"A Maryland appeals court on Tuesday reinstated the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, the subject of the 'Serial' podcast who was freed last year..."

"... after he had spent 23 years fighting charges that he had killed his former high school girlfriend. The Appellate Court of Maryland ruled that a lower court had violated the right of Young Lee, brother of Hae Min Lee, the victim, to have been notified of and to attend a hearing on the state’s motion to vacate Mr. Syed’s conviction. The appeals court ordered a new hearing on the state’s motion to vacate Mr. Syed’s conviction. The court wrote that it 'has the power and obligation to remedy those violations, as long we can do so without violating Mr. Syed’s right to be free from double jeopardy.' 'We can do that, and accordingly, we vacate the circuit court’s order vacating Mr. Syed’s convictions, which results in the reinstatement of the original convictions and sentence.... We remand for a new, legally compliant, and transparent hearing on the motion to vacate, where Mr. Lee is given notice of the hearing that is sufficient to allow him to attend in person, evidence supporting the motion to vacate is presented, and the court states its reasons in support of its decision."

The NYT reports.

I presume Syed will remain free, Lee will be given a respectful hearing, and the result will remain the same.

Michael Moore leads the way in the "stop Warren" effort... but you have to listen to his podcast to get the details.

I said I wanted to do a separate post about whatever it was Michael Moore said that got Drudge to link with the teaser "MICHAEL MOORE: She Stuck Knife in Back...," but on clicking, I see it's a whole podcast...

Elizabeth & Bernie have appeared in my films. I love them both. Why Elizabeth chose to stick a knife in Bernie’s back is beyond me. At a time when job #1 is to remove Trump, how did this help? My new RUMBLE podcast “The Sad Downfall of Elizabeth Warren.” https://t.co/uFwOFNka9U

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) January 15, 2020

... so that's not blog ready. That's a side road I won't take the off-ramp for. I will continue down the highway and go for the debate transcript. I've already done my close analysis of 16 seconds of the after-debate gesturing between Bernie and Warren, and what I really want to do is to see what they said about the miniature controversy that's been stirred up over whether Bernie ever said that a woman cannot beat Trump.

Just as I have no time — well, really, patience — for a podcast right now, I could not put up with sitting through the 2-hour debate last night. I DVR'd it, and I started to watch it, but it didn't begin until 8, and I'd already maxed out my TV-watching capacity on the "Jeopardy!" "Greatest of All Time" show and the Trump Milwaukee rally, both of which started at 7. I watched Trump until there was enough lead time on the "Jeopardy!" recording to skip the ads, then watched "Jeopardy!," then turned to the debate. The first question was so idiotic — an open invitation to just say why you're "best prepared to be commander-in-chief" — that I gave up on pushing myself to watch.

The medical examiner has ruled James Brady's death a homicide, 33 years after John Hinckley shot him, so could there be a murder trial?

"There is no statute of limitations on murder charges, but any attempt to retry Mr. Hinckley would be a challenge for prosecutors, in part because he was ruled insane, said Hugh Keefe, a Connecticut defense lawyer who taught trial advocacy at Yale University."

“They’re dead in the water,” Mr. Keefe said. “That’s the end of that case, because we have double jeopardy. He was tried; he was found not guilty based on insanity.”

But George J. Terwilliger III, who was the assistant United States attorney in Washington when he wrote the search warrant for Mr. Hinckley’s hotel room, said there might be grounds for a new trial.

“Generally, a new homicide charge would be adjudicated on its merits without reference to a prior case,” said Mr. Terwilliger, who became a deputy attorney general under the elder President George Bush and is now in private practice. “The real challenge here would be to prove causation for the death.”

Mr. Hinckley’s lawyer, Barry W. Levine, acknowledged new charges were possible, but said the possibility was “far-fetched in the extreme.” “There’s nothing new here that happened,” he said.

I can't imagine prosecutors choosing to go after Hinckley now, but is there any legal path here? I would have thought no. I'm surprised to see what Terwilliger said, but I'm not an expert on double jeopardy.

