Nancy Gertner

As Democrats announce they're moving forward with drafting articles of impeachment against President Trump, we check in with WBUR senior news correspondent and retired federal judge and WBUR legal analyst Nancy Gertner.

Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, WBUR's legal commentator, and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, walks us through what we learned from the impeachment hearings last week and what's next.

The Democrats brought their last witnesses in the public impeachment hearings Thursday, with President Donald Trump’s former top Russia adviser Fiona Hill using her time to directly confront Republicans on the committee who she said have used the television time to push false conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the 2016 election. Jim Braude was joined by retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, and R.J. Lyman, senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and Mark Mauer:  Arnie King has been serving a sentence of life without parole in Massachusetts since 1972 for the murder of John Labanara. King was a high school dropout addicted to drugs and alcohol. He was seeking his next high the night he killed Labanara. Over the last 47 years, King has changed his life. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston University, has spoken to at-risk youths about making better choices in their lives, and has received awards for his community leadership, including the anti-racism leadership Award from Simmons College. Still, despite the time he has served and his rehabilitation, he has failed to secure a sentence commutation from the governor that would make him eligible for parole. A recent hearing in the Massachusetts House of Representatives shed light on this little-known aspect of mass incarceration. While there has been a great deal of attention in recent years to the impact of the drug war on growing prison populations, in fact, the main drivers of the prison system now are excessive sentences for violent offenses.

Last week, for the second time in recent Massachusetts history, a young woman was charged with manslaughter for texting her boyfriend messages encouraging him to kill himself. Alexander Urtula, 22, and Inyoung You, 21, were both students at Boston College last May when, on graduation day morning, Urtula leaped off a parking garage to his death...Conversations with prosecutors, defense attorneys, and experts suggest cases like these resonate in part because the criminal justice system—and society at large—can't make sense of men experiencing domestic violence at the hands of women. When forced to grapple with that reality, prosecutors risk painting the women in question as having almost supernatural powers with which they manipulate victims. "That's the part of this that is interesting to me, is the notion of causation: the notion that these women were somehow putting a spell on the men so that the men were doing what they would otherwise not have done," said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and Harvard Law lecturer who is on Carter's appellate team. "That's antithetical to most gender stereotypes, though it certainly is a caricature: the witch caricature.”

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey joined us Thursday for a regular check-in as the state's top law enforcement official. We discussed the recent impeachment vote in the House of Representatives, Governor Baker's vaping ban, and her office's lawsuits against Purdue Pharma and ExxonMobil. But, first, we hear the latest on impeachment from our legal analyst. Guests: ... Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst.

The impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump is proceeding apace this week with closed-door testimonies each day from various actors within the Trump administration, including former Europe advisor Fiona Hill yesterday and Ambassador Gordon Sondland on schedule for Thursday. Hill’s testimony yesterday revealed the sharp divisions within the White House this summer over Rudy Giuliani’s shadow agenda in Ukraine, including former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s deepening distrust of Trump's attorney’s activities. To discuss all this and more, Jim Braude was joined by Jennifer Braceras, a senior fellow with the conservative organization Independent Women’s Forum, and retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School.

A war of words and a stalemate in Washington this week, after the White House declared that it will not cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. President Trump tweeted that the Democratic-led House inquiry was "a totally compromised kangaroo court." Democrats said the president is obstructing justice, and vowed to press on. So, what happens now? Guests: Noah Feldman, professor at Harvard Law School. He tweets @noahrfeldman. His piece in the New York Times is called "This Is a Constitutional Crisis. What Happens Next?" He tweets @noahrfeldman. Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst. She tweets @ngertner.

There are more reactions today to a July call President Trump made in which he asked Ukraine's leader to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. This weekend, the president admitted to discussing the vice president and his son, Hunter, with Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky. "The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place. Was largely the fact that we don't want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine," the president said. The call raises a number of critical questions, including whether the president acted unlawfully. Guests [include]...Nancy Gertner.

Four feminist law professors at Harvard Law School have been telling some alarming truths about the tribunals that have been adjudicating collegiate sex for the past five years. Campus Title IX tribunals are “so unfair as to be truly shocking,” Janet Halley, Jeannie Suk Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Nancy Gertner proclaimed in a jointly authored document titled “Fairness for All Students.” That document followed up on a previous open letter signed by 28 members of the Harvard Law School faculty in 2014 arguing that the updated sexual assault policy recently installed at Harvard was “inconsistent with some of the most basic principles we teach” and “would do more harm than good.”

Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is introducing a resolution to open an impeachment inquiry over new and expanded allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. We discuss what we know, what we don't, and where we go from here. Guests: ... Nancy Gertner, WBUR legal analyst, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.

