http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_(law)
Color (law)
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[edit] Color of law
 | It has been suggested that Under color of authority be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) |
The Supreme Court has interpreted the United States Constitution to construct laws regulating the actions of the law enforcement community. Under "color of law", it is a crime for one or more persons using power given to him or her by a governmental agency (local, state or federal), to willfully deprive or conspire to deprive another person of any right protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. Enforcement of "color of law" does not require that any racial, religious, or other discriminatory motive existed. Criminal acts under color of law include acts within and beyond the bounds or limits of lawful authority. Off-duty conduct may also be covered if official status is asserted in some manner. Color of law may include forced vaccinations for school aged children under threat of expulsion or placing the child's parents under arrest where no law exists to do so. Color of law may include public officials and non-governmental employees who are not law enforcement officers such as judges, prosecutors, and private security guards.[3] Furthermore, in many states it is unlawful to falsely impersonate a police officer, a federal officer or employee, or any other public official or to use equipment used by law enforcement officers, such as flashing lights or a fake police badge. "Possession of a firearm also can enhance the penalty for false impersonation of a police officer."[4]
[edit] Color of office
Color of office refers to an act usually committed by a public official under the appearance of authority, but which exceeds such authority. An serving as act committed under color of office is sometimes required to prove malfeasance in office.[edit] Color of title
In property law, color of title refers to a claim to title which appears valid, but may be legally defective. Color of title may arise when there is evidence, such as a writing, suggesting valid legal title. The courts have ruled that deeds are mere color of title; the actual title to land is secured with an irrefutable instrument like a land patent, then when that land is subsequently conveyed to another owner by a deed, the deed colors the title to show the new owner. Thus, the chain of title from the land patent to the present may include many deeds, the actual title remains with the land patent and lawful deeds show the chain of title to the present landowner. Because the ownership in land is a very specific thing requiring precise and proper transfers of ownership, in times past, people always required a certified abstract be provided with a deed to insure the deed was not merely a color of title fiction. Today, title companies offer 'title insurance' to secure such documents. Still, only a proper and lawful title, like the land patent, provides actual title to land; and, only a proper and lawful chain of title (deeds, etc.) from such a patent to the present can secure land rights to the landowner.Note that this concept does not apply in jurisdictions that have adopted Torrens title. The Torrens system operates on the principle of "title by registration", in which the act of registering an interest in land in a state-operated registry creates an indefeasible title in the registrant, which can be challenged only in very limited circumstances.
[edit] Appropriation of name or likeness
Main article: Personality rights
Although this is a common-law tort, most states have enacted statutes that prohibit the use of a person’s name or image if used without consent for the commercial benefit of another person. A person's exclusive rights to control his or her name and likeness to prevent others from exploiting personal information without permission is protected in similar manner to a title or trademark action with the person's likeness and personal information, rather than the trademark or title, being the subject of the protection.[5]The tort of false light involves a misappropriation or "major misrepresentation" of a person's "character, history, activities or belief."[6] In the United States, one who gives publicity to a matter concerning another that places the other before the public in a false light is subject to liability for invasion of privacy, if:
- The false light would be highly offensive to a reasonable person; and
- The actor acted with malice—had reason to know of or acted with reckless disregard as to the falsity of the publicized matter and the false light in which the other would be placed.
Public disclosure of private facts arises where one person reveals information which is not of public concern, and the release of which would offend a reasonable person.[7]
[edit] References
- ^ Law Dictionary Fourth Edition, Steven H. Gifis, p. 86
- ^ Color of Law, Federal Bureau of Investigation
- ^ Hate Crimes. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miami Division, February 22, 2005. Via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
- ^ Impersonating a Police Officer, LegalMatch
- ^ Invasion of Privacy, Appropriation of Name or Likeness. CSE/ISE 334 "Introduction to Multimedia Systems" Lectures and Recitations, Stony Brook University.
- ^ Gannett Co., Inc. v. Anderson, 2006 WL 2986459 at 3 (Fla. 1st DCA Oct. 20, 2006).
- ^ Common Law Privacy Torts
http://www.cfoinnovation.com/content/will-ernst-young-survive-lehman-scandal
Will Ernst & Young Survive the Lehman Scandal?
by Cesar Bacani, 12 March 2010
What are ‘colorable claims’? Until this week, few CFOs and accountants probably know what this U.S. legal term means. That’s about to change. Anton R. Valukas, the U.S. examiner tasked by the Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York to investigate the demise of Lehman Brothers, uses the term to describe the acts and omissions of the bankrupt bank’s CEO, three CFOs and Ernst & Young, Lehman’s external auditor.
In a 2,200-page report released on March 11, Valukas writes that “the business decisions that brought Lehman to its crisis of confidence may have been in error but were largely within the business judgment rule.” But then he goes on to conclude that “the decision not to disclose the effects of those judgments does give rise to colorable claims against the senior officers who oversaw and certified misleading financial statements – Lehman’s CEO Richard S. Fuld, Jr., and its CFOs Christopher O’Meara, Erin M. Callan and Ian T. Lowitt.”
