Tag Archives: Fourth Amendment

At Fernandez v. California Oral Argument, Supreme Court Debates What It Means To Be Roommates

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At yesterday’s oral argument over a warrantless search, Breyer tries to draw lines while Scalia seems to have made up his mind. Picture via The Atlantic.
At yesterday’s oral argument, Breyer tries to draw lines while Scalia seems to have made up his mind. Picture via The Atlantic.

Last term, the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment cases made for some curious cross-aisle alliances, pitting a privacy-friendly Justice Scalia and his liberal colleagues Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan against a government-supporting Justice Breyer and the conservative bloc of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Thomas (and sometimes Kennedy). Wednesday’s oral argument in Fernandez v. California, however, saw Breyer and Scalia falling back along more conventionally ideological lines, with the former attempting to balance a rather unsympathetic defendant’s rights against a domestic violence victim’s needs, and the latter coming out in favor of a more expansive reading of law enforcement’s investigatory powers.

Fernandez v. California stems from a 2009 encounter between Los Angeles police and a man suspected of committing robbery and gang-related assault, who was spotted near the crime scene and subsequently seen running into an apartment. After Fernandez’s live-in girlfriend, Roxanne Rojas, opened the door for officers, fresh bruises and blood visible on her body, Fernandez told them that they could not legally come inside. He was removed from the premises anyway based on suspicion of domestic violence, arrested and taken to the police station. Two officers then returned to the apartment without a warrant and received consent from Rojas to search the premises, where they found evidence that would later be introduced at Fernandez’s robbery and assault trial, resulting in his conviction. The question before the Supreme Court now is whether the police violated Fernandez’s Fourth Amendment rights by warrantlessly searching his home with only the permission of the co-tenant girlfriend, even though Fernandez had earlier told the police in no uncertain terms that they could not enter. (If so, the state would not have been able to use the incriminating evidence from the apartment at his trial.)

In 2006’s Georgia v. Randolph, the Supreme Court established that a co-occupant’s objection to the police search of a home overrides another co-occupant’s consent if both co-occupants are present. California argues that its search did not violate Randolph because Fernandez was absent at the time the police officers returned and Rojas, as the only present co-tenant then, had the right to open her home to whomever she wished to grant entry. The removal of Fernandez from the apartment–even if it was forcible–effectively nullified his refusal to consent to a search.

Fernandez, on the other hand, interprets Randolph to mean that once a physically present co-tenant has objected to the search, “an objection… remains in effect until officers learn that the objector no longer wishes to keep the police out of his home”–or until the police get a warrant. In other words, for the seven-year-old precedent to have any force, the police must not be allowed to gain consent for a warrantless search simply by carting an objecting tenant away from the premises.

This reading of Randolph appeared to be in trouble from the moment that Justice Breyer– whose Fourth Amendment jurisprudence typically reflects an optimistic view of the government using its investigatory powers in good faith–opened questioning with a hypothetical about a domestic abuse victim who is unable to ask the police to come investigate a shared home for evidence of the crime even after the assailant has been arrested, because there is no clear probable cause for a warrant and no consent from the violent co-tenant. Breyer is clearly troubled by Fernandez’s argument, which he believes would deny Rojas her rightful authority as co-occupant to admit a visitor into their home during the 500-plus days he spent in custody.

On the other hand, Breyer, who joined the majority (and authored a concurrence) in Randolph, also doesn’t want to undermine his previous position by giving free rein to law enforcement to change presences into absences. So he tries to reconcile his vote in Randolph with his unease in Fernandez with a compromise: the known objection of a tenant who is then removed from the house by law enforcement could remain valid for a limited “reasonable time” afterward (the exact definition of “reasonable time” to be decided by the lower courts), during which the police cannot search the house without a warrant.

Unfortunately for Breyer, none of his colleagues seem terribly receptive to this idea. Of the nine justices, Alito articulates the case against Fernandez most vociferously, suggesting at several points that Georgia v. Randolph was wrongly decided and ought to be overturned entirely. “I don’t understand why the fact that one is a joint tenant is not the end of the analysis. Why shouldn’t it be?” Justice Alito asked Fernandez’s lawyer, indicating his belief that present consent should always override a present objection, much less an absent one. For Alito, Randolph has got it reversed–since he can’t imagine having the authority to ever tell his co-tenant what visitors she could or couldn’t permit into the home, Rojas’ consent alone should have disposed of the entire case.

