Gary Sims to retire as Wake County Elections Director

Although Wake County's press release may hail Sims' many years running the Wake County elections, I am familiar with Gary Sims as one of the named defendants in the eponymous lawsuit Bernstein v. Sims. Sims is being sued over permanently banning Lynn Bernstein from the Wake BoE headquarters. Bernstein is an election integrity advocate and founder of Transparent Elections NC.

Although the case is still being litigated, Bernstein has won a preliminary injunction, allowing her to attend the Board of Election meetings held at the property.

Duke Law ‘plea tracker’ aims to provide transparency in prosecutor’s plea bargaining decisions

Our plea-bargain driven justice system differs quite a bit from how it is portrayed and conceptualized. If you look at the particular penalty for any particular law, you have to understand that 90-95% of cases involve some sort of deal between the prosecution and the defendant, and that the penalty attached by the statute for a particular behavior will often be negotiated down to a lower offense with a lower penalty. A report on a year of cases in Durham aims to shed a little light on this key aspect of our judicial system.

Judge bars media from publishing on expelled student suing UNC system

A judge has now lifted an order which restricted both UNC and the media from releasing information about a former student who is suing UNC. The student, who was expelled from UNC-Chapel Hill, is alleging that the university allowed accusers to “weaponize UNC’s Title IX process” by using “defective, prejudicial, and arbitrarily inequitable processes that were replete with gender bias against Plaintiff”. I only came across this case due to the first amendment concerns over the prior restraint on media; I haven't seen any reporting directly on the merits of the case.

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