Valukas, who is chairman of well-known U.S. law firm Jenner & Block LLP, also believes that colorable claims exist against Ernst & Young, the Big Four accounting firm whose unit in Hong Kong has been accused of irregularities in the audit of electronics firm Akai.
“Ernst & Young took no steps to question or challenge the non-disclosure by Lehman of its use of $50 billion of temporary, off-balance sheet transactions [to allegedly manipulate the balance sheet],” he wrote. “Colorable claims exist that Ernst & Young did not meet professional standards, both in investigating [allegations by a Lehman executive about the supposed manipulation] and in connection with its audit and review of Lehman’s financial statements.”
Is this Enron all over again? In that 2001 bankruptcy, senior executives including CFO Andrew Fastow were jailed for fraudulent accounting and other crimes. Its external auditor, Arthur Andersen, was found guilty of covering up the irregularities. Abandoned by clients, Arthur Andersen was broken up in 2002, although the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the judgment against it by the lower courts in 2005.
The parallels are surely disturbing to the many Arthur Andersen alumni who have found a new home in Ernst & Young. If it’s any consolation, the colorable claims the examiner is making are not actual indictments. “In this Report a colorable claim is one for which the Examiner has found that there is sufficient credible evidence to support a finding by a trier of fact,” Valukas explains.
“The Examiner is not the ultimate decision‐maker,” he goes on. “Whether claims are in fact valid will be for the triers of fact to whom claims are presented. The identification of a claim by the Examiner as colorable does not preclude the existence of defenses and is not a prediction as to how a court or a jury may resolve any contested legal, factual, or credibility issues.”
Off the Balance Sheet
The examiner’s colorable claims against the four former Lehman executives and Ernst & Young rest on the use of off-balance sheet devices known within Lehman as ‘Repo 105’ transactions. Repos – the term stands for sale and repurchase – are agreements where one party transfers an asset or security to another party as collateral for a short‐term borrowing of cash, while simultaneously agreeing to repay the cash and take back the collateral at a specific point in time.
According to Valukas, Lehman’s Repo 105 transactions were nearly identical to standard repurchase and resale transactions that investment banks use to secure short-term financing. The critical difference is that Lehman accounted for Repo 105 transactions as ‘sales,’ instead of financing transactions. By so doing, it removed the inventory from its balance sheet.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/civilrights/color_of_law
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/civilrights/color_of_law
Color of LawColor of Law Abuses
You may also contact the United States Attorney's Office in your district or send a written complaint to: Assistant Attorney General Civil Rights Division Criminal Section 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NorthwestWashington, DC 20530 FBI investigations vary in length. Once our investigation is complete, we forward the findings to the U.S. Attorney’s Office within the local jurisdiction and to the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., which decide whether or not to proceed toward prosecution and handle any prosecutions that follow. Civil Applications Title 42, U.S.C., Section 14141 makes it unlawful for state or local law enforcement agencies to allow officers to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives persons of rights protected by the Constitution or U.S. laws. This law, commonly referred to as the Police Misconduct Statute, gives the Department of Justice authority to seek civil remedies in cases where law enforcement agencies have policies or practices that foster a pattern of misconduct by employees. This action is directed against an agency, not against individual officers. The types of issues which may initiate a pattern and practice investigation include:
Under Title 42, U.S.C., Section 1997, the Department of Justice has the ability to initiate civil actions against mental hospitals, retardation facilities, jails, prisons, nursing homes, and juvenile detention facilities when there are allegations of systemic derivations of the constitutional rights of institutionalized persons. Report Civil Rights Violations
Resources http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Color+of+Law EXCERPT: The appearance of a legal right. The act of a state officer, regardless of whether or not the act is within the limits of his or her authority, is considered an act under color of law if the officer purports to be conducting himself or herself in the course of official duties. Under the civil rights act of 1871 (42 U.S.C.A. Section 1983), color of law is synonymous with State Action, which is conduct by an officer that bears a sufficiently close nexus to a state so that the action is treated as though it is by the state.
