearing, and he was ordered deported. On appeal, C.J.L.G. argued that his hearing was unfair and that due process required that child litigants like him be provided counsel at government expense.

C.J.L.G.’s immigration hearing was all too usual. Each year, tens of thousands of minors appear without a lawyer in immigration proceedings, some as young as two and three years old. Data show that, unsurprisingly, unrepresented minors are significantly more likely to be ordered deported than represented minors. The government nevertheless insists that adversarial proceedings against unrepresented children comport with due process.

The fully briefed right to appointed counsel claim was presumably the reason the 9th Circuit chose to hear C.J.L.G. en banc. Yet, as it did three years ago, it avoided the issue. (In J.E.F.M. v. Lynch (2016), the 9th Circuit held in the context of a class action that there was no jurisdiction over a constitutional right to counsel claim raised by minor respondents.) Instead, the court ordered a new hearing because the immigration judge failed to inform C.J.L.G. of his apparent eligibility for SIJS. It then dropped a footnote to explain that because C.J.L.G. has since secured counsel, and will be represented on remand before the Immigration Court, it need not address the constitutional right to appointed counsel claim.

The 9th Circuit’s decision is certainly a victory for C.J.L.G. and other pro se children who may be eligible for SIJS. The court found error in his proceedings, and he now has an opportunity, aided by counsel, to fully present his case for relief. But to avoid the right to appointed counsel issue (again) is, in practice, to decide it. And it is to decide it in a way that necessarily leaves thousands of child litigants, who either cannot afford a lawyer or who have not lucked into pro bono counsel, to defend themselves against trained government prosecutors in proceedings that involve a notoriously complex area of law.

Strikingly, C.J.L.G.'s case demonstrates exactly why child respondents need lawyers to ensure the fairness of their proceedings. Recall that the 9th Circuit found that the immigration judge failed to inform C.J.L.G. of a possible form of relief as he was required to do. Neither the presence of a friendly adult nor the immigration judge’s duty to develop the record were sufficient safeguards. If C.J.L.G. had not secured counsel after he was ordered deported, the error in his case would have never come to light. He would have been just another child deported after an unfair hearing. Nevertheless, because of C.J.L.G.’s fortune in securing a lawyer, thousands of children who do not share his good luck will continue to go without a lawyer in proceedings that are just as likely as his to be unfair.

Imagining A Greater Justice: Criminal Violence, Punishment and Relational Justice

By Professor Samuel H. Pillsbury 

This excerpt of the book Imagining A Greater Justice: Criminal Violence, Punishment and Relational Justice originally appeared in the Friday, May 10, 2019 edition of the San Francisco and Los Angeles Daily Journal

As a society, our most pressing need for justice comes after criminal violence. A young man is shot in a crosswalk on a summer's night and bleeds to death on the asphalt. A wife is punched and choked by her husband. A girl is sexually molested by her basketball coach. Hearing about these events, our feelings move quickly from sympathy for victims to anger at perpetrators. We hope to see their swift arrest, conviction and punishment. Then we can say that justice has been done.

But we need more than law to do justice in these cases. We need a justice commensurate with the harm. This means we need a justice that comprehends the grief of the young man's family, the soul hurts of the beaten woman, and the girl whose world has been utterly transformed by sexual violation. We need a justice that comprehends how violence shatters survivors' sense of trust and place in community. Can we imagine this? I think we can. But we should not stop here.

Can we imagine a justice that respects an offender's humanity? Can we imagine a justice that treats someone who has spent half of his life locked up for serious crime as a human being capable of change? Can we imagine an ideal of justice that says we should try to reconcile with him to make a lasting peace in our communities? Can we imagine a justice that acknowledges the racial violence of the past and the racial denials and misunderstandings that undercut the trust needed for effective law enforcement? Can we imagine a justice concerned with healing the community after violence?

Imagining a justice this big will be a stretch for many.

I know it has been for me.

I have spent most of my professional life working on justice defined by what happens in the courtroom. As a young man I swore allegiance to justice under law as an officer of the court – a federal prosecutor. And I believe in it as much today, in my 60s, as I did when I was in my 20s.

