Court blocks Ala. from checking student status
GREG BLUESTEIN,Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — A federal appeals court on Friday blocked a key part of Alabama’s law that requires schools to check the immigration status of students, temporarily weakening what was considered the toughest immigration law in the nation.

Justice George Carley announced this morning that he will step down from the Supreme Court of Georgia next July, allowing Gov. Nathan Deal to choose his successor and precluding an election for his seat for which some lawyers around the state had been planning to run. 

Just last week, Atlanta attorney Scott Bonder announced that his campaign for the high court had already raised more than $85,000. In August, Bonder and divorce lawyer Tamela L. Adkins told the Daily Report that each planned to run for court seat expected to be vacated by Carley, who had said earlier he would serve out his term that ends in December 2012.

In the same August story, Presiding Judge Anne Elizabeth Barnes of the state Court of Appeals said she was considering joining the race.

Carley said Tuesday in a press release issued by the court, “I am announcing this now to notify potential candidates before the election cycle gets into full swing.”

In unrelated news that could nonetheless interest would-be candidates for the high court, the U.S. District Court is seeking to hire a new magistrate judge to replace Judge C. Christopher Hagy, who is stepping down next June. The deadline for applications is Oct. 21, according to this link.

The Daily Report will have a full report on Carley’s announcement in its next edition, which will be online late this afternoon.

The full text of Carley’s press release is below.

GEORGE CARLEY TO STEP DOWN JULY 2012

Atlanta, October 4, 2011 – Presiding Justice George H. Carley announced today that he will leave the Supreme Court of Georgia on July 17, 2012, after all cases from the January term of court have been decided.

That means that Governor Nathan Deal will have the opportunity next year to appoint a replacement to the state’s highest court. Whoever the governor appoints will then have to run for election in 2014.

 “I am announcing this now to notify potential candidates before the election cycle gets into full swing,” the Presiding Justice said. Carley, 73, announced earlier that he did not plan to run for re-election.

When he steps down, Carley will leave the high court as its Chief Justice. The court voted unanimously last month to have him serve as the leader of Georgia’s judicial system for two months before he leaves the court. He will become the first in Georgia history to have served as Chief Justice and Presiding Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, as well as Chief Judge and Presiding Judge of the Georgia Court of Appeals.

The Presiding Justice said that although he is stepping down from the state Supreme Court, he intends to continue being involved in the legal field. “I have loved every minute I have served,” said Carley, who has been a judge for 32 years.

Two days after the state Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency for convicted cop killer Troy Davis and the day after Davis’ highly-protested execution, Gov. Nathan Deal announced he had appointed a state legislator to succeed a board member whose term is expiring at the end of the year.

Rep. James Mills, R-Gainesville, was tapped to succeed Gale Buckner after she leaves the post on Dec. 31. Mills, a business owner, could not be reached immediately for comment.

The Governor’s Office said his announcement was not related to the Davis case. Rather, the governor chose to make his announcement today so that District 25 voters could prepare for a special election on Nov. 8  to replace their representative.

“This provides a cost savings and ensures the district will have representation when the legislative session begins in January.”

According to the governor, Mills has served on the state Legislature for nearly two decades and will resign from the House on Oct. 1 to allow the special election this fall.

“The duties of the Pardons and Paroles board involve equally important and difficult decisions,” the governor’s written statement said. “James Mills is a man of strong faith, who will ably balance our hopes for rehabilitation with our need for community safety.”

The recently released Jacqueline Kennedy oral history interviews reveal she found Justice Arthur Goldberg insufferable and had some of the same frustration with the court’s “isolation” that the court’s critics might express today.

Goldberg, who rose to prominence as a union lawyer, first served as Kennedy’s secretary of labor and the president named him to the U.S. Supreme Court when Felix Frankfurter stepped down.

Jackie told interviewer Arthur M.  Schlesinger Jr.  that Goldberg “never stopped talking about himself.” She called him “the biggest egomaniac of any man I’ve ever seen in my life.”

She said of Goldberg in another part of the interview, “I just think it’s such a shame to be so pleased with yourself.”

Her husband’s treatment by the Dallas Morning News, which ran a full-page ad the day of the assassination saying Kennedy was soft on communism, was still an open wound for Jackie, and she tied that into her feelings about Goldberg. Jackie recalled that Goldberg voted with the court in a case “where you can write anything about people in public office.”