"When a prosecutor loses a criminal case in America, there are no remedies."

"It's gone. It's dead as a doornail. If they try the case badly and they lose, it's double jeopardy — you heard of it? So there are no post-trial motions, it's gone. Why? Because we had a rookie prosecutor, and if he had done a better job... Too bad, it's gone. Can you then go ahead and sue the DA and say, 'Boy you should have put your ace prosecutor on there'?"

The Supreme Court's new double jeopardy case divided 6-3 on gender lines: was this "some sort of gender-related 'empathy'"?

Lawprof Mark Tushnet wonders, noting the dissent limited to the 3 female Justices — Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor — and expressing the belief that "this is the first case in which the Court has divided along gender lines." I don't think he's taking account of instances when Justice O'Connor (or Justice Ginsburg) was the only woman on the Court and dissented alone. It is striking to see the 3 women segmented off, but really, what is the big deal? They are the liberal wing of the Court, so it's just a matter of whether or not Justice Breyer joins them. I suppose one might wonder whether there's something male about Breyer's defection from the usual group of liberals.

The case in question, Blueford v. Arkansas, found the 3 women championing the rights of a man accused of murder after a 1-year-old boy died of a severe head injury while in his care. Nothing particularly appealing to females there, as Tushnet notes.

Perhaps what's at work is some sort of gender-related "empathy" triggered by the prosecutor's decision to "overcharge," as the three justices might have thought, and then to continue to try to obtain a conviction on an unjustified charge. (I can also imagine -- I stress the word, because I have absolutely no inside information -- Justice Kagan thinking the case close on the merits and deciding that it would be neat to have the Court line up along gender lines. For what it's worth, I note my personal judgment that Justice Sotomayor's dissent is tighter than the Chief Justice's opinion for the Court.)

Tighter?! I hope that's not a gender-related notion, professor. I've read both opinions, and I think the Chief Justice's majority opinion is plenty tight.

Anyway... neat to have the Court line up along gender lines. Tushnet can imagine Kagan thinking that. I can't.  (And why is Kagan running the show? It's Sotomayor's opinon.)

"This case demonstrates that the threat to individual freedom from reprosecutions that favor States and unfairly rescue them from weak cases...

"... has not waned with time. Only this Court’s vigilance has." 

So ends the dissenting opinion in Blueford v. Arkansas, written Justice Sotomayor and joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan. It's quite an interesting double jeopardy problem, where a mistrial was declared after a report from the jury that there had been a unanimous vote of not guilty on the capital murder charge and the first degree murder charge.

The jury got hung up at the manslaughter charge. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, the jurors were instructed to decide one charge at a time and only to move on to consider the next, lesser charge after they'd found the defendant not guilty on the more serious charge. Roberts writes that despite the report from the jury, mid-deliberation, that revealed that there had been a unanimous not guilty vote on the 2 highest charges, he hadn't been "actually acquitted" of them.

The foreperson’s report was not a final resolution of anything. When the foreperson told the court how the jury had voted on each offense, the jury’s deliberations had not yet concluded. The jurors in fact went back to the jury room to deliberate further, even after the foreperson had delivered her report. When they emerged a half hour later, the foreperson stated only that they were unable to reach a verdict. She gave no indication whether it was still the case that all 12 jurors believed Blueford was not guilty of capital or first-degree murder, that 9 of them believed he was guilty of manslaughter, or that a vote had not been taken on negligent homicide. The fact that deliberations continued after the report deprives that report of the finality necessary to constitute an acquittal on the murder offenses....

But even if we assume that the instructions required a unanimous vote before the jury could consider a lesser offense—as the State assumes for purposes of this case, see Brief for Respondent 25, n. 3—nothing in the instructions prohibited the jury from reconsidering such a vote. The instructions said simply, “If you have a reasonable doubt of the defendant’s guilt on the charge of [the greater offense], you will [then] consider the charge of [the lesser offense].” App. 51–52. The jurors were never told that once they had a reasonable doubt, they could not rethink the issue....