As the years have passed, though, my view of justice has changed according to my experience of life. I have slowly, often reluctantly, but with increasing conviction come to believe that our conception of justice in the United States is too small. It is too focused on the conduct and character of a few identified wrongdoers. Its concern with individual blame and punishment leaves unaddressed the deep needs of those most hurt by crimes of violence. It flatly ignores, even righteously dismisses, the needs of the incarcerated and their families.

Against the grain of an American culture that celebrates individual freedom and independence, I have come to appreciate how closely tied we are to each other, by bonds chosen and unchosen. The experience of surviving violence makes the strength of these bonds awfully clear. Our conception of justice should respect the reality of how we live in dynamic, interdependent relationship. In addition to holding persons responsible for their chosen actions, we need to take collective responsibility for legal and social structures that determine who belongs in society, and who does not. Belonging, it turns out, is the foundation of just and peaceful community.

We need to imagine what I call relational justice, which includes the rules and processes of the criminal law, but which is bigger in both scope and heart.

***

Policing and Procedural Justice in an Unjust Society

By Professor Eric Miller 

This post originally appeared on Prawsblawg, where Prof. Miller is guest blogging.

There is a sense, at least among a chunk of people, that policing in this country is broken: that the police are an authoritarian group that too often ignore the rights of minorities, especially African Americans, but also Latinos and other minority groups. The police hold these groups in contempt, and engage in unwarranted violence against minorities without being held properly to account. The popular reform proposed for this kind of police violence is "procedural justice": training the police to allow the people they encounter to given their side of the story before engaging in further action, increasing the chances that the civilian will voluntarily comply. The upside for the public is that "procedural justice" lowers the likelihood of police violence. The downside is that it is touted as real reform. But "procedural justice" is an inherently conservative response to problems with policing, and ignores—and perhaps even obfuscates—the need for real change. Worse, it potentially places the police in harms way in a manner that has longlasting moral and political (and perhaps psychological) costs for the police and the public. Here's why.

One way of seeing the problem is to realize that "procedural justice" explains the psychological impact on civilians of procedural due process. If police officers adhere to a form of procedural due process on the streets, civilians are more likely to comply with their directives. From a justice-oriented perspective, however, introducing procedural due process as a standard operating procedure for the police seems like a mealy mouthed—and long overdue—reform.

A standard critique of procedural due process is that it is insensitive to background considerations of justice. Procedural due process simply ensures that the parties get a chance of a hearing before someone who does not have a clear interest in the outcome of some dispute. But if the background equities are stacked against one of the parties, then that party has a much harder chance of success, even though the procedure used is just (in the sense of ensuring the parties get the right amount of participation). Worse, having committed to the procedure, the parties are bound by the results. The loser is disempowered from protesting her loss (except by means provided by the procedure, such as an appeal to some other authority, if such a right exists). Systems of procedurally just systems are often substantively unjust because a fair procedure in a system that is otherwise unfair cannot ensure that the parties receive their distributive or corrective due. Such inequities are often a feature of majoritarian political systems which are stacked against minorities; some form of substantive due process is often introduced as a means of mitigating against this sort of majority advantage.

On Behalf of the Community

Professor Eric Miller recently presented at the Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting panel “#BlackLivesMatter: Balancing Security with Dignity in American Policing" raised points that are particularly salient in light of the Chicago report. His talk, published below, which is the basis for his forthcoming law review article in the Fordham Urban Law Journal.

A new manifesto of sorts is emerging from certain quarters of the academy challenging us to rethink our parochial approach to criminal justice. The challenge is to detach the way we think about policing from the context of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and instead approach policing in the context of some more general questions about the justification of criminal law and criminal punishment. This manifesto of sorts is being worked out by a loose collection of Anglo-American scholars, who have revived the long-dormant political question of how to justify the police within the apparatus of state punishment. That question last made a major appearance in the American legal academy in the 1960s, when Herbert Packer raised it as part of his book on the Limits of the Criminal Law. But it was soon drowned out by doctrinal and sociological approaches to policing.

