Reinhold Frank

Reinhold Frank (23 July 1896 – 23 January 1945) was a German lawyer. He did work for the resistance to Hitler's rule in Nazi Germany. He was sentenced to death in connection with the failed 20 July Plot.
Life.
Reinhold Frank was born the youngest of seven children in Bachhaupten in the Sigmaringen district. After serving in the military in the First World War, he studied law in Freiburg. He was a member of the "Katholische Deutsche Studentenverbindung Arminia" ("Catholic German "Studentenverbindung" Arminia") in the "Cartellverband der katholischen deutschen Studentenverbindungen". After his time as a junior lawyer, he went to Karlsruhe and there, together with Dr. Honold, he ran a law practice. Owing to his Christian outlook, Nazi ideology did not sit well with Frank. He often found himself defending persecuted clients of all political and religious stripes, among them Catholic priests, who often ended up before the courts during the time of the Third Reich for having uttered criticisms of the régime.
Reinhold Frank belonged to the circle about the resistance group founded by Dr. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler. He had already agreed to stand ready in Baden to take a leading rôle in Germany's reconstruction, should the plot to overthrow Hitler actually succeed. It was therefore no wonder that, after the attempt on Hitler's life at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia failed, Frank was arrested quite quickly, on 21 July 1944, the day after the attempt. Frank was found guilty by the "Volksgerichtshof" of high treason and treason. On 12 January 1945, he was sentenced to death. He was hanged on 23 January at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.
In his honour, a memorial stone has been placed at the "Hauptfriedhof" ("Main Cemetery") in Karlsruhe. The street in Karlsruhe where the lawyers' chambers may be found bears his name. The Research Centre for German Resistance against National Socialism in Southwestern Germany, together with the University of Karlsruhe, the City of Karlsruhe, and the German "Bundesarchiv", honours Frank yearly in the time around 20 July with a memorial reading.


Mark system

The mark system is a social organization that rests on the common tenure and common cultivation of the land by small groups of freemen. Both politically and economically the mark was an independent community, and its earliest members were doubtless blood relatives. In its origin the word is the same as mark or march, a boundary. First used in this sense, it was then applied to the land cleared by the settlers in the forest areas of Germany, and later it was used for the system which prevailed to what extent or for how long is uncertain in that country. It is generally assumed that the lands of the mark were divided into three portions; forest, meadow and arable, and as in the manorial system which was later in vogue elsewhere, a system of rotation of crops in two, three or even six fields was adopted, each member of the community having rights of pasture in the forest and the meadow, and a certain share of the arable.
The mark was a self-governing community. Its affairs were ordered by the marknien who met together at stated times in the markmoot. Soon, however, their freedom was encroached upon, and in the course of a very short time it disappeared altogether.
Controversy.
The extent and nature of the mark system has been, and still is, a subject of controversy among historians. One school holds that it was almost universal in Germany; that it was, in fact, the typical Teutonic method of holding and cultivating the land. From Germany, it is argued, it was introduced by the Angle and Saxon invaders into England, where it was extensively adopted, being the foundation upon which the prevailing land system in early England was built.
An opposing school denies entirely the existence of the mark system, and a French writer, Fustel de Coulanges, refers to it contemptuously as a figment of the Teutonic imagination. This view is based largely upon the supposition that common ownership of the land was practically unknown among the early Germans, and was by no means general among the early English. The truth will doubtless be found to lie somewhere between the two extremes. The complete mark system was certainly not prevalent in Anglo-Saxon England, nor did it exist very widely, or for any very long period in Germany, but the system which did prevail in these two countries contained elements which are also found in the mark system.