She continued elsewhere in the interview, “And I thought, that’s right after that ad of the day in Dallas—‘Wanted for Treason.’ And there you, his appointee, go and say that everything, even this, is all right? But it’s because the Supreme Court is so isolated. They’re never affected by newspapers, anything.”

She added, “When you think, ads like that in the paper was partly what killed Jack. They get so detached from life up in the Supreme Court.”

She was referring to New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 case where a unanimous court established the “actual malice” standard in defamation cases involving public figures.

In addition to the ad in the Dallas Morning News the day of the assassination, a “Wanted for Treason” leaflet with the president’s picture was distributed in Dallas that day.

Schlesinger also asked Jackie about Justice William O. Douglas, whom he suggested was a “great friend” of the president. Jackie corrected him, allowing that Douglas was a friend of the president’s father and his brother, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. “We never really saw Bill Douglas much, but I think he liked him.”

Unwilling to let go of the line of questioning, Schlesinger asked if Douglas came around the White House. “Never ,” Jackie replied, adding that “none of those people,” came to the White House, presumably referring to the other justices.

As has been reported, Jackie called Martin Luther King a “phony,” and “a tricky person” because of his dalliances outside his marriage.

The remarks should be viewed in the context of what Jackie had been told about King. Not long before the interview,  Jackie was told that King made jokes about the president’s funeral while he was watching it on TV and ridiculed Cardinal Richard Cushing, the archbishop of Boston who married the Kennedys and celebrated his funeral mass.  That information came from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had a well-known vendetta against King. Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, an aide to King, told Fox 5 last week that King admired the president and that Hoover fabricated the information. A footnote in the book refers to an FBI tape of King’s purported remarks.

Jackie and Robert Kennedy later attended King’s funeral in Atlanta and Jackie also said in the interview  that her husband “never really said anything against Martin Luther King.” The president “said what an incredible speaker he was during that freedom march thing,” and didn’t pass judgment on the reports he was receiving from Hoover on King’s personal life.

Caroline Kennedy,  who gave  permission for her mother’s interviews to be  released,  cautions in the forward to the book that her mother gave the interviews—one of only three times she spoke to a journalist about her White House years—when she “was a young widow in the extreme stages of grief. The interviews were conducted just four months after she had lost her husband, her home, and her sense of purpose. She had two young children to raise alone. It isn’t surprising that there are some statements she would later have considered too personal, and others too harsh.”

Though she was often the subject of press reports and gossip rags, Jackie, who died in 1994, guarded her privacy and never wrote a memoir.  She gave these interviews in 1964 on the condition that they be locked in a vault during her lifetime. The book, “Jacqueline Kennedy, Historic conversations on life with John F. Kennedy,” is accompanied by CDs of the entire interview with Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide and one-time Harvard history professor. Schlesinger, who died in 2007, won the Pulitzer Prize for his history of the Kennedy presidency, “A Thousand Days.”

 On a night when four Atlanta mayors spent much of a 90-minute discussion congratulating each other for their accomplishments, the Atlanta school testing scandal elicited a rare moment of disagreement between Mayor Kasim Reed and predecessors Andy Young and Bill Campbell. And Reed suggested he’ll continue to use his bully pulpit to encourage the school board to improve its governance, warning that “if we don’t see significant improvement  . . . then the mayor should take the system.”

Accountability is the issue, Reed said. While few citizens can name members of the school board, “everybody knows who the mayor is and they hold him accountable.”

 The comments came in an Atlanta magazine-hosted forum Monday evening  at the Atlanta History Center. Reed, Campbell, Young and Sam Massell took questions from Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas A. Blackmon. Shirley Franklin didn’t attend because of a family obligation.

Young attributed the current state of the Atlanta schools to the school board’s penchant for hiring “outsiders”—particularly from the Northeast—to run the system. He also suggested the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was determined to find wrongdoing and dismissed all standardized testing as nonsense. While not calling out the AJC by name, Young said “the newspapers have to take some responsibility. Just like they sent [a reporter] to trash Mayor [Maynard] Jackson, they sent people to trash the schools.”

