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WASHINGTON, D.C. Today, Senator Rick Scott led a resolution with Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Mike Braun marking the one-year anniversary of last Julys historic democracy demonstrations in Cuba and condemning the illegitimate communist Cuban regimes horrific oppression aimed at silencing Cubans as they demand freedom on the island. Senator Scott continues to be a voice for the Cuban people, bringing awareness to the inhumane treatment they face and calling for support of freedom fighters like Jos Daniel Ferrer and the hundreds of others, including children, who have been unjustly imprisoned for months by the regime. A companion resolution was introduced by Representatives Mario Daz-Balart, Mara Elvira Salazar, Carlos A. Gimnez, Rick Crawford and Michael McCaul in the U.S. House of Representatives. Read the full resolution HERE.

Senator Rick Scott said, Since the July 11th demonstrations, the Cuban peoples fight for patria y vida and democracy in Cuba has only grown stronger. We will never rest until the freedom-loving people of Cuba are liberated from the illegitimate communist regime that continues to oppress and torture them. For decades, we have seen how the cowardly regime attacks, kidnaps, tortures, jails and murders the brave people of Cuba whose only ask is for their God-given basic human rights. These attacks and oppression must end. A new day of freedom in Cuba is closer than ever before, and I wont stop fighting until we see an end to the Castro/Daz-Canel regime.

Senator Marco Rubio said, The Cuban peoples desire for basic freedoms, following decades of oppression under the criminal Castro/Daz-Canel dictatorship, were heard worldwide as they courageously took to the streets on 11J. As a result of their courage, the regime arbitrarily detained, tortured, and censored civilians, including minors. The Biden Administration must end its policy of concessions to the communist regime and hold the dictatorship accountable.

Senator Ted Cruz said, The Cuban people are facing a monumental struggle against a brutal totalitarian communist regime and its one that my family knows all too well. Its impossible to overstate the uncommon bravery and determination of those willing to risk everything to speak out against this oppression. May God bless these individuals and their fight for liberty.

Senator Mike Braun said, Im proud to join this resolution commending the courageous Cubans fighting for human rights against an oppressive regime and the evils of communism. The horrors of communist dictatorships worldwide must never be forgotten, and countries around the world must do their part to shed light on the oppression that brave citizens have endured from their own governments. God bless these men and women in their fight for liberty, and let them be an example for others around the globe fighting for the same basic rights.

Congressman Mario Daz-Balart said, One year ago, thousands of Cubans risked everything to demand freedom. This important resolution marks that pivotal day in Cubas history and honors the courage of those who sacrificed for a free and democratic Cuba. While hundreds of Cubans still languish in prison, we must remain steadfast in our solidarity with the Cuban people by tightening sanctions on their oppressors and expanding internet access, broadcasting, and democracy-building for the Cuban people. I commend my colleagues in the House and Senate for their leadership and for standing with the Cuban people.

Congressman Carlos A. Gimnez said, We commemorate the anniversary of the freedom fighters in Cuba and their stand against communism, the very system of social, political, and economic oppression that has brought misery, poverty, and death to the Cuban people. Its time for the United States to stand up for free and fair elections in Cuba, for freeing all political prisoners held by the regime, for the establishment of a free and independent press, and for connecting the Cuban people with internet free of censorship.

Congresswoman Mara Elvira Salazar said, On July 11, 2021, the Cuban people took to the streets shouting Libertad in historic protests after having lost everything to the regime including their fear. Peaceful demonstrators were violated, beaten, and unjustly sentenced to prison for decades. Today, the regime continues to oppress its people, but we remain confident that we have finally witnessed the beginning of the end. May God bless the brave Cuban people in their fight for freedom.

Congressman Rick Crawford said, The Castro/Daz-Canel dictatorship continue their oppressive reign over the Cuban people. Last year, they once again took extreme measures to silence their own citizens who support democracy. We will always stand with the Cuban people in their pursuit for basic liberty and democracy.

Congressman Michael McCaul said, Last year, thousands of brave Cubans from all walks of life demanded the end of the repressive communist dictatorship. Im proud to join my House and Senate colleagues in this resolution honoring the protestors bravery in shining a spotlight on the regimes oppression. The July 11th protests must be a clarion call to the Biden administration that its policies of unilateral concessions are an affront to the Cuban peoples demand for freedom.

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Leads Colleagues in Resolution Recognizing One-Year Anniversary... - Senator Rick Scott

Former President Donald Trump pictured at a Republican campaign event on June 25, 2022 in Mendon, Illinois. (Photo by Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)

Donald Trump and his family were ordered to testify in the New York Attorney Generals investigation into allegations of fraudulent financial conduct by Trump and the Trump Organization. Although Trump and his children will appear for their depositions, dont expect them to say anything. The smart money is that they will assert the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer any substantive questions.