Second Seimas of Lithuania

The Second Seimas of Lithuania was the second parliament (Seimas) democratically elected in Lithuania after it declared independence on February 16, 1918. It was the only regular interwar Seimas which completed its full three-year term from May 1923 to March 1926. The First Seimas, elected in fall 1922, was in virtual deadlock as no party or coalition could gain a majority. President Aleksandras Stulginskis was forced to dissolve it on March 12, 1923. The elections to a new Seimas took place on May 12 and May 13, 1923. The Christian Democrats gained two additional seats which were enough to give them a slim majority. At first they tried to form a coalition with the Lithuanian Peasant Popular Union. The Populists demanded lifting the martial law (introduced during the Lithuanian Wars of Independence), prohibiting political campaigning in churches, and three portfolios in the new cabinet of ministers. The Christian Democrats were not inclined to satisfy the demands and the coalition broke apart in June 1924.
The Christian Democrats reelected Stulginskis as the President of Lithuania and Ernestas Galvanauskas as the Prime Minister. The new cabinet of ministers included two Populists: Ministers of Internal Affairs and Transport. However, the government was not stable and was forced to resign in June 1924 after the coalition with Populists collapsed. The new cabinet, headed by Antanas Tumėnas, managed to stay in power only for seven months. In January 1925 Vytautas Petrulis was asked to form a new cabinet. It resigned in September 1925 when it agreed to neutralize the Neman River and allow international traffic, which primarily benefited Poland, an enemy of Lithuania over the Vilnius Region. The last cabinet was formed by Leonas Bistras. Despite apparent political instability the Seimas managed to introduce some economic stability. The country, after years of World War I and Independence Wars, entered a peaceful period. The Seimas continued the land reform, expanded the network of primary and secondary schools, introduced social support systems.


Calogero Mannino

Calogero Antonio Mannino (born August 20, 1939 in Asmara) is an Italian politician and lawyer. He has been a member of the Christian Democracy and the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats. He served in the cabinet of Prime Ministers Spadolini (1981–1982), Fanfani (1982–1983) and Andreotti (1991–1992). He was also member of the Chamber of Deputies of Italy in Legislature VII (1976–1979), Legislature VIII (1979–1983), Legislature IX (1983–1987), Legislature X (1987–1992), Legislature XI (1992–1994) and Legislature XVI and member of the Senate in Legislature XV.
He was accused to have been involved with the State-Mafia Pact as an active part in negotiating the end of the early 1990s massacres in return for detention measures attenuation to mafia members. In 2015 the first verdict was an acquittal. In 2017 the prosecuting authority gave impulse to the process in second grade.
Biography.
Calogero Mannino, also known as "Lillo", originally from Sciacca, moved from a young age to Palermo to support his university studies. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law of Palermo and graduated 1961. Subsequently he continued his studies also graduating in Political Science.
Member of the Christian Democracy, in 1971 he was elected deputy to the Sicilian Regional Assembly and, in July of the same year, he became regional Assessor of finance, remaining in office until February 1976.
In 1976 he was elected national Deputythe in the western Sicily constituency, and was re-elected also in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992. In 1979 he was elected Vice President of the Christian Democratic Parliamentary Group in the Chamber of Deputies. In July 1980 he was appointed Undersecretary of the treasury in the Forlani Cabinet. That year he was appointed Commissioner of the Sicilian DC by Ciriaco De Mita.
Mannino served as Minister several times: in July 1981 he was appointed Minister of the merchant navy in the Spadolini I Cabinet; in December 1982 he became Minister of Agriculture and Forestry in the Fanfani V Cabinet, remaining in office until July 1983. In 1987 he served as Minister of Transport in the Goria Cabinet; in March 1988, he was appointed Minister for agriculture in the De Mita Cabinet and subsequently confirmed in the Andreotti VI Cabinet, but in July 1990, together with Sergio Mattarella and other fellow ministers, resigned for dissent in with respect to the "Mammì Law" on television broadcasting. However, he returned to the government, together with Martinazzoli and Misasi, who also resigned, in February 1991, in the Andreotti VI Cabinet, in which was appointed Minister for extraordinary interventions in the South.
He was not re-elected in the 1994 general election, where he was candidate to the Senate with the civic list "Democratic Shield". After twelve years of absence from political life, he joined the UDC and in 2006 and was elected senator in the Sicily constituency, while in the 2008 general election he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the Sicily 1 constituency.
In September 2010, together with the southern deputies Francesco Saverio Romano, Giuseppe Drago, Giuseppe Ruvolo and Michele Pisacane, he abandoned the UDC and founded with them The Populars of Italy Tomorrow (PID). The 5 deputies therefore abandoned the opposition role, for which they were elected to the UDC, and take sides in support of the centre-right parliamentary majority of Silvio Berlusconi; as a first act they vote trust in the government. Mannino took over the presidency of the PID, while Romano became the national coordinator.
On 14 March 2011 Calogero Mannino announced the abandonment of the party and on 14 October 2011, he said that he would never again vote for confidence in the Berlusconi government. On 8 November 2011, he was one of the deputies of the majority who didn't vote on the 2010 General State Report, leading to the crisis of the Berlusconi government.
External links.


