Category Archives: Law

Judge blocks retaliation against Sen. Mark Kelly for “illegal orders” video

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In an opinion issued Thursday, Judge Richard Leon, senior US District Court for the District of Columbia, granted Senator Mark Kelly a preliminary injunction blocking Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from retaliating against Kelly for a video he and others made citing laws requiring refusal to obey illegal orders.

The opinion’s opening paragraphs make the judge’s viewpoint clear:

United States Senator Mark Kelly, a retired naval officer, has been censured by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for voicing certain opinions on military actions and policy. In addition, he has been subjected to proceedings to possibly reduce his retirement rank and pay and threatened with criminal prosecution if he continues to speak out on these issues. Secretary Hegseth relies on the well-established doctrine that military servicemembers enjoy less vigorous First Amendment protections given the fundamental obligation for obedience and discipline in the armed forces. Unfortunately for Secretary Hegseth, no court has ever extended those principles to retired servicemembers, much less a retired servicemember serving in Congress and exercising oversight responsibility over the military. This Court will not be the first to do so!

Worse still, Secretary Hegseth contends that this Court is not yet competent to decide the issues in this case. He and his fellow Defendants argue that military personnel decisions are exempt from judicial review and, in any event, that Senator Kelly should first be required to go through the military appeals process so the military can have the first crack at adjudicating his First Amendment rights. I disagree. This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees. After all, as Bob Dylan famously said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” To say the least, our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government, and our Constitution demands they receive it!

Leon’s full opinion appears below.

Disgraced attorney could face trial on fraud, theft charges next month if plea deal not reached

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The trial of disgraced Honolulu attorney Robert Chapman is scheduled to take place the week of March 9, court records show.

Readers may recall that Chapman, the former managing partner in a major downtown law firm, surrendered his license in December 2022 to avoid the likelihood he would be disbarred by the Hawaii Supreme Court stemming from his alleged theft of assets belonging to clients or their estates.

He was then indicted last year on multiple counts of identity theft, forgery, and theft for allegedly plotting to steal an estimated $750,000 from the estate of a deceased Honolulu resident.

Chapman had been licensed to practice law in Hawaii since 1980. He has been free since his arrest last June after posting a $1 million bail bond via A-1 Bail Bonds, court records show.

Active plea negotiations were underway last year, but their current status is unknown.

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Miske’s half-brother awaits court decision on long shot appeal

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John Blaine Stancil, the younger half-brother of the late Michael J. Miske, Jr., is being held at Terminal Island, a low security federal prison in downtown Los Angeles, while awaiting a decision from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on a long shot challenge to his 20-year sentence for racketeering conspiracy.

Stancil was sentenced a year ago, February 11, 2025, to the maximum prison term allowed by law for his role in Miske’s racketeering organization over a period from at last 2012 through mid-2018. He is currently scheduled to be released on June 10, 2037.

Stancil accepted a last minute plea deal with prosecutors in January 2024, on the same day he was scheduled to go on trial with his brother. He was the last of 12 Miske codefendants to plead guilty.

In his plea agreement, Stancil admitted to being part of Miske’s racketeering organization and committing a variety of offenses violent offenses over several years. In exchange for Stancil’s guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to drop 12 additional counts, including murder-for-hire conspiracy, assault and attempted murder in aid of racketeering as well as conspiracy, carrying and using a firearm in a drug crime, conspiracy to use a chemical weapon, use of a chemical weapon, armed robbery, and drug trafficking.

Those offenses could have resulted in a sentence of life in prison, which Stancil avoided by accepting the plea deal.

But Idaho-based attorney, W. Miles Pope, who took over the case after trial and sentencing, filed the appeal on Stancil’s behalf on December 24, 2025, hopes it will lead to resentencing that will prove to be a “get out of jail early” card that gets his client out several years early.

Federal prosecutors responded by filing a motion to dismiss the appeal.
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Tear Gas Mirabella

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Guest Post: A first-hand account by Neal Milner, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, and a columnist and regular contributor to Civil Beat, now living in Portland, Oregon.

ICE didn’t target anyone.
The agents on the roof did worse than that.
They targeted everyone.

My wife Joy and I were tear gassed at Portland’s Labor Against ICE demonstration on Saturday, January 31. So were a lot of others.

With no warning or provocation, ICE agents wildly and indiscriminately fired gas canisters and flash bombs into the crowd.

Several thousand people had marched the few blocks from a small park, where the rally started, to ICE headquarters.

Parents brought children, elderly people came with walkers, (there is a large retirement community across from the park). Families pushed strollers while others walked with dogs. Many cyclists too.

A surprisingly sunny Portland afternoon. Noisy but pleasant. Chanting. Calls and response. “Fuck Ice!”

No talk of violence or even confrontations. The organizers had not planned any purposeful civil disobedience. The only cops visible were a few directing traffic on nearby streets.

Overall, union based and family friendly—at least at first.

Joy and I were a couple hundred yards from the front of the crowd as it arrived at the ICE building. There was one agent observing from the roof. The crowd was across the street with no barriers, human or otherwise, between.

We were talking to two guys holding their small terrier when with no warning and no provocation, a few agents came onto the lower roof of the building and began firing the gas canisters and shooting off loud flash devices.

Before we even knew what was going on—remember there had been no warning—what we thought was smoke but was gas enveloped us and many people behind us. The stuff travels indiscriminately and really fast.

Joy and I immediately felt the effects of the gas. It’s very painful and disorienting. Fortunately, with some help we were finally able to walk on our own the few blocks to our building.

ICE didn’t target anyone. The agents on the roof did worse than that. They targeted everyone.

To make that more real, think of what that meant for three groups of people at the rally.

Older people who were less mobile: Who knows how they managed to navigate the crowd and move to shelter, trying to outrace the rapidly spreading tear gas. Our 80+ year old neighbor was hit blocks away.

Union people: besides their own struggles with the attack, how different it must have felt from picket lines where rules are so predictable.

The children: Parents brought their kids to teach them something about being a citizen and in a setting a lot more interesting than middle school social studies.

The Oregonian has a video of a little girl sitting on the ground, saying, “Owie, Owie.” That’s sure not the civics lesson her parents hoped she would learn.

There’s ongoing litigation about these Portland ICE tactics. A few days ago a judge ruled that ICE can’t act as arbitrarily as it did on that Saturday.

Good, it’s important to have a victory for freedom of assembly and the First amendment.

But what will linger with me most is the vision of that stunned, crying little girl in a pink sweatshirt covered with butterflies.

They tear gassed our children.