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Senate Judiciary Committee Vote Clears Way For Confirmation Of Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor
The Senate Judiciary Committee"s approval on Tuesday of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor "cleared the way" for a vote next week in the full Senate, where she is expected to be confirmed, the New York Times reports. The committee"s 12 Democrats voted in favor of Sotomayor, with one Republican -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) -- joining them in the 13-6 vote (Lewis, New York Times, 7/28). According to Roll Call, Sotomayor"s confirmation is not in doubt, as members of both parties have predicted as many as 70 votes in her favor. So far, five GOP senators have said they will support the nomination, including Graham, Susan Collins (Maine), Richard Lugar (Ind.), Mel Martinez (Fla.) and Olympia Snowe (Maine) (Stanton, Roll Call, 7/29). Strategists on both sides who have been following the nomination said that as many as five more Republicans could announce intentions to vote for Sotomayor, the AP/San Francisco Chronicle reports (Hirschfeld Davis, AP/San Francisco Chronicle, 7/29). According to the Chicago Tribune, other Republicans initially appeared open to supporting Sotomayor, but pressure from antiabortion-rights groups and gun-rights advocates has swayed them in the other direction (Savage/Simon, Chicago Tribune, 7/29).The Times reports that Tuesday"s partisan vote indicates that Senate Republicans are "determined to deny ... an easy path" for President Obama in his nominations to fill the dozens of open federal appeals courts seats and any future Supreme Court vacancies. Obama is expected to announce several appeals court nominees in the coming weeks. On some appeals courts, including the Richmond, Va.-based Fourth Circuit, Obama"s nominations could change the ideological balance on the bench (New York Times, 7/28).According to the Tribune, Republicans believe that their strategy in Sotomayor"s confirmation hearings "succeeded in setting a new, conservative standard for judging." Throughout the hearings, Democrats portrayed Sotomayor as a moderate, cautious jurist, while many Republican senators sought to portray her as an activist judge. Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the Senate Judiciary Committee"s ranking Republican, said that the confirmation process has been a "repudiation of activist legal thought" and that it "will now be harder to nominate activist judges" (Chicago Tribune, 7/29). Committee member John Cornyn (R-Texas), who serves as the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said he hopes Sotomayor"s hearings serve as an example for future judicial nomination debates. He added that the Republicans on the committee have "made clear that radical views on judging have no place on the federal bench. And we have set expectations for future nominees." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday said that he intends to bring Sotomayor"s nomination to a full Senate vote prior to Congress" August recess. He has not said what day the debate is scheduled to begin or how many days are scheduled, although he noted that debate could take several days (Roll Call, 7/29).
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General Optical Council Highlights Importance Of Student Supervision, UK
The General Optical Council (GOC) is today reminding all optical businesses, students and supervisors to ensure their current arrangements for professional supervision of students meet the requirements outlined by the GOC, and examination or assessment bodies. This follows the recent Fitness to Practise (FTP) hearing involving Boots Opticians Ltd (a GOC-registered business); Trevor Burgess, a registered student dispensing optician; and Richard Simmons, a registered dispensing optician.
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Judges Can Make Poor Decisions About Asylum Seekers

Judges often make poor decisions about the stories asylum seekers tell them because their decisions are based on false assumptions. Dr Stuart Turner, a psychiatrist who runs the Trauma Clinic in London and is Immediate Past President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, told the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Liverpool that judges often had little information on which to base their decisions. Few asylum seekers had passports or records of their abuse and so the judges relied on their stories. He told the Annual Meeting there was a "positive bias" against asylum seekers, based on a judicial belief that if a story was true then the details would remain consistent with each telling. "It"s a common lay assumption that if the details of a story remain the same then the story is true," said Dr Turner. "But with trauma memories the focus is on the central event, not the peripheral detail. If consistency is used as the gold standard test of credibility, then the most traumatised will be disadvantaged." He said an average of 24,250 asylum seekers a year arrived in Britain between 2005 and 2007. In 2006, 79 per cent were refused entry; but 22 per cent of these decisions were subsequently overturned. Some 7,795 of those whose cases were not overturned applied for further review and 2,845 applied for judicial review. The fact that a fifth of the initial decisions were overturned indicates that judges were making erroneous decisions, Dr Turner argued. He said judges were "mirroring their own assumptions" about the world and how people would behave. He said: "Judges are applying things from their own experience and that may not be relevant to trafficked women, asylum seekers or torture survivors, or people who have been sexually violated. Judges many not have a clue about how people in those situations may behave." Asylum seekers as a group had an increased risk of emotional disturbance because of the trauma that they have endured, Dr Turner told delegates. In an analysis of a large group of Kosovan and Albanian refugees arriving in the UK after the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, 21 per cent reported feelings of anxiety and 17 per cent were worried about their family and friends. Some were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, such emotional trauma and its impact on behaviour was not fully grasped by some judges, Dr Turner said. "For instance, one asylum seeker said that he had been tortured every day for three months by the authorities of his country about the whereabouts of his brother. The judge concluded that the man was a liar on the basis that the authorities would not continue to torture every day." Another judge failed to understand why a woman had not immediately reported to the British authorities that she had been raped. Dr Turner emphasised that he was not criticising decisions the judges made, as they had little evidence on which to base them. It was, he said, "an extraordinarily difficult job", and it was natural that they should base their decisions on their common sense. "However, there may be a gap between their commonsense and empirical information and I am questioning whether the assumptions they make about the behaviour of asylum seekers are well-founded assumptions." Dr Turner and his colleagues set up the Centre for the Study of Emotions and Law, a year ago. Their research shows that consistency in the re-telling of stories is a poor way of assessing credibility - around 30 per cent of asylum seekers change the details in their stories. Moreover, those suffering from PTSD are even more inconsistent in recalling detail. "What we want is to give the judiciary empirical information to help work out what the right assumptions might be," he concluded. "We want science to inform their decisions. There are a lot of areas where there is no empirical information - what happens when you"ve been sexually assaulted? Do you stay in your village? Do you run away? Judge A might make one assumption and Judge B another." Reference: Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, BT Convention Centre, Liverpool, 2 -5 June 2009 Royal College of Psychiatrists


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