James Kantor

James Kantor (26 February 1927 – 2 February 1974) was a South African lawyer and writer.
James Kantor was born in Johannesburg to a Jewish family. A prominent Johannesburg lawyer in the 1950s, Kantor was attorney for Nelson Mandela and imprisoned with him during the Rivonia Trial. He later immigrated to England and wrote an autobiography.
Rivonia Trial.
Kantor was one of the defence lawyers in the Rivonia Trial until his brother-in-law and legal partner Harold Wolpe, one of the accused, managed to escape. At this stage, Kantor was himself arrested and charged with the same crimes as Mandela and the other defendants although he had no involvement with the ANC or MK. Harold Hanson and Harry Schwarz, a close friend and a well-known politician, stepped in to act as his defence lawyers in the trial. After aggressive treatment by the prosecutor Percy Yutar, who sought to portray Kantor as a vital cog of MK, finally Judge Quartus de Wet discharged Kantor, stating "Accused No. 8 has no case to answer".
Later life.
Kantor fled South Africa and settled in London, working in publications for the film industry. He married and he and his wife Barbara had two daughters and he also adopted Barbara's two sons from a previous marriage. He wrote an autobiography, called "A Healthy Grave". However, his health had never recovered from the harsh treatment while in prison awaiting trial, and he died of a massive heart attack in 1974.