Justice Scalia, who was in last Term’s cases a champion of privacy interests and mistrustful of government in search and seizure cases, dissented in Georgia v. Randolph, in part over concerns that abusers would use the rule privileging present objections to prevent police from investigating domestic violence, over the wishes of their battered partners. Today, he returned to that stance, telling Fernandez he was asking for an overbroad extension of a narrow ruling. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts (who dissented in Randolph) and Justice Kennedy (who was in the majority) treated Fernandez’s Fourth Amendment rights as virtually nonexistent in this situation, repeatedly stating that assault victims should not be deprived of the law enforcement assistance they might want to ask for in the abuser’s absence. The fact that Fernandez is basically the world’s worst roommate has made this an easier case for them to decide.

USA - Politics - Supreme Court Nominee Judge Sotomayor on Capitol Hill
Sotomayor thinks the police need to try harder before resorting to warrantless searches. Picture via The New Yorker.

With the conservative justices focusing mainly on the social customs of roommates and the rights of Fernandez’s co-tenant, it fell on Justice Sotomayor, the most vocal defender of Fernandez’s position yesterday, to point out that California’s proposed reading might grant law enforcement too much control in situations where they already have a great amount of power. Sotomayor questioned the wisdom of giving the police carte blanche to manipulate Randolph’s absence/presence test –“[a]ll they have to do is arrest and remove people”– and circumvent proper search and seizure procedures. When California’s lawyer told Justice Breyer that his “reasonable time” compromise would not be a sufficiently “clear answer” for law enforcement, Sotomayor interjected: “How about a clear answer? Get a warrant.” She reiterated this point again later: “I don’t know why that’s so difficult for police officers to understand. Your first obligation under the Fourth Amendment is to get a warrant.”

While that may be true in principle, there’s an argument to be made that the Roberts Court has been slowly weakening the warrant requirement over the years, and the unsympathetic facts of Fernandez’s case surely did not help his cause. From today’s argument, it looks as though the Supreme Court will reduce Georgia v. Randolph to “nothingness,” as Justice Ginsburg mused. Sotomayor may be able to convince Ginsburg and Kagan, who both showed some discomfort with the amount of control their conservative colleagues would hand to the police. She might also get Breyer’s vote if she can somehow figure out a test that is consistent with both his Randolph concurrence and his desire to limit it in situations like these. Without the support of Scalia, however, the list of justices supporting Fernandez’s claim is stuck at four, which, in the Supreme Court, is still a losing number.

SCOTUS Opinion Alert: In Which Transparency is Dealt a Body Blow

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Obama on Phone

How do you know he’s not listening in on your conversations? Answer: you don’t.

 [Photo by Pete Souza, found via the Council on Foreign Relations]

For those of us who believe that the government needs to be more transparent in matters of national security, yesterday was not a very good day. In its first 5-4 opinion of this term, the Supreme Court split along ideological lines and ruled in favor of protecting a wide-ranging international surveillance program from constitutional challenges. Specifically, the Clapper v. Amnesty International opinion makes it much more difficult for lawyers, journalists, and human rights practitioners who suspect the United States of wiretapping their communications with non-Americans abroad to bring suit for such governmental behavior unless they have concrete proof that their correspondence will be intercepted.

At issue in Clapper is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows the United States to target the communications of non-citizens on foreign soil. First authorized in 1978, FISA originally limited the Government to instances where it could show probable cause (to a special closed court known as a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) that its individual targets were “foreign powers or the agents of foreign powers.”  In 2008, however, Congress amended FISA to include Section 1881a, a provision which removed the probable cause requirement and greatly expanded both the pool of people and the kinds of communications that could be monitored.

