Davidson County Lawyer Newton S. Holiday was today reinstated to the active practice of law by order of the Tennessee Supreme Court. Newton received a temporary suspension on June 18 for failure to respond to the Board of Professional Responsibility’s request for information. Holiday then provided an appropriate response and on July 10 filed a motion to set aside order of temporary suspension. The Board filed a response yesterday acknowledging the sufficiency of Holiday’s response and had no objection to his motion.

The Office of the Post-Conviction Defender is now accepting applications for an assistant post-conviction defender and an investigator. As part of a team, both the assistant post-conviction defender and the investigator will work with one another and with paralegals on behalf of clients to develop both guilt and innocence and sentencing claims, as well as grounds for clemency. The assistant defender must have a law license or eligibility for admittance to the Tennessee State Bar within six months of being employed. A law license isn’t required for the investigator position and all levels of experience will be considered. Read more on both positions and learn how to apply here.  

Federal inmate Daniel Lewis Lee was put to death by lethal injection Tuesday morning, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a federal judge’s last-minute injunction, the ABA Journal reports. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Monday blocked the Trump administration from resuming executions just hours before Lee was set to die, but in a 5-4 decision this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that injunction, saying Lee and three other federal inmates had not made a showing that justified last-minute intervention. The inmates argued against the federal government’s plans to use the single drug pentobarbital sodium on the grounds that it could cause them to suffer respiratory distress called “flash pulmonary edema.” The court said the drug has been used in more than 100 executions without incident. Lee died two to three minutes after the drug was administered, and he reportedly did not appear to be suffering. Lee, who was on death row for murdering a family of three, is the first federal inmate to be executed since 2003.

The Court of Criminal Appeals will continue its livestream of oral arguments on Wednesday. According to the Tennessee State Courts website, four cases will be heard by Judge Thomas T. Woodall, Judge Robert L. Holloway Jr. and Judge Timothy L. Easter at 9 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 1:30 p.m. and 3:15 p.m. CDT. You can find the livestream on the TNCourts YouTube channel. Subscribers to the channel will receive notice when a case begins.

The National High School Mock Trial Championship (NHSMTC) Board of Directors has appointed the TBA’s Young Lawyers Division and Public Education Coordinator StephanieVonnahme to the group’s Site Selection Committee. Vonnahme currently serves as NHSMTC’s Tennessee state competition coordinator, but in her new leadership role, will work with high school mock trial coordinators from around the country to identify hosts for upcoming competitions and to streamline information on the group’s website to make it more user-friendly for hosts. Additionally, mock trial coordinators interact, brainstorm and pose pressing mock trial questions to one another during the Coordinator’s Roundtable. The Tennessee High School Mock Trial competition takes place annually in the spring, but was cancelled this year due to concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The Trump administration has rescinded a controversial policy that would have forced international students to leave the U.S. if their courses were being taught only online, The Hill reports. The reversal comes after Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Northeastern University sued the administration, later joined by Vanderbilt University and a number of other colleges and universities across the country. The Harvard-MIT-Northeastern suit argued that the new policy was designed to “force universities to reopen in-person classes,” thereby increasing risk of exposure to the COVID-19 virus. It asked a federal judge in Boston to issue a permanent injunction against the policy, but that judge this morning announced that both parties had come to a resolution and will “return to the status quo.”

Rep. Glen Casada, R-Franklin, is being fined $10,500 by the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance after an audit found his political action committee had failed to provide receipts for $99,625 in campaign expenditures, the Nashville Post reports. The audit, which inspected Casada’s campaign finances from Jan. 1- June 30, 2018, also found his PAC failed to report $1,713 in contributions and $2,589 in expenditures. As a representative, Casada himself was found to have failed to report $1,063 in contributions, $1,520 in expenses and failed to provide supporting documents for $5,212 in campaign expenditures. Casada did supply bank statements reflecting his campaign purchases, a potential reason for his fine being $10,500 instead of the $2.9 million he was eligible to receive if the bureau had levied a civil penalty for every missing receipt.

Members of the University of Tennessee College of Law faculty have created a series of videos aimed at examining the legal system’s role in institutionalized racism. The “How Did We Get Here?” series was spearheaded by the law school’s anti-racism task force and prompted by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. The series will feature faculty discussing subject matter specific to their expertise and includes such topics as residential redlining, racial disparities in healthcare, biased legal reasoning and racial discrimination in jury selection. Professor Greg Stein organized the project on behalf of the task force and said he hopes the series will provide better understanding about how decades-old decisions within government and legal systems have resulted in socially accepted racial discrimination. Read more from the College of Law’s website.

Attorneys for death row inmate Harold Nichols late last month filed a federal lawsuit seeking to delay his Aug. 4 execution, the Associated Press reports. His attorneys argue that the Tennessee Supreme Court has twice denied his requests to reschedule his execution, but have delayed two other executions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They argue the pandemic has made them unable to prepare a clemency application for the governor and also say Nichols hasn’t been able to sufficiently meet with family, friends, attorneys or his spiritual advisor. They also claim the state attorney general and corrections officials haven’t provided a plan on how it will carry out an execution amid the pandemic. Nichols was convicted of rape and first-degree felony murder in the 1988 death of Karen Pulley in Hamilton County.

Brentwood police were mistakenly called last month on attorney James Crumlin after he entered his own home, WSMV reports. An unidentified caller phoned police to report she’d seen an African American male enter what she thought was a vacant home. The home is not vacant and belongs to Crumlin, an attorney at Bone McAllester in Nashville, who has lived in the home for 13 years. After the call, three Brentwood police officers arrived at Crumlin’s home and asked for proof that he lived there. “So I go to get my driver’s license. I walk back and right as I come to the front door, I saw one of the officers dart around to the side of my house," Crumlin said. "And I’m thinking that’s odd, where is he going? Then I’m thinking, oh, he probably thinks I’m going to run out the back door. As if I don’t live here.” The incident ended without issue, but left Crumlin shaken and questioning what would’ve happened if he hadn’t answered the door. The caller did reach out to Crumlin and left an apology in his mailbox and called him with an invitation to meet in person. Crumlin said he would be willing to talk with her, calling the incident a “teachable moment.”