Taking the Fifth has become a familiar moniker for all types of witnesses gangsters, politicians, even lawyers and judges. Yes, in a civil trial a jury may draw an adverse inference against a party who takes the Fifth. And, combined with the substantive evidence, a verdict canbe reached against that party resulting from the invocation of the privilege. Thus, there is a significant consequence for taking the Fifth in a courtroom setting. And why shouldnt there be?A party should indeed have the benefit of the adverse partys testimony in a civil case, and the party who refuses to testify should pay the price for that refusal, even if the asserting party is resting his silence on the fundamental constitutional right against self-incrimination, which would be fully protected if it were a criminal trial. That makes total sense!

Is there or should there be a difference in a civil trial? Maybe. Typically, when someone takes the Fifth in a proceeding of interest to the public, the man on the street draws an adverse inference against him, i.e., the person who asserts the Fifth is a bad guy. Why else would he take the Fifth? In fact, Donald Trump himself has publicly articulated this commonly-held view. The mob takes the Fifth, hesaid at a campaign rally in September 2017. If youre innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment? Ironically, Trump himself invoked the Fifth Amendment in 1990, during his bitter and public divorce from his late first wife, Ivana Trump. The real estate mogul took the Fifth to avoid answering questions about adultery, invoking the Fifth a total of 97 times in deposition questions that were mostly about other women. And many remember Senator Joe McCarthy pushing the envelope daily during the Army/McCarthy hearings in the early 50s, actually compelling witnesses to publicly take the Fifth in order to incite the public to vilify them.

Now, though, the shoe is on the other foot the Trump family itself is under the gun. Is the ex-president concerned? Probably not. His thinking on issues like this is quite malleable. He will simply say that he and his family have done nothing wrong, and that this is a political witch hunt, like so many other witch hunts against him, and theyll refuse to play ball. Half the public wont believe him, half will. And, as long as he has his half, he wont really care what the rest think.

So, while Trump may be sui generis and thus not a particularly good model for this discussionhis taking the Fifth does squarely raise the issue: Is it fair for the public to conclude that someone is a bad person simply because they take the Fifth Amendment? Is it reasonable or appropriate to make a negative assessment about someone who asserts a core constitutional right that has been a fundamental backstop against government overreaching since the dawn of the Republic? Put differently, does the rights mere assertion imply badness or wrongdoing, however lawful it clearly may be for any individual to take that tack?

According to public opinion polling, invoking the Fifth Amendment is not necessarily an indication that someone is guilty. In a poll conducted after Trumps legal team indicated the possibility of Trump pleading the Fifth in the Russia investigation, 51% of registered voters said that when someone invokes the Fifth Amendment, it does not usually mean they are guilty, while 36% said it usually does. 42% of Democrats said pleading the Fifth usually implies the person is guilty, compared to 31% of Republicans and 33% of independents who said the same.

Heres the irony. Steve Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to even appear when he was subpoenaed by the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Had he simply appeared and asserted the Fifth to every question asked or to not produce protected documents, that would have been the end of the matter with no consequence to him other than the view that many would surely have as a result that he had, indeed, criminally participated in the riot. But he wanted to stand tall and not give an impression of weakness by relying on a constitutional right. He even says now, parenthetically,that if he has to go to jail, so be it!

Were not fans of Bannon. But doesnt it say something about how the public views decisions about someone taking the Fifth? In truth, the public has a perfect right to make that decision but is it fair? In a day when so much of our conduct has been criminalized, and with people often taking the Fifth for noble reasons such as protecting their families or themselves from personal embarrassment or their affiliations with ostracized groups is there anything bad about being a communist or belonging to the NAACP in Alabama? any thoughtful criminal lawyer will almost always counsel her client to take five.

By way of example, as a young prosecutor we sought an interview with a witness. His lawyer, a true Brahmin of the bar with total credibility, told us that his client had done nothing wrong and that the interview would accomplish nothing for us. Still, he would decline. He, indeed, said that if I were representing Jesus Christ himself nowadays, I would have him take the Fifth Amendment. Quite a statement!

But isnt there truth to what this lawyer said to us? Most thinking prosecutors today accept that almost every witnesss lawyer is totally justified in insisting on protection for a clients interview by a prosecutor. If so, why should the public draw the seriously negative inference that it typically does when a witness in an investigatory proceeding takes the Fifth? Yes, Bannon had a reason to resist invoking the Fifth he idealized himself in the martyr role as a Trump loyalist intent on fighting back against the House Select Committee. Most witnesses dont have such motivation. They and even more so their lawyers who advise them simply dont want to risk an overzealous prosecutor using an interview or testimony potentially out of context to make a case against them.