The Black Lives Matters movement has also raised a series of political questions that have lain dormant for about half-a-century: indeed, since the last major period of racial unrest in the 1960s. Some of those questions are: what are the police? What is their role? To whom are they accountable? Whom do they represent? In the late 1960s and early 1970s a variety of sociologists and administrative law theorists including Jerome Skolnick, James Q. Wilson, Egon Bittner, William Ker Muir and Kenneth Culp Davis provided what has seemed like a definitive answer: that the police are those people entrusted with the situational power to deploy force in the community. But the Black Lives Matter movement, along with the less organized but equally compelling smartphone scrutiny of police violence, has given use good reason to be unhappy with this answer. The situational power to deploy force does not appear to represent the rule of law and the rights of civilians on the street. So the sociologist’s answer, telling us what, descriptively, the police actually do, does not tell us whether, normatively, the police ought to be doing it, and, politically, on behalf of whom they do it.

The political and normative set of questions raised by the Black Lives Matters movement I am particularly interested in, are the questions of representation and agency: on whose behalf to the police act? Police legitimacy often depends upon the answers to these questions: they gain their authority to intervene, including to deploy force, because of their role as state or municipal agents. In acting as the police, they act in their role as public officials authorized by the laws of the relevant jurisdiction that confer the legal power to act as they do. As Michelle Dempsey makes clear, the point is a conceptual one: without a state or a municipality to represent as publicly authorized officials, they would not be police. When, for example, the Mafia takes over the role of ensuring public order in the communities they control, they do not become “the police,” because they represent the Mafia, rather than the state.

The Mafia, like the police, often claim to act on behalf of, not only the state or municipality, but also the community. Indeed, the whole community policing movement gains its resonance from that claim. But what does it mean to “act on behalf of” a community? Because it is possible for the state, and thus for state officials, to fail to serve the communities they are supposed to govern. Your country is founded on just such a claim. Are the police an institution that, by its very nature, represents the community in addition to the state?

In our current political climate, the question of whom the state represents is a live one: large chunks of people on the right of the political spectrum have claimed that President Obama does not represent them, and large chunks of people on the left of the political spectrum claim that President-Elect Trump does not represent them, either. These communities are making an important political point: to represent some group is to claim to be authorized by that group to speak and act on its behalf. The police have a pretty compelling claim to speak and act on behalf of the state: they are members of the executive branch of government, and the various constitutive rules of government identify them as state agents. But speaking on behalf of the community is a question of political rather than institutional legitimacy. And it is that question that is being pressed by the Black Lives Matter movement, and requires a political answer that goes beyond the constitutive rules of the state.

One political answer is that acting on behalf of a community—representing a community by speaking on its behalf and acting in its name—requires regarding oneself as answerable to the community. It requires regarding community members as having standing to call you to account, as a community representative, for what you are saying and what you are doing. And this idea of accountability has important consequences for the political standing of members of the public on the street, in their interactions with the police.

The police provide two answers to the question of how they are answerable to the community: the first is that they express the values and interests of a particular group, for example by soliciting public opinion and input as to how to deploy their resources. This is the answer promoted through the community policing movement: the police are not mere agents of the state, but responsive to the needs of the community. 

President & Policing: What the Candidates Need to Consider

By Adjunct Professor Steve Lurie
Lieutenant, Los Angeles Police Department

The next president of the United States will lead our nation’s police through the most important four years in the history of American policing. Their most critical responsibility will be to rebuild the morale of our nation’s police officers. The president will inherit a nation where law enforcement professionals feel paralyzed. As a result, violent crime is rising in all of our major cities. Recruitment numbers are falling. Proactive policing is dying or dead. Without a motivated, professional police community, re-energized to walk the thin blue line, no progress will be made.

In tandem with this mission, the president must address communities who do not trust that policing is being done in a constitutional, even-handed manner. There is no doubt that a small percentage of officers make errors in judgment during their shifts. Even more rarely, an officer with bad intentions uses their power for evil. These breaches of the public trust are abhorrent and should be swiftly punished. Increased funding for body cameras and other accountability tools should come in the first 100 days of the new administration. Once deployed, these will show that police misconduct is extraordinarily uncommon. The current national tone far exaggerates the frequency of true wrongdoing by sworn officers.

