How Appealing



Friday, May 8, 2015

“Court backs broadcasters, clears way for FCC review of AT&T-DirecTV merger”: The Los Angeles Times has this report.

Shalini Ramachandran of The Wall Street Journal reports that “Ruling Clears Path for AT&T Merger Review; D.C. Appeals Court decision removes hurdle for regulatory review of AT&T-DirecTV merger.”

Lawrence Hurley and Alina Selyukh of Reuters report that “U.S. appeals court throws out FCC order on programming contracts.”

Andrew Zajac and David McLaughlin of Bloomberg News report that “CBS, Disney Defeat FCC in Fight Over Programming Disclosures.”

And Variety has a report headlined “AT&T-DirecTV Merger: Court Decision May Clear Way for Review.”

You can access today’s ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit at this link.

Posted at 11:46 PM by Howard Bashman



“Court tosses Rep. Rangel’s bid to overturn censure”: Stephen Dinan of The Washington Times has this news update.

Michael Doyle of McClatchy Washington Bureau reports that “Court dismisses Congressman Rangel’s challenge to his House censure.”

And Sam Hananel of The Associated Press reports that “Appeals court rejects Rangel’s bid to overturn censure.”

You can access today’s ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit at this link.

Posted at 11:25 PM by Howard Bashman



“More on yesterday’s claim-forfeiture opinion in light of How Appealing’s post”: Matthew Stiegler has this post today at his “CA3blog” discussing my lengthy post of last night about a Third Circuit ruling issued yesterday.

And a federal prosecutor who practices in one of the states within the Third Circuit emails that “we routinely confront defendants who appeal their convictions and raise legal sufficiency challenges (or other claims that require the entire transcript to evaluate fairly (including harmless error)) but include only brief excerpts of the trial transcript in their Appendix (even if they’ve ordered all the transcripts).” As a result, according to my correspondent, the government frequently must “seek an extension of time, order any missing transcripts, and include them in a Supplemental Appendix (at Government expense).” Whether yesterday’s Third Circuit ruling in a civil case will now compel the dismissal of such claims of error in direct federal criminal appeals remains to be seen, but logically that should be the result, because FRAP 10 applies identically in civil and criminal appeals.

All of this, at least in my view, provides further support for my implicit suggestion in my post from last night that either the panel or the full Third Circuit sitting en banc might want to reconsider yesterday’s ruling, especially if its effect might be to force more issues that could have been resolved on direct appeal in a criminal case into federal habeas review due to ineffective assistance of appellate counsel. I will probably have more to say about this decision in next Tuesday’s installment of my “Upon further Review” column published in The Legal Intelligencer.

Posted at 10:54 PM by Howard Bashman



Programming note: After what promises to be a busy day today in Atlanta, I will be heading home this evening. As a result, additional posts will not appear here until tonight. In the interim, some appellate-related retweets are likely to appear on this blogs Twitter feed.

Posted at 8:16 AM by Howard Bashman