Word: courtly
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...Yahoo! Mail's rule is to keep accounts private. "The commitment Yahoo! makes to every person who signs up for an account is to treat their online activities as confidential, even after their death," says spokesman Jason Khoury. Court orders sometimes overrule that. In 2005, relatives of a Marine killed in Iraq requested access to his e‑mail account so they could make a scrapbook. When a judge sided with the family, Yahoo! copied the messages to a CD instead of turning over the account's password. Hotmail now allows family members to order a CD as long...
...seemingly endless nature of death-penalty appeals, passed a law intended to speed the death-row journeys of prisoners like Davis. Optimistically called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), the new law attempted to limit death-row prisoners to one set of appeals in federal court. Despite the restriction, Davis raised a variety of constitutional issues in his trip through the federal courts. Along the way, his lawyers accumulated a stack of affidavits from the motley crew of witnesses and from snitches of their own recanting their trial testimony and, in some cases, pointing new fingers at Coles...
Under normal circumstances, it takes a case of national importance to rile the Supreme Court during its summer recess. But in the words of an old axiom about capital punishment, "death is different." And so, on a sleepy mid-August Monday, Aug. 17, the court - over a strong dissent - dusted off an antique tool, unused for nearly half a century, to force a new hearing into the slow-rolling fate of a Georgia death-row prisoner named Troy Davis. In the process, the court has opened up new questions about the death penalty: most crucially, how far the courts must...
...Still, a necessary fiction underpinning our justice system is the idea that juries get things right, and so over the years, the courts found no reason to overturn the verdict, in some instances rejecting Davis' appeals on purely procedural grounds. At one point, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles conducted a detailed examination of the new evidence, but when it decided that Davis did not deserve mercy, the prisoner was forced to ask a panel of judges from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for special permission under the AEDPA to file a second federal appeal - this one based...
...vote of 2 to 1, the panel ruled against Davis, and this is where the Supreme Court comes in. Numerous times since the 1996 law was passed, the high court has ruled that the limits imposed by the AEDPA are valid - when they restrict the lower courts. But the Justices held open their own prerogative to issue a writ of habeas corpus if so moved. In other words, the lower federal courts had no power to hear another word from Davis. But he could make his pitch directly to the Supreme Court. Prisoners have been trying for nearly 50 years...