Leadership on policing starts at the White House and the Attorney General’s office. Both of these have failed to curtail the fomentation of an environment where the police are viewed as the enemy, and the law breakers are empowered as never before in our history. The expected result, a marked increase in crime, is beginning to cast its cloud over our people. The next president of the United States must act immediately and decisively to turn back this storm in a way that strengthens the bond between members of law enforcement and the communities they serve.

Adjunct Professor Steve Lurie teaches the Police Practice Seminar at Loyola Law School. He is a lieutenant with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Thoughts on Utah v. Strieff: A Blow to Democratic Accountability of Police

By Professor Eric Miller

On Monday, the Court announced its decision in Utah v. Strieff, a Fourth Amendment case in which a man was unlawfully stopped leaving a house the police suspected of being a drug den. Upon searching Strieff, the arresting officer discovered methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. Normally, the fruits of an unlawful search would be inadmissible in evidence. But what made this stop and search permissible was the officer’s discovery, upon asking for and checking upon on Strieff’s I.D., that Srtieff had an outstanding warrant, entitling the officer to arrest Strieff. The existence of the warrant, the Court held, was an unforeseen intervening event breaking the chain of illegality and permitting the police to arrest and search the defendant in good faith, free of the sanction of exclusion.

The decision, over an impassioned dissent by Justice Sotomayor, is a real blow to the democratic accountability of the police. To see why, consider a fairly old case in which the Court discussed an encounter somewhat like this: Sibron v. New York, 392 U.S. 40, 44-45, 61-63 (1968). In that case, an officer standing outside a cafe suspected Sibron of drug dealing inside a cafe, could not confirm that suspicion from his position outside the cafe, and performed and unconstitutional stop resulting in the discovery of drugs. While the major difference is, of course, the attenuation issue, it is worth considering that Sibron had a right to walk away from the police officer—a right emphasized by Justice White and Justice Marshall’s concurring opinions in Sibron’s more famous companion case, Terry v. Ohio, and reiterated in the “free to leave” seizure context (Schneckloth v. Butamonte, INS v. Delgado, Florida v. Drayton, etc.).

Professor Natapoff's Looks at Misdemeanor Decriminalization

Professor Alexandra Natapoff’s latest piece is entitled Misdemeanor Decriminalization, 68 Vanderbilt L. Rev (forthcoming 2015). She was interviewed about it by Slate. The abstract is below.

As the U.S. reconsiders its stance on mass incarceration, misdemeanor decriminalization has emerged as an increasingly popular reform. Seen as a potential cure for crowded jails and an overburdened defense bar, many states are eliminating jail time for minor offenses such as marijuana possession and driving violations, and replacing those crimes with so-called “nonjailable” or “fine-only” offenses. This form of reclassification is widely perceived as a way of saving millions of state dollars—nonjailable offenses do not trigger the right to counsel--while easing the punitive impact on defendants, and it has strong support from progressives and conservatives alike. But decriminalization has a little-known dark side. Unlike full legalization, decriminalization preserves many of the punitive features and collateral consequences of the criminal misdemeanor experience, even as it strips defendants of counsel and other procedural protections. It actually expands the reach of the criminal apparatus by making it easier—both logistically and normatively--to impose fines and supervision on an ever-widening population, a population who ironically often ends up incarcerated anyway when they cannot afford the fines or comply with the supervisory conditions. The turn to fine-only offenses and supervision, moreover, has distributive implications. It captures poor, underemployed, drug-dependent, and other disadvantaged defendants for whom fines and supervision are especially burdensome, while permitting well-resourced offenders to exit the process quickly and relatively unscathed. Finally, as courts turn increasingly to fines and fees to fund their own operations, decriminalization threatens to become a kind of regressive tax, turning the poorest populations into funding fodder for the judiciary and other government budgets. In sum, while decriminalization appears to offer relief from the punitive legacy of overcriminalization and mass incarceration, upon closer inspection it turns out to be a highly conflicted regulatory strategy that preserves and even strengthens some of the most problematic aspects of the massive U.S. penal system.

Prof. Levenson: California is Overdue in Adopting Rule on Exculpatory Evidence

By Professor Laurie Levenson and Barry Scheck

This op-ed originally appeared in the Dec. 15, 2014 edition of the Los Angeles Times.