Herta Geffke

Herta Geffke (married name, Herta Kaasch: 19 August 1893 – 29 December 1974) was a German activist and politician (KPD, SED) who resisted Nazism. After 1945 she became a member of the ("Zentrale Parteikontrollkommission" / ZPKK) in the Soviet occupation zone (from 1949 the German Democratic Republic), identified as a "true Stalinist" and feared on account of her interrogation methods.
Life.
Family provenance and early years.
The eldest of her parents' six recorded children, Herta Geffke was born in (Frauendorf) on the north side of Stettin, at that time in Pomerania. Her father was a shoe maker: her mother worked as a washer-woman. Her younger brother, Hans Geffke, (1903-1985), would later achieve some notability as a Communist Party activist and, after his return from the Soviet Union in 1949, as a senior party official in the German Democratic Republic. On leaving school Herta Geffke herself went into domestic service, later moving on to become a print worker.
She joined the (SAJ) in 1908. In 1912, the year of her nineteenth birthday, she became a member of the Social Democratic Party (" Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD). Two years later, in July 1914, war broke out. The party leadership concluded what amounted to a political truce for the duration of the war, which provoked vehement dissent among the party membership. In 1917 the party finally broke apart, primarily because of differences over whether to continue voting funds for the war in the Reichstag: Geffke was one of those who chose the anti-war breakaway faction, identified as the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD). In 1918 she was a member of the party regional leadership ("Bezirksleitung") for Stettin, and during the revolutionary months that followed the end of the war she was a member locally of the Workers' and Soldiers' Soviet ("council"). When the USPD itself broke apart at the end of 1920 she was part of the leftwing majority that switched to the newly formed Communist Party of Germany, becoming a full-time regional party secretary for Pomerania.
Activism and politics in Weimar Germany.
In March 1921 the party appointed her regional "women's secretary" for the politically and economically important Lower Rhine and Ruhr districts in the west of the country. Four months later, in July 1921, she was a delegate at the third world congress of the Communist International and the second international Women's Congress, both held in Moscow. Later in 1921, as the result of a by-election in Silesia (at that time part of Prussia), she was elected a member of the Prussian legislative assembly ("Preußischer Landtag "). She remained a member, representing the Communist Party, till 1924.
In 1922 Herta Geffke married , a party functionary. The marriage lasted till 1928. As a party moderate at a time when Staliinist extremists were increasingly in the ascendant within the party, she did not stand for re-election to the Landtag in the regional elections of December 1924. Over the next few years, living with her husband, she was employed in a succession of relatively low profile party jobs. Till the end of 1928 she worked for the party leadership in the Berlin district of Neukölln. After her marriage broke up in 1928 there were further political differences with party comrades and she offered her services to "Red Aid", the Communist-sponsored international welfare organisation. In this capacity she ran a children's home in Worpswede (north of Bremen) and then another, far to the south, at Elgersburg until it was forced to close through lack of funds. After this she worked as a regional party secretary in the Saar region, an area of Germany with an ambiguous status and still, at this stage, occupied by the French army. She was very soon moved to a job with the regional party leadership ("Bezirksleitung") in the Ruhr district and during 1931/32, worked as regional secretary for "Red Aid" in the large Baden-Palatinate region. In 1933 she became a member of the Central Executive of "Red Aid".
Twelve Nazi years.
The political backdrop was transformed in January 1933 when the Nazi Party took power in Germany and lost little time in converting the country into a one-party dictatorship. Herta Geffke continued to pursue her (now illegal) political activities, working for "Red Aid" in the Hessen-Frankfurt region from March 1933 and in the Ruhr district further to the north. It was in Essen in the Ruhr district that she was arrested on 11 or 13 September 1933. She was held for the next six months in "protective custody".
On 5 March 1934 the district high court in Hamm sentenced her to a thirty-month jail term for "preparing to commit high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat"). She was then imprisoned successively in the women's prison at (south of Kassel) and at Jauer (west of Breslau). She was released in October 1936, and trained to work in a (men's) barber's shop. During the ensuing Nazi years she worked as a hair dresser in Stettin and as a seamstress. It is reported that she resumed her illegal work for the Communist party, although details of what this involved are sparse. During 1943/44 she was a member of the resistance group around and in the Stettin region.
Soviet occupation zone.
War ended, and with it the Nazi régime, in May 1945. On 3 May 1945, Herta Geffke came into contact with Gustav Sobottka, who had spent the war years in Moscow and was now a leading member of the so-called Ulbricht Group, comprising trusted German exiles hurriedly flown in from Moscow to fill the power vacuum arising from the military defeat in Germany of the Nazi government. Following the meeting with Sobottka, Geffke was mandated to head up the in Stettin-Krekow. This one of several such institutions established in 1945, briefly, in different parts of Germany under the auspices of the Soviet sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany ("Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland" / NKFD). She quickly joined Sobottka's "Initiative Group", becoming a member of the Communist Party regional leadership and secretariat in June 1945.
Between June 1945 and March 1946, she was in charge of the regional youth department ( for the newly (and at this point temporarily) created state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In 1946 she became a member of the executive of the Mecklenburg advisory assembly ("Beratenden Versammlung"), a precursor of the (1946–1952) ("Landtag") of which she was a member between October 1946 and October 1950, serving as a deputy vice-president of the assembly. (Following the abolition of the regional tier of government in 1952, both the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and its "Landtag" would be abolished for administrative purposes, although both were revived in 1990.)
Alongside her role in the regional parliament, she held important party responsibilities. From April 1946 she served as regional women's secretary for the Mecklenburg Party Executive. Following the controversial creation that month of the Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED) she was one of many thousands who had lost no time in signing their Communist Party membership across to what now evolved into the ruling party for a new kind of one-party dictatorship. From 1947 she became a member of the regional party secretariat for Brandenburg. During 1947/48 she was also a member of the national executive of the politically important Confederation of Antifascists ("Bund der Antifaschistinnen und Antifaschisten" /BdA).
On the national stage within the Soviet occupation zone, from March 1948 to May 1949, Geffke was a member of the People's Council ("Deutscher Volksrat"), an appointed chamber mandated to develop and endorse the proposed constitution drawn up by the SED (party). In May 1949 the assembly declared itself to be a "provisional parliament", and following the General election of October 1950 (in which, reassuringly, more than 99% of the electorate endorsed the ruling party's candidate list), it did indeed become the national parliament ("Volkskammer"). Herta Geffke was never a candidate nor a member of the Volkskammer, however.
German Democratic Republic.
In October 1949 the part of Germany administered since May 1945 as the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic, a separated German state with its political institutions consciously modelled on those of the Soviet Union itself. Under the Leninist system, the state's power was focused not on any parliament or government ministers, but on the ruling party, and within the party (except when a party congress was in session) on the party central committee. Right from the birth of the state in 1949 Herta Geffke was active as an energetic official inside the party central committee. In March 1949 she became a department head in the Central Secretariat if the Party Executive and a member of the newly instituted Central Party Control Commission ("Zentrale Parteikontrollkommission" / ZPKK), retaining this membership till October 1958. This meant that, working alongside Hermann Matern, she was responsible for keeping the party cleansed "of enemy and degenerate elements" ("von feindlichen und entarteten Elementen") during the 1950s.
A specific investigation which she headed up, and which quickly acquired fame and/or notoriety, was the special ZPKK commission, starting in November 1949, to check out the contacts of party members with the US born spy Noel Field. Between 1954 and 1958 she served as deputy chair of the ZPKK. One source describes her in the role as "the archetypal harsh and uncompromising Stalinist functionary" ("der Prototyp einer bedingungslosen und harten stalinistischen Funktionärin"). Contemporaries who encountered her during the course of the Noel Field investigations recall interrogation sessions lasting many hours, conducted without signs of any significant emotional engagement.
Following the 1956 Party Congress in Moscow, at which Comrade Kruschev's so-called "secret" speech greatly alarmed the Stalinist traditionalists who controlled East Germany, Herta Geffke and her (party commission) were responsible for a large number of party resolutions and retributive actions that some forty years later (after the changes of 1989/90) would trigger judicial rehabilitation decisions.
In October 1958, the year of her sixty-fifth birthday, she was removed from the ZPKK and took on the top job in the personnel department ("Kaderabteilung") at the party central committee's (Institute for Social Sciences). She held this post till her retirement in June 1962.
Herta Geffke died in East Berlin on 29 December 1974.


