Nancy Gertner

An interview with Nancy Gertner. The U.S. Supreme Court said most of President Trump's controversial travel ban could go into effect until the high court takes up the case in the fall. So it's at least a partial and temporary victory for the president to finally make good on a major campaign promise.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Governor Baker introduced a criminal justice bill in February to great fanfare. Designed to give prisoners incarcerated on mandatory minimum sentences access to good-time credit to hasten their release and to provide reentry programming, it received wide bipartisan support — as it should. The justification was clear. “Reducing recidivism,” Baker said, was the bill’s focus. The people of Massachusetts benefit “when more individuals exit the system as law abiding and productive members of the society.”

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Where do we draw the line between words and physical harm? That's what we're left wondering after the verdict in the Michelle Carter trial, announced last Friday. Twenty-year-old Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her friend to commit suicide in a series of texts. In his decision, Judge Lawrence Moniz cited the fact that Carter texted Conrad Roy III to "get back in" after he had left the truck where he planned to kill himself with carbon monoxide.

For a case that had played out in thousands of text messages, what made Michelle Carter’s behavior a crime, a judge concluded, came in a single phone call. Just as her friend Conrad Roy III stepped out of the truck he had filled with lethal fumes, Ms. Carter told him over the phone to get back in the cab and then listened to him die without trying to help him. That command, and Ms. Carter’s failure to help, said Judge Lawrence Moniz of Bristol County Juvenile Court, made her guilty of involuntary manslaughter in a case that had consumed New England, left two families destroyed and raised questions about the scope of legal responsibility...“Will the next case be a Facebook posting in which someone is encouraged to commit a crime?” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and Harvard Law professor, asked. “This puts all the things that you say in the mix of criminal responsibility.”

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey gave two and a half hours of highly anticipated testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey was repeatedly asked about details revealed in his written testimony, submitted Wednesday. Specifically, he was asked why he took it upon himself to write memos of every visit and call he made with President Trump. "I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting," said Comey. "So I thought it really important to document." Comey also confirmed the serious nature of the Russian hacking in the 2016 election.

Former FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday that he believed President Trump was telling him he should drop the FBI’s criminal investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn during several private conversations between the two men. Comey testified that the president said he “hoped” Comey would “let this go,” asked him for his personal “loyalty,” and urged him to clear Trump’s name publicly from a broader probe into Russian election hacking...Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge in Massachusetts who is now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, spoke with the Gazette about the legal issues swirling around the matter.

Nancy Gertner, former U.S. federal judge, talks with Rachel Maddow about whether the pressure Donald Trump exerted to end the FBI investigation into Mike Flynn was merely awkward or actually illegal.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. "This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!" That was the tweet from President Trump this morning, following yesterday evening's news that the justice department has appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee its Russia investigation. The president may be fuming, but Congress issued a collective bipartisan exhale at the news. Amy Klobuchar, Democratic senator from Minnesota, called it "a breath of fresh air [that] has come into this week-long saga."

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and fellow Chiraag Bains. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Session instructed the nation’s 2,300 federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges in all but exceptional cases. Rescinding a 2013 policy that sought to avoid mandatory minimums for low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, Sessions wrote it was the “moral and just” thing to do. Sessions couldn’t be more wrong. We served as a federal prosecutor and a federal judge respectively. In our experience, mandatory minimums have swelled the federal prison population and led to scandalous racial disparities. They have caused untold misery at great expense. And they have not made us safer.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. A Massachusetts judge has vacated the first-degree murder conviction of former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez. He was convicted in the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd. Hernandez was found hanged in his prison cell last month. His death was ruled a suicide, which led to today's news that Superior Court Judge Susan Garsh has overturned Hernandez's conviction.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Can local law enforcement agencies detain someone at the request of federal immigration authorities, or is that in violation of the Massachusetts state constitution? That was the question before the state's highest court on Monday in the case of Commonwealth v. Lunn — a Cambodian national who was detained by state court officers at the request of federal immigration officials, even though Lunn's state criminal case had been dismissed.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. He sounds so judicial. He talks about neutrality, raising plain vanilla issues about deference to the expertise of administrative agencies. It is boring, hardly likely to engender indignation. He says his decisions are required by the law — not affected by his own background. He is Judge Neil Gorsuch and he may soon be on the Supreme Court. Don’t be fooled. His approach is not neutral, not required by the law, and far out of the mainstream. Quite apart from social issues like abortion or gay rights, his approach could gut health and safety and antidiscrimination laws.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Judge Neil Gorsuch faced his third long day of Supreme Court confirmation hearings with the Senate Judiciary Committee today. Yesterday, Gorsuch faced questioning about his judicial independence. Today, Republicans praised his calm demeanor and carefully worded answers. Democrats, however, appealed to Gorsuch's more personal side.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. That Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a false statement under oath before a congressional committee is clear. He said, “I did not have communications with the Russians,” when in fact he had met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The only question is what the consequences should be. Making a false statement under oath before Congress is a crime punishable by five years imprisonment when three tests are satisfied: (1) The statement is false, (2) it concerns a material fact, not a minor or incidental one, and (3) the speaker has made the statement willfully and knowingly. The first two are not debatable.