A New York Times piece over the weekend presented a witness account of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulting a young, unnamed woman while they were both in college — a new allegation in addition to those levied against the judge during his confirmation hearing last year. ... Now, some Democrats are calling for Kavanaugh’s impeachment, saying they are concerned both about continued allegations of sexual misconduct and the possibility that he may have lied under oath. ... To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, and James Rappaport, former chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party and director of the New Boston Fund.

Escalating an unusually public legal dispute, Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins filed an emergency petition with the state’s highest court Wednesday to overturn a judge’s ruling against a protester arrested at the Straight Pride Parade, saying he overstepped his bounds by refusing to allow her prosecutors to dismiss the charges. Boston Municipal Court Judge Richard J. Sinnott “ignored the clear and unambiguous constraints placed on the judiciary by the separation of powers” in refusing to let prosecutors drop nonviolent charges against protesters who were arrested Saturday in a clash with police, Rollins wrote in a 16-page petition to the Supreme Judicial Court...Sinnott’s stance against prosecutors drew a sharp rebuke from many legal specialists. Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Boston who now teaches at Harvard Law School, said Sinnott was making “the kinds of judgments that a prosecutor makes.” “As a judge, I oftentimes disagreed with the cases brought in front of me,” Gertner said. But, “in a system of divided power,” prosecutors decide when to bring criminal charges, she said.

There was more drama and confusion in Boston Municipal Judge Richard Sinnott's courtroom Wednesday, where prominent immigration and civil rights attorney Susan Church was held in custody for hours. Sinnott held Church in contempt of court while she was representing someone arrested for protesting this weekend's so-called "Straight Pride" parade. Guests [include] Nancy Gertner...

Thirty-six people were arrested at Saturday's Straight Pride Parade and protests. On Tuesday, Boston Municpal Court Judge Richard Sinnott denied the prosecution’s motions to dismiss charges of "disorderly conduct and resisting arrest" against seven of the arrested. There are more arraignments pending. Four officers were injured during the response to Saturday's events. We review what we know about what happened. Guests [include]...Nancy Gertner.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner:  It doesn’t seem to matter who sits in the US attorney’s office when it comes to prosecuting union members or the politicians who advocate for them. Democratic appointee Carmen Ortiz prosecuted Joseph Burhoe and John Perry of Teamsters Local 82 for extorting nonunion employers to hire union workers at various fund-raising events. She also prosecuted four Teamsters in connection with the 2014 filming of the reality TV show “Top Chef.” While Ortiz began the prosecution of Walsh administration officials Kenneth Brissette and Timothy Sullivan for Hobbs Act violations in connection with their efforts to get union jobs at the Boston Calling music festival, the case against them was enthusiastically finished by Republican appointee Andrew Lelling.

Early Wednesday morning, federal agents arrested the former president of the Massachusetts State Police union and the group's Beacon Hill lobbyist at their respective houses in Worcester and Hull. The Massachusetts U.S. attorney is charging Dana Pullman and Anne Lynch with conspiracy and obstruction of justice — accusing the two of running a scheme that gathered thousands of dollars in illegal kickbacks. Guests [include]...Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, WBUR legal analyst.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services notified local immigration attorneysthat asylum officers from Boston will be sent to the southwest border with Mexico to address the influx of asylum seekers there. It's a move Boston immigration attorneys say will impact their clients' chances of asylum. Guests [include]...Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, WBUR legal analyst.

A recent op-ed from a progressive advocacy group that called on future Democratic presidents to shut Big Law partners out of consideration for the federal judiciary has prompted an uproar of opposition in some corners of the bar while others are nodding their heads. Law professors, plaintiffs-side trial lawyers, students, public defenders and Big Law lawyers have taken to social media in the past two days to express a full range of feelings on a proposal appearing in the Atlantic by the group Demand Justice to cut “corporate” lawyers from Democratic presidential hopefuls’ lists of potential nominees to the bench...Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts who is now a professor at Harvard Law School, agreed that diverse backgrounds should be a factor for considering future judges, but also spoke out against a bright-line rule against Big Law. She chairs a committee that advises Massachusetts’ senators on good picks for the federal bench, and she noted that it has put forth employment lawyers, environmental lawyers and other nontraditional candidates because it has cast a wide net.

Nathan Carman is either a criminal mastermind, or the victim of a series of unfortunate, fatal events. His aunts say he shot his multimillionaire grandfather to death in 2013, and killed his mother on a fishing trip in 2016 to get a portion of the family’s $44 million estate. But 25-year-old Carman has so far eschewed criminal charges, let alone gone to criminal court...After a six year legal battle that depicts the inner workings of an upper-class New England family, which feels like something out of the show Revenge, what finally lured Carmen to a witness stand in Rhode Island’s federal courthouse Thursday, was an $85,000 boat insurance claim...Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law professor and former federal judge, also says Carman’s testimony in the boat insurance trial “could be used in the homicide case” and handed over to a prosecutor. And Carman could have avoided all of this if he backed down from the $85,000 claim. But he didn’t.