While FISA is aimed at foreign nationals who fall outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment, one effect of the law was the warrantless interception of thousands of international communications between FISA targets and American citizens. Shortly after the passage of 1881a, a group of American legal, labor, media and human rights organizations led by Amnesty International asked the Supreme Court to overturn that provision. Claiming that they frequently communicate with non-American clients, coworkers, witnesses and sources abroad, the challengers argued that this law violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights.

Before they could even get to the constitutionality of 1881a, however, the challengers ran into a practical problem: because of the secrecy involved in such surveillance programs, they couldn’t find any hard evidence that the United States was actually looking at their correspondence. Since Article III of the Constitution requires that you show some “injury” before you can bring a suit, Amnesty International argued that the injury lay in the “objectively reasonable likelihood” their conversations were or might be intercepted. The challengers further claimed that they had suffered numerous economic and professional harms in trying to avoid these interceptions, such as having to fly abroad to speak with clients in-person rather than over phone or email, and the reluctance of sources to disclose information in light of the potential eavesdropping. In response, the United States claimed that no one in this group had standing to bring this lawsuit, because (1) FISA targets only non-Americans, and (2) they simply could not prove that they were being intercepted. After the Second Circuit agreed with Amnesty International, the United States brought an appeal.

 Justice Alito

Justice Samuel Alito, a huge fan of certainty.

[Photo via Columbia Law School]

Justice Alito’s opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy, reverses the Second Circuit ruling by accepting the Government’s stance that the challengers’ claimed injuries were too speculative to allow the suit to continue to trial. Alito found the Second Circuit’s “objectively reasonable likelihood” standard inconsistent with his reading of Supreme Court precedents, which he believes require a (much harder to show) “certainly impending” injury in order to establish standing. Ignoring the fact that it would be nearly impossible for any American to prove that the Government will monitor his correspondence under 1881a, Alito repeatedly emphasized that the challengers’ fears of future surveillance were nothing more than a “highly attenuated chain of possibilities.” Likewise, Alito brushed aside the fact that some of the challengers’ foreign contacts included the friends and family of Guantanamo detainees (including rather high-profile clients like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mohammedou Ould Salahi) whose communications had already been monitored by the United States.

The majority opinion was also quite unsympathetic to the increased economic and professional costs of operating under 1881a, despite the fact that lawyers and journalists have an ethical duty to protect confidential communications with clients and sources:

“[The challengers] cannot manufacture standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending… Because [they]do not face a threat of certainly impending interception under 1881a, the costs that they have incurred to avoid surveillance are simply the product of their fear of surveillance.”

Naturally, the liberal wing of the Court, which had vociferously questioned the United States at oral argument about the fairness of a law for which virtually no one has standing to challenge, took issue with all parts of the majority opinion. The Justice Breyer-penned dissent also looked to precedent and rejected the majority’s “certainly impending” injury standard in favor of a “reasonable probability” or “high probability” injury standard:

“…[C]ertainty is not, and has never been, the touchstone of standing. The future is inherently uncertain. Yet federal courts frequently entertain actions for injunctions and for declaratory relief aimed at preventing future activities that are reasonably likely or highly likely, but not absolutely certain, to take place. And that degree of certainty is all that is needed to support standing here.”

Breyer went on to list no fewer than 18 cases in which federal courts found standing even where the likelihood of injury was “far less certain than here.” In addition, he argued that under the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Monsanto Co. v. Geertson Seed Farms, “reasonable efforts to mitigate the threatened effects of the future injury”–i.e., the economic costs that the 1881a challengers incurred in trying to keep their communications confidential–could constitute an injury sufficient enough for standing. Looking at the Government’s motive, capabilities and previous actions under 1881a and some other “commonsense inferences,” the dissent concluded that the challengers had in fact met the “reasonable probability” of injury standard and should have been allowed to contest 1881a’s constitutionality at trial.

Unfortunately, the dissenting justices were unable to convince a fifth colleague over to their side, meaning that the federal government is now incentivized to take one more step away from transparency. In his opinion, Justice Alito countered this concern by choosing to place his faith in the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts, which he believes will keep the Government accountable to the Constitution. As Justice Breyer’s dissent pointed out, however, these closed, secret courts (which do not make their hearings or records available to the public) very rarely reject any of the Government’s surveillance plans, and should not be the only safeguard for Americans’ civil liberties.  Nonetheless, the message that the Supreme Court sent yesterday is clear: the more secretive the United States keeps its national security programs, the safer they are from constitutional challenges, and the harder it is for ordinary Americans to vindicate what may be flagrant violations of their rights. We should all be very scared.