Demers v. Austin

Demers v. Austin (746 F.3d 402, 9th Cir., 2014) was a landmark decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, extending First Amendment protection to professors at public universities for on-the-job speech that deals with public issues related to teaching or scholarship, whether inside or outside of the classroom. "Demers" carved out an exception to a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Garcetti v. Ceballos) that denied free speech protection to public employees. In doing so, "Demers" provided, for the first time in history, constitutional protection for faculty speech that criticizes policies and decisions of university administrations.
In 2009, Demers, a tenured faculty member in the Edward R. Murrow School (now College) of Communication at Washington State University, sued four administrators in a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action when they allegedly retaliated against him after he circulated a 7-Step Plan calling for a restructuring of the academic units and urging administrators to seek accreditation for the program. In 2011, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington granted summary judgment for the Defendant administrators, holding the plan was written as part of Demers's official duties and, therefore, was unprotected under "Garcetti". The district court also held that the plan did not address a matter of public concern.
Writing for a three-judge panel in Seattle, lead judge William A. Fletcher declared that Demers's Plan was protected speech and dealt with matters of public concern. The appeals court reinstated the lawsuit. Fletcher wrote: "[T]eaching and academic writing are at the core of the official duties of teachers and professors. Such teaching and writing are 'a special concern of the First Amendment.' ... We conclude that if applied to teaching and academic writing, "Garcetti" would directly conflict with the important First Amendment values previously articulated by the Supreme Court. ... (which) has repeatedly stressed the importance of protecting academic freedom under the First Amendment. ... "
The university declined to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and eventually paid Demers $120,000 to drop the lawsuit.
The "Demers" decision is precedent in only nine states in the West. There is no on-the-job free-speech protection for professors in the other 41 states, who can be punished for criticizing administrators' policies and decisions even when they deal with issues of teaching or scholarship.
Matthew Jay Hertzog, director of Educational Technology at Methodist College, writes that "Demers v. Austin" and other cases are establishing Constitutional protection for academic freedom. "With the decisions of the lower courts in these cases being reversed by various U.S. Courts of Appeals ... , the constitutionally protected rights of academics for their academic speech and writing is being recognized as a First Amendment protection. As social and political events within higher education over the past several years have led university administrators to question the parameters of Constitutional protections and challenge the academic’s right to freedom of speech, the U.S. legal system has remained firm in its interpretation of the law by protecting a professor’s civil rights as well as those rights awarded to their academic speech and writings.
Demers himself has argued that the "single most important consequence of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in "Demers v. Austin" is the constitutional protection that it offers for shared governance in nine western states. The assumption underlying the Appeals Court ruling is that teaching and scholarship are impacted by the structure of the organization and its resources. And if those who do the teaching and scholarship have no say in how academic units are structured and how resources are distributed, then the academic search for truth, knowledge and understanding of the world will be compromised."
“Had the Ninth Circuit ruled the other way," legal scholar Kenneth White, a former prosecutor, writes, "then the state could fire professors at will if it didn’t like, for instance, the stance that a history professor took about a historical event, or a political science professor took about a political dispute, or any professor took about an issue of academic governance on a committee.”