Bill Campbell, who famously had his differences with the AJC, didn’t follow Young’s shot at the  newspaper, but he did criticize Beverly  L. Hall, the former Newark and New York City school administrator who presided over the Atlanta schools during the cheating scandal. “The school system functioned tremendously well for many, many years before  Dr. Hall came here” and became preoccupied with testing and treated teachers poorly, he said.

But Reed said that standardized testing is a national issue and “I don’t want us to run away from tests. If  tests are the measure, I believe  our kids can match up. I just want the improvement to be real.”

Reed confided that he first took advice from Young—in a school—many years earlier. Reed, a product of Fulton public schools, recalled meeting Young as a 10-year-old and being disturbed when the mayor playfully messed up his carefully coiffed Afro. Young recalled  the meeting, too. “I think what I said was ‘you got your hair fixed, now you better get your head right.’”

A group of 400 immigration lawyers in Georgia and Alabama on Thursday called on Gov. Nathan Deal to revoke his appointment of a member of the new state Immigration Enforcement Review Board.

The Atlanta chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association issued a statement Thursday saying it strongly opposed Phil Kent, who runs a local consulting firm. He is a former president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation and is the national spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group.

David Soloway, who chairs the Atlanta chapter of the lawyers’ group, said in the statement that its opposition to Kent came not from his “restrictionist views on immigration – although his views are sadly misplaced – nor even his [work for] a hate group.”

“Instead,” the statement added, “Mr. Kent’s disqualification arises from his own words that mark him as unabashedly bigoted. Mr. Kent openly has called for using immigration laws to maintain the “whiteness” of America;  he has lamented advertising that reflects the reality of America’s multiculturalism;  and he even has asserted that “American authenticity” can be found only where whites feel comfortable in their white identity.”

That statement was softer than one Soloway issued earlier Thursday that referred to Kent as a “white supremacist.” Soloway said he made the change after speaking to Kent on the phone Thursday.

Kent, said Soloway, noted that he was familiar with being in public controversies, but “he seemed to be very hurt by being called a white supremacist.” Soloway said he decided he’d need far more time to study Kent’s writings to justify calling him a white supremacist.

Kent told the Daily Report on Thursday that he was pleased that Soloway revised the statement to remove that allegation, which he called a lie, and he added that there were “other lies” in the statement. He called the Southern Poverty Law Center “a radical left-wing group” that likes to call people “haters.”

The immigration lawyers’ group, he added, “is for permissive immigration laws,” that allow its members to make more money.

The review board Kent is joining was created by House Bill 87, the state’s new immigration control law. The immigration lawyers’ group opposed the bill.

“We’re like umpires,” said Kent, adding that he expected the panel to spend its time examining whether employers are using the E-Verify system to check employees’ immigration status.

A spokesman for Deal issued a statement responding to the lawyers’ group’s opposition to Kent: “The board will review complaints issued by citizens about the actions or inactions of local government authorities. No individuals go before the board. The board’s primary purpose isn’t punitive; it’s to encourage statewide compliance with the new law.”

Scott Bonder, a civil litigator from Fried & Bonder, formally announced his candidacy for the state Supreme Court last week with an e-mail highlighting dozens of endorsements from members of the bar. The release, which lists his endorsements on the second page, can be found here.

Today the Georgia attorney general’s office officially filed its challenge of a June 27 preliminary injunction against parts of the state’s recent immigration law in the 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The 86-page brief argues that opponents of House Bill 87, which allows law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of suspects and creates criminal penalties for harboring and transporting known illegal immigrants, did not properly show they would be irreparably injured by the parts of the law that were to go into effect on July 1. Read more »

Five attorneys are among the 20 state representatives who will have to fight to keep their seats under the proposed redistricting map for the Georgia House of Representatives released Friday.

One of the hottest races would pit freshmen lawmakers Elena C. Parent, D-Chamblee, against Michael S. “Scott” Holcomb, D-Atlanta. Read more »

Here’s a piece of legal news out of Congress—with a Georgia twist—that was lost amid the debt-ceiling negotiations: U.S. Rep. Austin Scott (R-Tifton), has submitted a bill that would eliminate the Legal Services Corp. The congressionally-created nonprofit is a key funder of Atlanta Legal Aid and Georgia Legal Services.

Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, said Scott’s one-sentence bill, H.R. 2774. “betrayed his Tea Party roots.” Read more »