Justice Amy Coney Barrett finally meets the other 8 Supreme Court justices for a class photo
Justice Amy Coney Barrett has been on the job since late October, but until now, because Covid kept the justices apart, she had not been pictured with her colleagues.
That changed Friday when the court released its new class photo depicting the junior-most justice with her colleagues.
Class photo or no, the 49-year-old Barrett has made her presence known, plunging into work, actively participating in cases heard by telephone amidst the global pandemic. While there have been some clear signs that her vote has solidified the court’s conservative majority, in other areas, Barrett remains more of a mystery even drawing some concern from her allies. That’s because the court has not released opinions in the most controversial cases of the term dealing with the issues such as the Affordable Care Act, religious liberty, unions and the Voting Rights Act.
There has been a bloodbath in the United States in the past few months.
From 2003 to 2020, there had been no federal executions, and only four going all the way back to my birth in 1959. In the 230 years since records began in 1790, we had averaged only marginally more than one federal execution a year.
However, in the last months of his tenure, President Donald Trump presided over the deaths of 13 prisoners, with six conducted after he lost the election. Typically for a president prone to excess, Trump broke various records, though none was particularly salutary: the most federal executions in seven months in history, and the first time a president had ever set executions after losing an election.
Bidenâs Plan to End Afghanistan War Gives Some Detainees Hope for Release
The legal basis for indefinite detention at Guantánamo is to prevent combatants from returning to the battlefield. But what if their old battlefield is no more?
A detainee in a communal cellblock of Guantánamo Bay in 2019. Lawyers for at least two prisoners there contended this week that the governmentâs legal basis for detaining their clients was evaporating.Credit.Doug Mills/The New York Times
April 21, 2021Updated 3:47 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON â President Biden has declared that he intends to end the war in Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks this year. But it is less clear whether anything will change for detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay that was opened for that war.