Thomas Frampton

A Harvard Law School lecturer is suing the Louisiana State Police to release a purported list of members of antifa that originated on white supremacist and Neo-Nazi websites. The roster itself appears to be a hoax that originated a year ago on Neo-Nazi websites like Stormfront and the far-right conspiracy theory website 8Chan, according to the lawsuit filed by Harvard Law School Lecturer Thomas Frampton in Baton Rouge state court on behalf of New Orleans civil rights attorney William Most.

Federal authorities have subpoenaed the publisher of the National Enquirer for records related to its $150,000 payment to a former Playboy model for the rights to her story alleging an affair with Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. The subpoena from Manhattan federal prosecutors requesting information from the publisher, American Media Inc., about its August 2016 payment to Karen McDougal is part of a broader criminal investigation of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, they said...The Federal Election Campaign Act makes clear that news stories, commentaries or editorials aren’t considered campaign expenditures, a press carve-out that could add First Amendment complications to an investigation of American Media. But the exemption isn’t absolute, said Thomas Frampton, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies criminal law. “If the other evidence is there, I don’t think AMI’s status as a media company will preclude liability,” he said.

Most people assume that a conversation with their lawyer will remain confidential. But if the conversation takes place on the phone from the New Orleans jail, it might be used as evidence of a crime. One inmate awaiting trial on drug charges mentioned to his lawyer that he had just gone through detox. The call was recorded by the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s office, and his statement was used to prove that a needle the inmate was carrying when he was arrested had been used for illegal drugs, according to the inmate’s lawyer, Thomas Frampton. He was convicted of possession of drug paraphernalia. “It ended up being the critical evidence,” said Mr. Frampton, who was then a public defender in New Orleans and is now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. Mr. Frampton objected to the inclusion of the evidence, but the judge disagreed.

The phone call used to convict Gerard Howard lasted seven minutes. Howard made the collect call to his attorney from Orleans Parish jail shortly after his March 2015 arrest on possession of heroin and of drug paraphernalia, court records show. It began with a standard disclaimer for jail calls, saying it was subject to recording and monitoring. Then, once connected, public defender Thomas Frampton asked why Howard had been transferred to a different jail building. "Just like after detox or whatever," Howard is heard answering in a recording of the call, obtained by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Prosecutors later dropped the heroin charge, leaving Frampton confident he could prove his client's innocence with lab results showing the two syringes found on Howard were clean. But days before the trial, District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office told Frampton prosecutors would use the recording of that jail call, and specifically Howard's utterance of the word "detox," as evidence of the needles being drug paraphernalia. "I was shocked they actually used it in court," recalled Frampton, now a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

...The drafters of the state constitution Louisiana adopted in 1898 said they aimed to “perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in Louisiana,” primarily by scrubbing from the rolls nearly all of the roughly 130,000 black people then registered to vote...But with cooperation from the East Baton Rouge Parish clerk of court, The Advocate was able to collect this information for two-thirds of the 200 convictions by 12-member juries that took place in the state’s most populous parish from 2011 to 2016. Those records include 46 trials, involving 552 jurors, that ended with a nonunanimous guilty verdict...Thomas Frampton, a former Orleans Parish public defender who now teaches at Harvard Law School, enlisted researchers there to analyze the newspaper’s data. Their analysis mirrors that of The Advocate. “The disparities that this data identify are not terribly surprising for those who have spent time in Louisiana courtrooms but are shocking in terms of how wide the (racial) gulf actually is,” Frampton said.

The extraordinary legal battle between the president of the United States and a former adult-film star has been building for seven years. The standoff is rapidly escalating, as the porn actress, Stephanie Clifford, seeks to go public with details of her claims of an extramarital affair, and President Donald Trump and his attorneys fight to stop her...The allegations pivot on whether the payment was made to influence the election to Mr. Trump’s benefit, said Thomas Frampton, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “It may be one of the least scintillating issues that Ms. Clifford could speak about, but from the perspective of Cohen’s and the president’s legal liability, it could be the most dangerous,” he said.