The real David Petraeus scandal

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF9u6SuKKE8]

It’s not the adultery, it’s the invasion of privacy:

The fishing expedition into Broadwell’s emails should, on its face, be considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment—while the FBI apparently had a search warrant, it’s hard to see how this warrant was obtained with the “probable cause” the Constitution requires. But the real scandal here is what’s currently considered to be legal. After a 180-day period has elapsed, private emails are currently considered public and require only a subpeona to a provider to be accessed. Even worse, the government contends that even inside the 180-day window opened emails carry no expectation of privacy. As Adam Serwer of Mother Jones puts it, “If you think the feds need a warrant to start looking at your email, you’re dead wrong.” The standards created by the The Electronic Communications Privacy Act from a time when most emails were downloaded rather than stored on a third-party server remain in place. In the current technological context, these standards are privacy shredding.

The invasions of privacy in this case make the need for major changes in the law clear. First of all, the federal courts should make clear that there is the same Fourth Amendment right to privacy in electronic communication that there is in telephone calls. The government should have access to emails only after obtaining a warrant after the showing of probably cause. Cases like the investigation of Broadwell’s email—in which “evidence” of wrongdoing that would not be considered adequate cause if applied to snail mail was enough to obtain a warrant—should not go forward.

And much more needs to be done to protect the privacy of employees. A recent decision by the Supreme Court of Canada provides a valuable road map. “Canadians may therefore reasonably expect privacy in the information contained [workplace] computers, at least where personal use is permitted or reasonably expected,” wrote Justice Morris Day. This is the right approach. The Fourth Amendment should give government employees a presumptive expectation of privacy in their electronic communications, including those on workplace computers. And the privacy of private employees should have a similar expectation of privacy established by federal statute. The fact that emails and text messages are stored on third-party servers should not be used to immolate the privacy of individuals.

It’s That Time of the Year Again: Supreme Court Preview 2012 – 2013

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The width of the smile seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of time the Justice has been on the court.

After a busy summer spent lecturing abroad, appearing at book promotions, publicly sparring with other federal judges, attending Yankees games and having their homes robbed, the Supreme Court is set to start its 2012-2013 session next Monday, October 1st. Though it may not quite match last term’s level of drama with its Affordable Care Act and immigration rulings, this term promises to bring a few blockbusters as the Court prepares to tackle cases on hot-button issues such as affirmative action, gay marriage, government wiretapping and capital punishment for the mentally incompetent. The Supreme Court’s calendar for the term is not entirely set in stone–an opening conference held on September 24th  placed six new cases on the docket, and more cases are yet to be added–but here are some highlights we can expect to see in this coming year:

  • Revisiting Affirmative Action in Higher Education: Abigail Fisher, a Caucasian student, applied but did not gain admission to the University of Texas. She claims that UT unfairly denied her a spot on the basis of her race: under a 1997 Texas law, automatic admission to state-funded universities, including UT, is granted to the top 10% of students in every Texas high school regardless of race. At UT, race is then used as one factor among many to determine admission for the rest of the remaining spots. Fisher did not make the top 10% cutoff at her high school and her application was passed down to the pool that took the applicant’s race into consideration. In 2003, SCOTUS ruled in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan could constitutionally take race into account as one factor in its admissions decisions since racial diversity in higher education was a “compelling state interest.” Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote in her opinion then that she expected the Court to review this ruling again in 25 years, when racial disparities had (hopefully) faded to the point where affirmative action for ethnic minority students was no longer necessary. It has only been nine years since Grutter, but the Court has seen some personnel changes and a marked shift to the right since then–and some believe that Justice John Roberts (who has in a previous case indicated that racial diversity at the elementary school level is not a compelling state interest) & Co. are ready and willing to either overturn or restrict the Court’s previous ruling. Fisher will be argued on October 10th.
  • Gay Marriage (Finally) Makes Its Way Up to SCOTUS… We Think: Last year saw a boom of gay marriage cases being fought in various federal appellate courts across the country, and a number of these decisions have now been petitioned to the Supreme Court. Of the various cases seeking review, most involve challenges to the constitutionality of the Defense Of Marriage Act (which currently denies federal benefits to same-sex couples even if their marriages are legally recognized by their home states), while one involves an appeal from the Ninth Circuit’s February 2012 decision finding unconstitutional California’s Proposition 8 (which changed the state’s constitution to bar same-sex marriage). This last case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, is the most marquee of the bunch, though Emily Bazelon of Slate argues in this essay that proponents of gay marriage should want SCOTUS to take a step-by-step approach and hear one of the less-glitzy DOMA cases instead of Hollingsworth–which may demand too much of SCOTUS by seeking a sweeping decision that marriage is (or is not) a basic right guaranteed to all. SCOTUS has not decided exactly which case to grant cert to yet, if any–none of the six new cases that it agreed to review on Monday involved gay marriage–but Ruth Bader Ginsburg did mention at a University of Colorado conference this summer that the high court is likely to hear a DOMA case this term.
  • Can Suspected Drunk Drivers be Forced to Undergo Warrantless Blood Tests?: In a case concerning the privacy rights of motorists stopped by police for drunk driving, the Supreme Court will consider Missouri’s appeal of a state supreme court ruling that its police wrongly administered a warrantless, non-consensual blood test on Tyler McNeely. Under current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, there are certain defined exceptions that would justify a police officer’s warrantless search and seizure of a person, but McNeely claims that none of these exceptions applied to his blood test, which was forcibly taken at a hospital less than a half-hour after he was first pulled over and refused to take a breathalyzer test. McNeely argues that over half the fifty states have laws prohibiting law enforcement from administering non-consensual blood tests without a warrant. On the other hand, Missouri argues that the 1966 precedent of Schmerber v. California allows for warrantless blood tests where the “special facts” exception exists, including the fact that the body begins eliminating alcohol from its blood shortly after drinking.
  • While We’re On the Subject of Warrants, Drug-Sniffing Dogs Come Under Scrutiny As Well:
    Franky the drug-sniffing dog. We’re not sure what the white stuff around his muzzle is.

    On October 31st, the Court will hear a pair of Florida cases involving drug-sniffing dogs and warrantless searches. In Florida v. Jardines, the defendant argues that the police violated his Fourth Amendment Rights against illegal search and seizure when they brought a drug-sniffing dog named Franky to sniff at his door without a warrant. Jardines contends that there was no probable cause for the sniff, which constituted a search in and of itself. Meanwhile, in Florida v. Harris, the Supreme Court will decide whether an “alert” from drug-sniffing dog Aldo can be assumed credible (thereby establishing probable cause for a warrantless search) merely on the basis that Aldo attended sniffing school, or whether prosecutors must provide more detailed information to show that the dog is indeed reliable. The Florida Supreme Court ruled last year in favor of the latter approach, ordering that the State provide evidence of the dog’s training and certification, field performance records, and evidence of the handling officer’s own experience and training.