Auton (Guardian ad litem of) v British Columbia (AG)

Auton (Guardian ad litem of) v British Columbia (AG), [2004] 3 S.C.R. 657, is a leading decision of the Supreme Court of Canada wherein the Court ruled that government funding for non-core medically necessary treatments is not protected under section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Background.
The parents of several children with autism brought an action against the British Columbia government for failing to fund Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA/IBI), a form of therapy for children with autism.
Both at trial and in the British Columbia Court of Appeal the Court found that the children's equality rights (under section 15) were violated.
Ruling.
The Court unanimously decided that the refusal to fund the ABA/IBI treatment did not violate the children's section 15 equality rights.
McLachlin, writing for the Court, reiterated that the question here is whether the petitioners were denied a benefit in a discriminatory manner (see Law test). However, here, she claimed, the benefit of "funding for all medically required treatment" is not guaranteed by law, as it is neither promised in the Canada Health Act nor any provincial health legislation. Rather, the Health Act only guarantees funding for "core services" of which ABA/IBI for autism is not one.
The Court further rejected the possibility that autistics were adversely discriminated against by the underinclusiveness of the legislation. Non-core medical services, McLachlin stated, are by their very nature underinclusive and cannot be considered discriminatory.
For a claim to succeed the petitioner must establish a comparator group from which differential treatment must be shown. In this case, the Court identified the comparator group as a person who is not suffering from a mental disability who wants funding for an emergent or experimental treatment. As the petitioners were unable to show that other seekers of experimental treatments are guaranteed funding, the Court rejected the claim on this basis as well.


Blood court


Results of the 2003 Swedish euro referendum

Sweden held a non-binding referendum on the introduction of the euro on 14 September 2003.
National results.
Blank votes counted towards the net total. 5,719,240 ballots were cast for either yes or no, whereas a total of 5,840,313 votes counted towards the total.
Source: Valmyndigheten
Parliamentary constituency results.
Although blank votes, unlike in Riksdag elections counted towards the total, these tables only list yes and no votes, hence the total number being below 100 %. Full results for blank votes are available at the Electoral Agency's website. While European Parliament elections are counted through counties, the nominal constituencies for the Riksdag extend to national referendums. Regardless, results were published both at constituency and county levels. "Votes" also denotes invalid ones.
Metropolitan counties.
Three counties had multiple constituencies.


