Due Process Clause

Thereafter, the then acting Attorney General and prosecutors revived a moribund investigation into a political social media post which the Secret Service and DOJ leadership had previously determined to be a prosecutorial dead end.

The resulting indictment violates the Due Process Clause, the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clause.

The court should dismiss with prejudice.

The government's defense of the indictment rests on a series of flawed legal premises that, when combined, would categorically bar any defendant from ever challenging a president's open direction of vindictive prosecutions of political opponents.

And so the people of Jackson who were most harmed by this ongoing abdication of any responsibility gathered together and they sued the city of Jackson and its leadership back in 2022, not long after the complete failure of the water system there, alleging that state officials violated the residents' constitutional rights.

According to the complaint, quote, even before the water supply failed, Jackson's water supply was not fit for human consumption due to the high levels of lead and other contaminants in violation of plaintiff's right to bodily integrity protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency's Lead and Copper Rule and other law.

Children comprising a quarter of Jackson's residents are especially susceptible to the devastating and lifelong damages of lead poisoning.

This public health crisis decades in the making was wholly foreseeable by defendant's actions and has left Jackson residents in an untenable position without access to clean, safe water in 2022 in a major United States city.

And you might be like, wait, Lita, the 14th Amendment doesn't say anything about bodily integrity or state-created danger.

And you'd be right.

The 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause says no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process.

There's procedural due process that stems from this provision, meaning every person is due the proper procedure before they are deprived of life, liberty, or property.

In a 10-to-5 decision, the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee the right to clean drinking water, rejecting a lawsuit by residents of Jackson, Mississippi, over the city's contaminated water system.

The residents claimed that officials deliberately allowed lead to contaminate the drinking water, harming those who drank it and violating their constitutional right to bodily integrity under the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause.

The majority was composed of all Republican appointees And the opinion by Judge Kurt Engelhardt, a Trump appointee, said that while the deprivation of clean water was grievous, it did not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.

Joining me is environmental lawyer Jennifer Novak.

This was in the wake of World War I.

And the court stated that substantive due process, the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause, quote, "Denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home, and bring up children to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men." So just think about what I just read.

That's a very, very expansive notion of natural rights in the Constitution under this heading, Substantive Due Process.

Um, and then, you know, a few years later, 1925, Pierce v.

in the U.S. District of Court for the Eastern District of California against California Attorney General Rob Bonta and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber.

The lawsuit challenges the Stop Nick Shirley Act, which was recently signed into law, alleging it unlawfully targets citizens and journalists who investigate immigration-related organizations in violation of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment and Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution.

Nick Shirley is an independent investigative journalist who's reporting on government spending, fraud, waste, and abuse, as well as immigration policy and the organizations that provide immigration-related services in California, reaches millions of viewers.

And then they show one of his original videos.

The court found that Anthropic's public criticism of DOW's AI policy was protected free speech and a substantial motivating factor in the retaliatory designation.

Second, it violated the Due Process Clause because the department denied pre-deprivation notice or process despite the risk assessment resting on a core factual misunderstanding.

namely that Anthropic had backdoor access to deployed models.

Third, it violated the APA because Anthropic's conduct did not meet the statutory definition of supply chain risk, and the department failed to make the required procedural findings, the wrong official prepared the risk assessment, and the designation was arbitrary and capricious with the factual basis assembled after the fact.