The contrast with Miranda during police interrogations is worth noting. Although police are able to get suspects to waive their Miranda rights in most cases, many suspects are advised by their lawyers not to speak to the police. Would anybody criticize the lawyer for giving this advice? Would anybody believe its bad advice, or that the suspects silence means hes guilty?

Most witnesses simply want to protect themselves and their loved ones. Why should they have to pay the price of the publics clamor against them for exercising a constitutional right? Shouldnt the public be better educated about the limited meaning of ones exercise of the constitutional right that should have no adverse consequences outside a courtroom setting? Yes, a hard-to-estimate but extremely significant number of those who take the Fifth probably have done something wrong that requires it. But what about the rest who assert it for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with being guilty?How often in common parlance do people say Ill take the Fifth when they themselves have done nothing wrong, but simply dont want to answer a question that is, for whatever reason, hard to deal with?

Joel Cohen, a former state and federal prosecutor, practices white collar criminal defense law as Senior Counsel at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. He is the author of Broken Scales: Reflections On Injustice (ABA Publishing, 2017) and an adjunct professor at both Fordham and Cardozo Law Schools.

Bennett Gershman is a Professor of Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorneys Office, and a Special Assistant Attorney General in New York States Anti-Corruption Office.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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If Trump Takes the Fifth, Is He Guilty? - Law & Crime

Charles W. Milliken| The Daily Telegram

Now that Roe has been overturned, once again the right to privacy has come to public attention.These two words open up a whole can of worms that the Supreme Court has wrestled with and come down on all sides of the issue.

Back in 1965, the Supreme Court ruled a Connecticut law banning contraception was constitutionally invalid(Griswold v. Connecticut). Justice Hugo Black wrote in that decision, Privacy is a broad, abstract and ambiguous concept.

The court, in this instance, ruled that privacy involving intimate relationships negated the power of the state to intercede or regulate. From the acorn of that ruling grew the mighty oak of the right of a pregnant woman to terminate her pregnancy. Afterwards came rulings leading up to the right to gay marriage, among other rulings dealing with aspects of sexual morality.

There appears to me to be two large questions in thosewords. What is a right? And what is privacy? Today Ill focus on rights,and next week on privacy.

In the Declaration of Independence, the signers opined that we …are endowed by (our) Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They stated that rights came from God, not from man. How could there be anything called a right that did not come from God? Otherwise, any right which depends on the sufferance of a government, no matter how constituted, is not a right at all, but a more or less temporary permission to do some thing, or possess some thing, subject to change or withdrawal at any time the governing authorities so wish.

Consider the Bill of Rights. In order to get the Constitution approved, these 10 amendments were passed since the main body of the Constitution didnt deal with rights adequately. Having listed a number of rights, the Ninth Amendment made clear the rights so enumerated were not an exhaustive list. In other words, the writers of these amendments thought there were many rights too numerous to be included, and that everyone, practically, took for granted. The right to privacy, for example,was nowhere listed.

The Fifth Amendment, following on the Declaration, stated that no one could be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. It is immediately apparent in the text that due process of law and just compensation provide loopholes large enough to drive a truck through.

Consider the right to private property. You may think you own your own home, but you only own it if you comply with myriad government regulations specifying what you can do with that home and, indeed, whether or not you can even live in it. Back in the day, Bonnie and I bought a fixer-upper, but even after having it fixed up, and bought and paid for it, we could not live in it until the local Michigan authorities issued us a Certificate of Occupancy,and they took their sweet time. It was our only home, and we had to pretend not to live in it until the certificate was forthcoming. We are thankful down here in South Carolina such certificates are not necessary.

The courts have held again and again various authorities have the right to intrude on your property rights anytime they feel like it. They can also take it any time they feel like it, provided it is for a public purpose,very elastically defined, and just compensation is whatever the government says it is, not what you think it is. Also, the courts have permitted your property to be taken, without being taken.Say a new environmental regulation destroys half the market value of land you own. Sorry. Thats not a taking.No compensation.

What about the right to life, which IS enumerated? Does the baby in the womb have any such right?

If a constitutionally enumerated right to property can be so thoroughly ignored, what about unenumerated rights? Privacy, unenumerated, Ill consider next.

Charles Milliken is a professor emeritus after 22 years of teaching economics and related subjects at Siena Heights University. He can be reached at milliken.charles@gmail.com.