Nassau Plantation (Texas)

Nassau Plantation was a endeavor purchased by the Adelsverein on January 9, 1843, in Fayette County, Texas, near what is now Round Top. A Texas State Historical Marker was installed in 1968, Marker 3550.
Original purchase.
The league of land was purchased near from what is now Round Top, from Robert Mills by Adelsverein officers Count Ludwig Joseph von Boos-Waldeck and Count Viktor August of Leiningen-Westerburg-Alt-Leiningen, at a cost of seventy-five cents an acre. It was named for the Duke of Nassau, in whose castle the Adelsverein was established. The acreage was developed as a full working plantation by slave labor bought by Count Boos-Waldeck in New Orleans, Galveston, and Houston. When Prince Solms inspected the plantation in 1844, he recommended the Verein divest itself of the property, rather than be associated with slavery.
Initially, the plantation had been considered as the primary base for arriving German immigrants, but the immigrants instead went to colonies established by Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels and John O. Meusebach. Nassau Plantation became a luxurious noblemen's retreat for representatives of the Adelsverein. Prince Solms enjoyed horse racing and extravagant entertaining on the property. John O. Meusebach resided at Nassau from April to July 1846 to recover his health.
One of the early managers of Nassau appointed by Prince Solms was Friedrich W. von Wrede, Sr. from Oberhausen, Germany. On October 24, 1845, Wrede and New Braunfels botanist Oscar von Claren were scalped and killed by Indians while camping about ten miles from Austin.
Sale.
The plantation was mismanaged and operated at a loss. Gustav Dresel, Special Business Agent for the Adelsverein, sold Nassau plantation and its twenty-five slaves on July 28, 1848, to Otto von Roeder. Von Roeder, in turn, sold off of undeveloped land and the manor house to fellow Prussian nobleman, Baron Peter Carl Johann von Rosenberg, who immigrated to Texas in 1849 with his family from their estate, Eckitten, near Memel in East Prussia.
In 1853, Bexar County district court ordered the Fayette County sheriff to sell the league, to satisfy creditors of the Adelsverein. The sheriff sold the property to James A. Chandler on May 3, 1853. Chandler filed suit for legal title. In June 1868, Chandler recovered judgment.


State Council of Lithuania

The State Council of Lithuania () was a legislative institution in interwar Lithuania. It was an advisory institution that codified existing and proposed new laws. It was established by the constitution adopted on 15 May 1928. President Antanas Smetona dismissed the Third Seimas in March 1927. Although the constitution of 1928 retained the Seimas as the legislative body, new elections were not called until June 1936. In the absence of a parliament, the State Council performed some legislative functions of the Lithuanian government. It was liquidated on 26 July 1940 by the People's Government of Lithuania. Its chairman in 1928–1938 was Stasys Šilingas who became the prime legal architect of the authoritarian regime of Smetona. The archives of the council were lost after the Soviet occupation. Therefore, its activities are known mainly from the press (which was censored by Smetona's regime), memoirs of its members, and documents of other institutions.
Activities.
The law governing the State Council was adopted on 21 September 1928. The council convened for its first official meeting on 9 October 1928. In its functions, the council superseded the Commission of Legal Advisers of the Ministries () which was liquidated in November 1928. The council's statute was drafted by its member Mykolas Römeris. One of the most discussed and debated aspects became the council's competence to rule whether directives, orders, instructions, and other acts by various institutions of the executive branch violated state laws. Römeris envisioned the council as at least a partial solution for the lack of an administrative court in Lithuania though it lacked any kind of binding decision power. The council rejected proposals to accept public complaints fearing that it would become overburdened. Prime Minister Augustinas Voldemaras opposed council's desire to independently "notice" conflicts between laws and various orders and instructions. Therefore, its statute was not published and in practice the council "noticed" conflicts only when asked for a ruling by a minister.
In 1934, Jonas Vileišis was tasked by the council with preparing the preliminary project for a new civil code. At the time, four different civil codes were in effect in Lithuania: Volume 10 of the Digest of Laws of the Russian Empire was in effect in most of Lithuania, the Napoleonic and other French laws in Suvalkija, the German Civil Code in Klaipėda Region, and the of the Baltic Governorates in Palanga and small areas near Zarasai. In early 1937, the council organized a commission to continue the project. Its members unofficially used the Swiss Civil Code and Swiss Code of Obligations as models, but the new civil code was not completed. Similarly, the council undertook to write a new criminal code in 1938. Lithuania still used the 1903 criminal code of the Russian Empire which was imperfectly translated into Lithuanian in 1919, 1930, and 1934. However, the work was slow and it was not completed before the Soviet occupation in June 1940.
In fall 1936, the council formed a special commission to draft a new constitution of Lithuania. The commission, chaired by Stasys Šilingas, started its work by borrowing the April Constitution of Poland adopted in 1935. In five months the commission held 109 meetings and produced the first draft by April 1937. The commission finished its work in July 1937 and the constitution was further modified by the Council of Ministers which made two critical changes: deleted the entire first section which was a declaration of Lithuanian nationalism and removed a sentence declaring President of Lithuania to be above the government, parliament, or courts. Šilingas protested the changes and resigned from the State Council on 1 February 1938. The modified constitution was adopted by the Fourth Seimas on 11 February and became effective 12 May 1938.
The council paid special attention to the creation and development of the proper legal terminology in the Lithuanian language. It had a permanent editorial commission to ensure that all published acts were written in proper Lithuanian and two special commissions on terminology, which included linguist . The council and its commissions reviewed and established several hundred legal terms, including same basics like "nusikaltimas" (crime) and "kaltinamasis" (the accused), that are widely used and accepted.
Members.
Initially, the council had five members; it later grew to nine members and four advisors. During its existence, 18 people were members of the council, including Stasys Šilingas, attorney Mykolas Römeris, General Teodoras Daukantas, banker Vladas Jurgutis, mayor Jonas Vileišis, judge (was its chairman 1938–1940). The members were appointed and dismissed by the President upon a recommendation of the Prime Minister. Generally, the members were selected for their expertise and not for their political loyalty to President Smetona or the Lithuanian Nationalist Union. The council was well funded and its members received high salaries. For example, in 1937, the state budget allotted 785,000 litas to the Fourth Seimas, 266,000 litas to the President, 381,000 litas to the Cabinet, and 310,000 litas to the State Council.