  • Capital Punishment, Habeas Relief and the Mentally Incompetent: In the U.S., inmates who have been tried and sentenced to death have a right to challenge their convictions and sentences in a habeas corpus hearing. The Supreme Court has also held that the Eighth Amendment bars capital punishment for the insane and the mentally disabled. But what happens when an inmate is convicted of a capital crime, sentenced to death, and then argues at the habeas corpus petition stage that he is mentally incompetent and therefore cannot assist his lawyers in preparing the petition? Is he entitled to a competency hearing? Two Circuits have found that inmates do have a “right to competence” at the habeas stage and have granted mentally incompetent inmates indefinite stays until they become competent–meaning that if they never do become competent, their death sentence is effectively turned into life imprisonment. Supporters say that it is unjust to force the mentally incompetent into habeas proceedings if they cannot help their own counsel assemble their case, and point out that capital punishment for the insane and mentally disabled is unconstitutional anyway. Opponents argue, however, that these indefinite stays run contrary to the state’s interest in the finality of convictions. The Supreme Court will hear arguments for Ryan v. Gonzales and Tibbals v. Carter on October 9th.
  • Corporations Behaving Badly and Causing Human Rights Atrocities Abroad: The Alien Tort Statute was penned in 1789 to provide for foreign citizens redress for violations of international law, in United States courts. Modern applications of this law have focused on bringing to justice former government officials accused of atrocities abroad, but Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum adds a Citizens United-esque twist: can corporations be sued under the ATS for genocide, torture and other violations of international law committed abroad? And what is the exact scope of the ATS in cases where the alleged violations were committed outside of the U.S., anyway? The Second Circuit said no to the first question in 2010, dismissing the case based on its holding that corporate liability is not a universally recognized norm of customary international law. Upon Kiobel’s appeal, the Supreme Court held oral argument on the case in February 2012, but took the unusual step of ordering further argument for the new term beginning in October. This will be the first argument of the 2012-2013 year: look for the justices to focus not so much on the corporate liability issue but on the question of whether Kiobel can even bring her case in an American court for human rights abuses committed on foreign territory.
  • Government Wiretapping: The Supreme Court referees on October 29th the latest chapter in the fight between national security and civil liberties. In Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, a group of strange bedfellows (including Amnesty Int’l, the New York State Bar Association and the Gun Owners Foundation) have banded together to sue the government over the constitutionality of a provision in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that permits the “targeting” of “persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States” for the purposes of “gathering foreign intelligence information.” Amongst other things, the law authorizes the government to wiretap such persons’ communications. The trouble for Amnesty and friends, however, is that in order to even sue in federal court, they must have standing, which requires them to show that they have suffered or will imminently suffer the injury they are complaining of. Unfortunately, they have no definitive proof that the government is in fact wiretapping their communications. Despite this obstacle, the Second Circuit permitted the case to proceed; SCOTUS will now decide whether the group does in fact have standing to sue.
  • Davids v. Goliaths–Immunity for Government Officials in Military and Prison Contexts: On Monday, the Supreme Court added to its docket not one but two cases from lawyerless petitioners, each involving the rights of individuals to sue the federal government. Millbrook v. United States arises from the claims of Kim Lee Millbrook, an inmate at a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania who accused three prison guards of sexually assaulting him. Though his suit was dismissed by the lower courts, Millbrook handwrote an appeal in pencil to the Supreme Court, which then decided to use Millbrook’s case to resolve the question of government liability for claims made against federal prison guards, according to the Associated Press.  Meanwhile, Levin v. United States addresses government liability for tortious acts committed by military medical personnel. The case arises from a battery claim against the U.S. government, made by a Guam resident whose eye was allegedly damaged in a botched cataract operation carried out by a U.S. Navy surgeon. Levin appealed to the Supreme Court after the Ninth Circuit ruled against him and held that the federal government has sovereign immunity from battery claims.
  • Does the Government “Take” Your Land If It Repeatedly Floods Those Lands? Finally, the Supreme Court will settle this term the age-old question of whether the government must compensate parties under the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause if it repeatedly causes those parties’ properties to flood, thus “taking” the private property for “public use.” Arkansas contends that over a six-year period, the United States Army Corps of Engineers did just that to one of its forests, the 23,000-acre Dave Donaldson Black River Wildlife Management Area, causing degradation of the forest’s timber and destroying wildlife habitats. The government’s response is that the lands were not rendered completely unusable because the flooding was only “temporary” and the waters always receded. It maintains that its behavior may constitute a tort but does not rise to the level of a “taking.” While this case may sound a little bit like a no-brainer–why shouldn’t the government pay back the state for this recurring damage?–SCOTUS has in the last half-century chipped away slowly at the Takings Clause, going so far as to allow a Connecticut city to take over private property, without compensation, for the purpose of selling it to a private developer (in 2005’s Kelo v. City of New London). Oral argument for Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States will be held on October 3rd.

Victoria Kwan holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School in New York and has just completed a clerkship with a judge in Anchorage, Alaska. She tweets as @nerdmeetsboy and will continue to post periodically here on legal issues. Rumor has it she and Jay Pinho are dating.