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Charles Milliken: Defining what exactly is a 'right' - Monroe Evening News

In Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, the Supreme Court terminated the national right to abortion. Writing for a 5-4 majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that the Constitutions Due Process Clause provides no protection for a right that is not deeply rooted in this Nations history and tradition. This means, according to the majority, that it is constitutional to bar the termination of a pregnancy as long as a state legislature rationally thought it would serve legitimate interests.

Nowhere in any of the five opinions did any justice mention the possibility that Mississippis law might violate another constitutional provision and in the process create a constitutional right to compensation for motherhood.

In 1897, the Supreme Court held for the first time that a provision in the Bill of Rights was incorporated as a right by the Fourteenth Amendment. In Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad Company v. Chicago, the railway challenged a jury award of $1 compensation for access to its property for a public street. The court held that even though an Illinois statute had authorized the taking and the proper procedure had been followed the states decision violated the Due Process Clause. This is because the de minimis award violated the Fifth Amendment, which provides that private property shall not be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The Just Compensation Clause requires government to pay the fair market value of private property it takes for a public use. The Supreme Court does not require the government to physically take property for there to be a taking; what matters is whether the rights of the owner are impaired by the governments use. As the Supreme Court held in Armstrong v. United States, the Just Compensation Clause was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.

Applying long-established Supreme Court precedents, requiring a pregnant women to give birth is a taking of her property during the period between the prohibition of elective abortion and childbirth. Undoubtedly, she owns her own body. As the dissent pointed out, There are few greater incursions on a body that forcing a woman to complete a pregnancy and give birth. They include physiological changes, greater need for medical treatment and increased risk. As the dissent noted, an American woman is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. She must also comply with state laws that regulate her behavior during pregnancy. In many states, it is illegal for her to consume alcoholic beverages, and in five she can be involuntarily committed for doing so. Pregnancy also imposes additional costs for changes in diet and maternity clothes. Women will need time off from work for medical appointments and may have to stop working altogether. Finally, there is the cost of giving birth.

The Supreme Courts definition of taking also requires that it be done for a public purpose. In Dobbs, the court had no difficulty in determining that the Mississippi law was adopted for the public purpose of protecting prenatal life. And while the newly-born citizens are private persons, the fact that individuals benefit from the states ban on abortion does not mean there is no constitutional taking. As the court held in 2005 in Kelo v. City of New London, the governments pursuit of a public purpose will often benefit individual private parties. In effect, state abortion bans impose the costs of bearing children on all mothers, who are denied the right to control the use of their wombs.

This is why women required to carry their pregnancy to term have a right to compensation for their service to the state. This applies to women in every state, since every state imposes some limit on the duration in which elective abortions are permitted.

What expenses must be compensated? At a minimum, out-of-pocket medical expenses due to pregnancy. While many women have insurance that covers some of these costs, they should be fully reimbursed for all mothers. That might best be accomplished by guaranteeing that pregnant women will have comprehensive health insurance until they give birth. Other out-of-pocket costs for clothing and food should also be compensated, either through a monthly grant or a reimbursement process. Lost income will vary based on each womans economic situation at the time of pregnancy and would need to be separately evaluated based on the specific circumstances of each mother.

Opponents of Dobbs have directed most of their ire at the five justices who signed the majority opinion. But it is unrealistic to expect the court will return to Roe v. Wade in the foreseeable future. Litigation to establish constitutional rights to compensation for the expenses of pregnancy should be pursued.

Rozinski is an associate professor of political science at Touro University.

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Roe, Dobbs and women's rights New York Daily News - New York Daily News

The Fifth Amendment Bills of the 1999 Constitution, from Alteration One to Alteration Sixty-Six, have been approved by the Anambra State House of Assembly for the benefit of the people.

The Senate and House of Representatives, respectively, amended sixty-six sections of the 1999 Constitution in March of this year. The amended sections were sent to all state Houses of Assembly in Nigeria for consideration as it requires two-thirds of the states in Nigeria to pass it before it becomes law, according to the majority leader, Dr. Nnamdi Okafor.

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Among the changes were those that supported the final autonomy of the state legislature, judiciary, local government, and independent candidacy.

Speaker of the House, Right Honourable Uche Okafor read out the sixty-six alterations to the House, while the lawmakers supported it through a voice.

In his reaction, the member representing Nnewi North Constituency, Honourable Nonso Smart-Okafor, commended the House for concurring with the entire alterations as sent to them by the National Assembly , stressing that the alterations were made to capture the present realities of the country and meet the yearnings and aspirations of the people.

Honourable Uzoma Eli, member representing Onitsha South One Constituency, described it as a step in the right direction, adding that the changes will ensure that Nigeria has a progressive constitution that can guarantee unprecedented development of the country.

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Anambra House of Assembly Passes 5th Amendment Bills - TVC News