Cross-referencesKu Klux Klan Act.West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. color of law n. the appearance of an act being performed based upon legal right or enforcement of statute, when in reality no such right exists. An outstanding example is found in the civil rights acts which penalize law enforcement officers for violating civil rights by making arrests "under color of law" of peaceful protestors or to disrupt voter registration. It could apply to phony traffic arrests in order to raise revenue from fines or extort payoffs to forget the ticket. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 (ch. 22, 17 Stat. 13 [codified as amended at 18 U.S.C.A. § 241, 42 U.S.C.A. §§ 1983, 1985(3), and 1988]), also called the Civil Rights Act of 1871 or the Force Act of 1871, was one of several important Civil Rights Acts passed by Congress during Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War when the victorious northern states attempted to create a new political order in the South. The act was intended to protect African Americans from violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist group. In March 1871, President ulysses s. grant requested from Congress legislation that would address the problem of KKK violence, which had grown steadily since the group's formation in 1866. Congress responded on April 20, 1871, with the passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act, originally introduced as a bill "to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment and for other purposes." Section 1 of the act covered enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment and was later codified, in part, at 42 U.S.C.A. § 1983. Section 2 of the act, codified at 42 U.S.C.A. § 1985(3), provided civil and criminal penalties intended to deal with conspiratorial violence of the kind practiced by the Klan. Both sections of the act were intended to give federal protection to Fourteenth Amendment rights that were regularly being violated by private individuals as opposed to the state. In addition, the Ku Klux Klan Act gave the president power to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus in order to fight the KKK. President Grant used this power only once, in October 1871, in ten South Carolina counties experiencing high levels of Klan Terrorism. The act also banned KKK and other conspiracy members from serving on juries. The Republicans who framed the Ku Klux Klan Act intended it to provide a federal remedy for private conspiracies of the sort practiced by the KKK against African Americans and others. As had become all too apparent by 1871, local and state courts were ineffective in prosecuting Klan violence. Local and state law enforcement officials, including judges, were often sympathetic to the KKK or were subject to intimidation by the group, as were trial witnesses. The Ku Klux Klan Act would allow victims of Klan violence to take their case to a federal court, where, it was supposed, they would receive a fairer trial. The act, like other Civil Rights laws from the Reconstruction era, sparked considerable legal debate. Its detractors claimed that the law improperly expanded federal jurisdiction to areas of Criminal Law better left to the states. The Supreme Court took this view in 1883 when it struck down the criminal provisions of the act's second section on the ground that protecting individuals from private conspiracies was a state and not federal function (United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629, 1 S. Ct. 601, 27 L. Ed. 290). This and other rulings stripped the Ku Klux Klan Act of much of its power. Like many other civil rights laws from its era, it went largely unenforced in succeeding decades. The remaining civil provisions of the act were later codified under 42 U.S.C.A. § 1985(3), where they have been referred to as the conspiracy statute. These provisions hold, in part, that when two or more persons "conspire or go in disguise on the highway or the premises of another, for the purpose of depriving … any person or class of persons of the Equal Protection of the law," they may be sued by the injured parties. The civil provisions, or § 1985(3), remained generally unused until the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision Griffin v. Breckenridge, 403 U.S. 88, 91 S. Ct. 1790, 29 L. Ed. 2d 338. In Griffin, the Court reaffirmed the original intention of § 1985(3) and ruled that the statute may allow a civil remedy for certain private conspiracies. The Griffin case concerned a 1966 incident in Mississippi in which a group of white men stopped a car out of suspicion that one of its three African–American occupants was a civil rights worker. The whites proceeded to beat and threaten the African Americans. The Court upheld one victim's claim that, under § 1985(3), the whites had engaged in a conspiracy to deny him the equal protection of the laws of the United States and Mississippi. In making its decision, the Court was careful to restrict § 1985 claims to those involving actions motivated by "some racial, or perhaps otherwise class-based, invidiously discriminatory animus." This standard meant that the conspirators in question had to be motivated against a class of persons, not a particular political or social issue. By creating this standard, the Court sought to prevent § 1985(3) from becoming a "general federal tort law" that would cover every type of private conspiracy. Since Griffin, the Court has expressed misgivings about expanding the types of classes protected by the statute. Using the Griffin standard, the Court later ruled in United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners v. Scott, 463 U.S. 825, 103 S. Ct. 3352, 77 L. Ed. 2d 1049 (1983), that economic or commercial groups could not be considered a class protected by the law. In that case, the Court rejected a claim by nonunion workers who had been attacked by union workers at job sites. During the 1980s and 1990s, lower federal courts upheld the use of § 1985(3) against antiabortion protesters who blockaded family planning clinics with large demonstrations and disruptions. In one ruling, a federal district court held that an antiabortion group had conspired to violate the right to interstate travel of women seeking to visit family planning clinics (NOW v. Operation Rescue, 726 F. Supp. 1483 [E.D. Va. 1989]). However, in a 1993 case, Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic, 506 U.S. 263, 113 S. Ct. 753, 122 L. Ed. 2d 34, the Supreme Court ruled that § 1985(3) could not be used against antiabortion protesters. The Court held that women seeking Abortion cannot be considered a class under the terms of the law. Further readingsBrown, Bruce. 1991. "Injunctive Relief and Section 1985(3): Anti-Abortion Blockaders Meet the 'Ku Klux Klan Act.'" Buffalo Law Review 39 (fall). Gormley, Ken. 1985. "Private Conspiracies and the Constitution: A Modern Vision of 42 U.S.C. Section 1985(3)." Texas Law Review 64 (November). Hall, Kermit L. 1984. "Political Power and Constitutional Legitimacy: The South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871–1872." Emory Law Journal 33 (fall). Mcmurtry, Joy Hollingsworth, and Patti S. Pennock. 1995. "Ending the Violence: Applying the Ku Klux Klan Act, RICO, and FACE to the Abortion Controversy." Land and Water Law Review 30.Cross-references |
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