An interview with Niki Tsongas and Nancy Gertner. The Washington Post reported last night that Sessions spoke twice last year with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But when asked about communication with the Russians at his Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in January, Sessions said, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.” Sessions revised that statement this morning, speaking to NBC News...Now, leading Republicans are joining Democrats in calling on Sessions to recuse himself from overseeing an investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential campaign. Many have also called on Sessions to explain what his meetings were about.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. President Trump frequently complains about Washington leaks. But what he is really concerned about is that these leaks are not random. He believes that they are being deployed to harm his administration. (Of course, he had no problem with WikiLeaks’ leak of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee during the campaign. “I love WikiLeaks,” he said.) But the pattern of leaks is uneven and, in one area, that inconsistent pattern may well redound to Trump’s advantage: Despite all the information that has come out of this leaky administration, his tax returns remain confidential (except for a single year reportedly leaked by one of Trump’s former wives).

An interview with Nancy Gertner. A ruling out of Concord District Court calls into question the accuracy of breathalyzer machine tests in Massachusetts and could impact 20,000 drunken-driving cases in the state. The cases occurred between June 2012 and September 2014. In a hearing decision issued last week, Judge Robert Brennan found that the state's Office of Alcohol Testing failed to prove its methodology for calibrating its breath-testing machines.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. On Wednesday, Gov. Charlie Baker nominated state Appeals Court Judge Elspeth "Ellie" B. Cypher to serve on the Supreme Judicial Court. This is Baker's fourth nomination in just over two years. Cypher would fill the position held by Justice Margot Botsford, who will be retiring next month.

It’s not every day that a former governor comes before the Supreme Judicial Court, but that’s what happened this week in a case involving Deval Patrick. The Democrat, who left office in 2015, is accused by a former state employee of defamation and is fighting the charge. The unique case raised an equally unique question: Is it wrong for justices who were appointed to the court by Patrick to hear his case? No, said two legal experts. While there are extensive rules governing when justices can and should recuse themselves, this isn’t one of them... Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law professor and former judge for the US District Court of Massachusetts, agreed, saying the judge would have to have been somehow involved in the case before he or she was on the bench. Gertner said that once a justice is appointed, he or she is expected to be impartial.

In sentencing a 19-year-old who pleaded guilty to statutory rape last week, a judge in Idaho made clear his punishment would include an extra wrinkle: government-mandated celibacy. The unusual proclamation by Judge Randy Stoker of the Fifth District of Idaho that abstinence would be a condition of probation appears to be based at least partly on an archaic, rarely enforced state law that forbids premarital sex...Nancy Gertner, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and a former federal judge, said fornication laws often stay on the books only because they are enforced so infrequently that they have not been challenged. They would likely crumble under legal scrutiny, she said. She said fornication laws were seen as unconstitutional after the United States Supreme Court 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which was considered a landmark case for gay rights because it struck down state sodomy laws. At the same time, the decision codified a broader principle that decriminalized the private sexual behavior of consenting adults, Ms. Gertner said. While judges are free to impose specific limitations related to the crimes of those on probation, “there are limits that have to do with dignity and substantive due process,” she said. A judge could not force someone to get a lobotomy or a vasectomy, and limiting a person’s private sex life struck her as a similar overreach.