Supreme Court stays lower court order to remove San Diego memorial cross News
Supreme Court stays lower court order to remove San Diego memorial cross

[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [JURIST news archive] on Monday stayed a lower court's order that a 29-foot cross honoring Korean War veterans [background] be removed from city-owned property in San Diego. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy [official profile], who oversees appeals from the Ninth Circuit, granted without comment the temporary delay requested [docket] by the San Diegans for the Mt. Soledad National War Memorial [advocacy website], which argued that removing the 55-year-old cross would amount to "destruction of a national treasure." City officials had planned to remove the cross as soon as Wednesday. In May, US District Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. [official profile] of the Southern District of California ordered [Union-Tribune report] that the cross be removed by Aug. 2 and that the city be fined $5,000 a day if it was not. Thompson found that the cross was a state endorsement of religion that violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment [text].

The lawsuit was brought by Philip Paulson, an atheist and Vietnam War veteran who has been challenging the cross for more than 15 years. The Supreme Court declined [docket] to consider an appeal in other litigation over the Mt. Soledad cross three years ago. AP has more. SCOTUSblog has additional coverage. The San Diego Union-Tribune has local coverage.

THIS DAY @ LAW

White supremacists overthrow government in Wilmington, North Carolina

A group of white supremacists overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina on November 10, 1898, killing at least dozens of Black people in the process. The city's Republican government resigned after the 500-2,000 strong white mob burned the offices of a Black-owned newspaper and terrorized black neighborhoods. The new state Democratic government passed laws in 1899 disenfranchising Black voters across North Carolina. Learn more about the 1898 Wilmington Coup.

Supreme Court limited free speech in wartime

On November 10, 1919, the US Supreme Court ruled in Abrams v. United States that the federal government could criminalize speech if it was of a type tending to bring about harmful results, in this case, resistance to the United States war effort. In a powerful dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes countered that even during wartime, free speech could only be curtailed when there was clear and "present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about."

Leonid Brezhnev dies

On November 10, 1982, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died of a heart attack. He had served as leader of the USSR from October 1964 until his death. Following his death, the Soviet Union cycled through three more leaders during the 1980s until Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the country to dissolve in 1991. Read an obituary of Leonid Brezhnev from the New York Times.