Page 23 - 100117

Groton Daily Independent
Sunday, Oct, 1, 2017 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 084 ~ 23 of 43
and ordered to pay $33.5 million to survivors, including his children and Goldman’s family.
He is still on the hook for the judgment, which now amounts to about $65 million, according to a Gold-
man family lawyer.
On Sept. 16, 2007, he led ve men he barely knew to the Palace Station casino in Las Vegas in an effort
to retrieve items that Simpson insisted were stolen after his acquittal in the 1994 slayings. Two of the men with Simpson in Las Vegas carried handguns, although Simpson still insists he never knew anyone was armed. He says he only wanted to retrieve personal items, mementoes and family photos.
He went to prison in 2008, receiving a stiff sentence that his lawyers said was unfair.
If the nation’s Simpson obsession waned for a while, it resurged last year with the Emmy-winning FX miniseries, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” and the Oscar-winning documentary “O.J.: Made in America.”
Supreme Court conservatives on rise as important term begins By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Disputes over a wedding cake for a same-sex couple and partisan electoral maps top the Supreme Court’s agenda in the rst full term of the Trump presidency. Conservatives will look for a boost from the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch, in a year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said will be momentous.
President Donald Trump’s travel ban appears likely to disappear from the court’s docket, at least for now. But plenty of high-pro le cases remain.
The justices will hear important cases that touch on gay rights and religious freedoms, the polarized
American electorate, the government’s ability to track people without search warrants, employees’ rights to band together over workplace disputes and states’ rights to allow betting on professional and college sporting events.
Last year, “they didn’t take a lot of major cases because they didn’t want to be deadlocked 4-to-4,” said Eric Kasper, director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. “This year, that problem doesn’t present itself.”
Gorsuch quickly showed he would be an ally of the court’s most conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, most recently joining them in objecting to the court’s decision to block an execution in Georgia.
While justices can change over time, Gorsuch’s presence on the bench leaves liberals with a fair amount of trepidation, especially in cases involving the rights of workers.
The very rst case of the term could affect tens of millions of workers who have signed clauses as part of their employment contracts that not only prevent them from taking employment disputes to federal court, but also require them to arbitrate complaints individually, rather than in groups.
“I’m very fearful, given the new Supreme Court, of what will happen,” said Sherrilyn I ll, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Just on Thursday, the justices added a case that has the potential to nancially cripple Democratic-leaning labor unions that represent government workers.
Taken together, the two cases “have a real chance of being a one-two punch against workers’ rights,” said Claire Prestel, a lawyer for the Service Employees International Union.
In the term’s marquee cases about redistricting and wedding cakes, 81-year-old Justice Anthony Ken- nedy, closest to the court’s center, remains the pivotal vote.
In an era of sharp political division, it may be now or never for the court to rein in excessively partisan redistricting. If the justices do set limits, their decision could affect elections nationwide.
The high court has weighed in several times on gerrymandering over the past 30 years, without agreeing on a standard that would allow courts to measure and oversee a process that elected lawmakers handle in most states.
But a lower court was convinced that Democratic voters’ challenge in Wisconsin to the Republican-led