City and municipal court cuts ties with contractor JusticePoint
The Milwaukee Municipal Court has severed ties with a consultant that for four decades has done work for the court that deals with some of Milwaukee County’s most vulnerable populations.
JusticePoint, a nonprofit, offers a Court Alternatives Program that works with people who have been cited for ordinance violations and are at risk of incarceration due to indigence, mental health or substance use issues. The Milwaukee-based organization told the Journal Sentinel it received notice on Monday its contract would be terminated.
No reason for the termination was provided in a recent letter from Rhonda Kelsey, Purchasing Director for the City of Milwaukee.
“JusticePoint is disappointed that the City of Milwaukee has canceled the Municipal Court Alternatives Services contract,” said Nick Sayner, the CEO and founder of JusticePoint. “We are deeply concerned that our clients, who largely consist of the most vulnerable, will no longer receive alternatives to the traditional municipal court process.
“In addition to assisting clients with satisfying their court obligations, our clients receive guidance with mental health and substance use issues, and eliminating this program will negatively impact our clients and the city as a whole.”
Emails between JusticePoint and the court obtained by the Journal Sentinel show the two groups met inperson May 5, during which the court asked JusticePoint to voluntarily cancel its contract.
There appears to be a dispute about a deadline made by the court during that meeting for JusticePoint to reply with possible solutions by May 11. The city stated in its termination letter delivered May 15 that because it had not received a reply by that date, the termination was the city’s final decision.
The emails show JusticePoint replied on the morning of May 15. In that letter, JusticePoint indicated the court stated during the May 5 meeting the “judges have lost faith in JusticePoint” over its years-long practice of sharing citations with Legal Action Wisconsin.
Legal Action, a nonprofit with offices in Milwaukee, Kenosha, Madison and elsewhere around the state, provides free legal services to low-income people.
JusticePoint received the contract termination from the city about four hours after it replied.
Sayner and COO Edward Gordon
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Google, Twitter and Facebook in lawsuits seeking to hold them liable for terrorist attacks. But the justices sidestepped the big issue hovering over the cases, the federal law that shields social media companies from being sued over content posted by others.
The justices unanimously rejected a lawsuit alleging that the companies allowed their platforms to be used to aid and abet an attack at a Turkish nightclub that killed 39 people in 2017.
In the case of an American college student who was killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris in 2015, a unanimous court returned the case to a lower court, but said there appeared to be little, if anything, left of it.
The high court initially took up the Google case to decide whether the companies’ legal shield for the social media posts of others, contained in a 1996 law known as Section 230, is too broad.
Instead, though, the court said it was not necessary to reach that issue because there is little tying Google to responsibility for the Paris attack.
The outcome is, at least for now, a victory for the tech industry, which predicted havoc on the internet if Google lost. But the high court remains free to take up the issue in a later case.
“The Court will eventually have to answer some important questions that it avoided in today’s opinions. Questions about the scope of platforms’ immunity under Section 230 are consequential and will certainly come up soon in other cases,” Anna Diakun, staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in an emailed statement.
Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said an email that the company will “continue our work to safeguard free expression online, combat harmful content, and support businesses and creators who benefit from the internet.”
A lawyer for the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in Paris, expressed disappointment at the outcome, but pledged to fight on. “We lawyers see this decision as just another hurdle we need to navigate. It took decades to topple Big Tobacco, we’ll eventually rein in reckless and greed driven Big Tech as well,” Nitsana DarshanLeitner wrote in an email.
The family of a victim in the bombing of the Reina nightclub in Istanbul claimed that the companies assisted in the growth of the Islamic State group, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
But writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said the family’s “claims fall far short of plausibly alleging that defendants aided and abetted the Reina attack.”
In the Paris attack, Gonzalez’ family raised similar claims against Google over her killing at a Paris bistro, in an assault also claimed by the Islamic State. That was one of several attacks on a June night in the French capital that left 130 people dead.
The family wants to sue Google for YouTube videos they said helped attract IS recruits and radicalize them. Google owns YouTube.