More than half a century ago, the Supreme Court established a rule that requires prosecutors to turn over to defense attorneys any evidence pointing to a defendant's innocence. It's known as the Brady rule, and violations of it occur far too often and can lead to devastating consequences. In a dissenting opinion last year, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declared that "there is an epidemic of Brady violations abroad in the land. Only judges can put a stop to it." There is no shortage of examples.

Take the case of Mark Sodersten. In 2007, a state appellate court reversed his 1986 murder conviction after finding that the prosecution failed to give the defense audiotapes of interviews with a key witness that contained evidence pointing to Sodersten's innocence. Tragically, the ruling came too late for Sodersten, who spent 22 years behind bars and died in prison months before he was awarded a new trial.

Or consider Kash Delano Register, who served 34 years behind bars for a 1979 murder in Los Angeles that he always maintained he didn't commit. He was released last year after a judge found that prosecutors and police "repeatedly concealed relevant evidence" that pointed to Register's innocence.

Read the complete op-ed.

Prof. Natapoff Writes About Dark Side of Decriminalization

By Professor Alexandra Natapoff

California is doubling down on decriminalization. Three weeks ago, the passage of Prop. 47 converted a half-dozen felonies to misdemeanors. In 2011, marijuana possession was reclassified from a misdemeanor to an infraction without jail time. If Rip Van Winkle fell asleep a decade ago at the height of California’s prison boom and woke up this morning, he’d quickly recognize this as a scramble to undo decades of harsh and expensive policy.

The state is not alone — we are seeing a seismic shift in how the United States handles punishment, especially with respect to misdemeanor decriminalization. Marijuana is the most famous example, but many states are eliminating jail time for other minor offenses, such as driving violations and public order crimes, and replacing them with so-called “nonjailable misdemeanors,” “nonarrestable” or “fine-only” offenses, and “civil infractions.”

Read the complete op-ed.

The Ferguson Grand Jury: Lessons from the O.J. Grand Jury

By Professor Laurie Levenson

Yes, you read that right. There are lessons from the O.J. Simpson grand jury for the grand jury considering whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown. Few people remember that the Los Angeles County District Attorney originally convened a grand jury to decide on the fate of celebrity defendant, O.J. Simpson. This was not surprising given that politically controversial cases are often thrown to the grand jury to take some of the heat off a prosecutor in deciding whether to bring charges. Unlike with federal cases, state charges generally do not need to go through the grand jury process. The District Attorney has the power to file charges directly and hold a preliminary hearing to determine whether there is probable cause to support those charges. However, a grand jury provides an elected official cover for making the decision to charge in difficult cases.

Ultimately, O.J. was not charged by the grand jury because they never got the chance to make that decision. The case was removed from the grand jury when the defense complained that pretrial publicity had tainted the grand jury process. Simpson’s lawyers claimed that Simpson’s due process rights would be violated by having a grand jury that had been exposed to the tremendous amount of media coverage and public comment decide whether he should be indicted.

Similarly, one can expect that if Wilson is indicted, his lawyers will challenge whether the grand jury process was tainted. Having a grand jury make its decision in the shadows of a National Guard alert is not an optimal way to run a justice system. The grand jury is supposed to be the buffer for individuals against public cries for justice. However, grand jurors are not immune from this pressure and, in an extreme situations, they may be affected as well. A motion to dismiss a grand jury indictment is almost never granted, but the motion itself will undermine any confidence in charges that are brought. In a case where the whole country is watching, that may be concern enough.

• Read more about the motion to quash the O.J. Simpson grand jury.
• Listen to Professor Levenson's commentary about the Ferguson grand jury on KPCC's AirTalk with Larry Mantle.

Who Will Police the Police?

By Professor Priscilla Ocen

This op-ed originally appeared in the Los Angeles Daily Journal on Sept. 22.

In August, Ferguson, Mo. — a small, predominately black suburb of St. Louis — erupted in protest after the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer. Following the shooting, Brown’s body lay prone on the street for hours, visible to neighbors and passersby as a gruesome reminder of the violent end to his young life. Brown’s death at the hands of police, however, was only one of many this summer. In New York, Eric Garner, another unarmed black man, was killed after he was placed a chokehold by members of the New York Police Department. In Los Angeles, Ezell Ford, an unarmed, mentally disabled black man, was shot and killed by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The deaths of Brown, Garner and Ford are not isolated incidents. According to the FBI, police officers, on average, kill over 400 people per year in what were determined to be “justifiable homicides.” This figure, however, likely underrepresents the number of police killings as it only includes self reported data from less than 10 percent of police departments and only those killings that have been deemed justified. Nevertheless, it is clear that the burden of deaths in police custody has fallen disproportionately on African-Americans. Annually, nearly a quarter of the 400 killings involve African-Americans. This means that African-Americans are killed by police almost twice a week in the United States. Indeed, in a recent report by Mother Jones magazine, it was found that blacks are roughly four times as likely as whites to die during arrest or while in police custody.

While the killing of African-Americans by law enforcement officers is a tragically common event, criminal penalties for police officers accused of killing African-Americans are startlingly uncommon. In one study of 21 high-profile shootings of unarmed African-Americans, only three officers were successfully prosecuted. As both St. Louis County and federal officials investigate the shooting death of Michael Brown, what kind of outcome should we expect if a criminal case is ultimately filed?

Marissa Alexander and Overpolicing and Underprotection of Black Women

By Associate Professor Priscilla Ocen

This op-ed originally appeared on Ebony.com.

Marissa Alexander is a 33-year-old African-American woman who stands accused of three counts of aggravated assault with a firearm after firing a warning shot to ward off a violent husband whom she believed was attempting to kill her. The shooting occurred after her husband assaulted her multiple times---once landing her in the hospital with head injuries---and after he made credible threats to kill her. Nevertheless, a Florida state court rejected her self-defense argument, specifically the “Stand Your Ground” defense. Angela Corey, the same state prosecutor who unsuccessfully prosecuted the killers of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis for murder, is now seeking to imprison Alexander for up to 60 years, effectively placing a life sentence around a Black woman who—unlike George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn--had every reason to believe her life was in danger.

Read the complete op-ed.

Procedure Takes Center Stage in Stop-and-Frisk Litigation

By Katherine A. Macfarlane '06, Guest Alumni Blogger

Teaching Fellow and Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, LSU Law Center

On October 31, 2013, the Second Circuit took the unusual step of removing Southern District of New York Judge Shira Scheindlin from two high-profile stop-and-frisk cases: Ligon v. City of New York and Floyd v. City of New York. Ligon is a Section 1983 class action challenging the NYPD's trespass arrest policy, or "Operation Clean Halls," a program through which NYPD officers patrol private apartment buildings across New York City. Judge Scheindlin oversaw Ligon since its filing in March 2012. Floyd, also a Section 1983 class action, challenged the NYPD's street-level stop-and-frisk practices, arguing that they amounted to racial profiling. Floyd was filed in January 2008, and immediately assigned to Judge Scheindlin.

The Floyd trial began in March and lasted nine weeks. Thirteen days before the Floyd trial began, the Floyd plaintiffs withdrew all claims for damages, and as a result, Floyd was tried to Judge Scheindlin, not to a jury. Floyd was decided in an August 12, 2013 order spanning 193 pages. Therein, the judge granted a sweeping injunction against the NYPD that ordered changes to NYPD policies and activities, appointed a monitor to oversee stop-and-frisk practices, required a "community-based joint remedial process to be conducted by a court-appointed facilitator," and ordered that one precinct in each of New York City's boroughs place body-worn cameras on their police officers. On the same date, Judge Scheindlin entered a similar decision in Ligon, ordering changes to the NYPD's trespass arrest policies, oversight by the same monitor appointed in Floyd, and revision of NYPD training materials and programs. In its October 31 order, in addition to removing Judge Scheindlin from Floyd and Ligon, the Second Circuit stayed the orders in Floyd and Ligon pending appeal.

But why was Judge Scheindlin removed? In its October 31 order, the Second Circuit found that Judge Scheindlin violated the Code of Conduct for United States Judges due to the appearance of partiality created by her "improper application" of the Southern District's "related cases rule," as well as "by a series of media interviews and public statements purporting to respond publicly to criticism of the District Court."