Krupina

Krupina (, ) is a town in southern central Slovakia. It is part of the Banská Bystrica Region and has approximately 8,000 inhabitants.
Etymology.
The name is probably derived from Slavic root "krup". Proto-Slavic: "krǫpъ", "krǫpъjь" – solid, strong. The root is present also in "krupa" ("krǫpa") – a smaller fortress, a fortified settlement, "-ina" is a frequent suffix. Another theory is based on the meaning "coarse". The settlement could be named after the nearby river, as the river had a rough and rocky bottom.
History.
The territory of modern-day Krupina was inhabited since the Neolithic, based on archaeological findings from the Bronze Age. The first written reference to the towns river dates back to 1135. The first people to inhabit it were the Slavs. Between the 12th and 13th century the Germans arrived in Krupina, later between the 17th and 18th centuries the Magyars (Hungarians). Along with Trnava, Krupina is the oldest town in Slovakia, having received town privileges in 1238. The settlement lay on a route known as the "via magna", connecting the Baltic Sea with the Adriatic. After the Mongol invasion of 1241/1242, when the town was sacked, it was rebuilt and received its town privileges again in 1244 and became a "free royal town".
The "Krupina law", based on the Magdeburg rights, was the basis for many towns in central and northern Slovakia. The deposits of gold and silver ran out in the 14th century and thereafter the town's economy was based on handicraft and agriculture. In the first half of the 15th century the town was threatened by the remains of the Hussites led by John Giskra. As the Turks advanced into the Kingdom of Hungary, the town built its town walls and sentry tower, and the Turks couldn't capture the town until 1682. It was also besieged in 1582, 1647 and 1678 and was ravaged in 1626 by Turks. Turks held it until 1686. Later, Krupina was involved in the Kuruc uprisings at the beginning of the 18th century, burnt down in 1708 and suffered from a plague in 1710. The first schools were opened in the 18th century. After the break-up of Austria-Hungary in 1918, the town became part of Czechoslovakia, was briefly occupied by the Slovak Soviet Republic in 1919, came back quickly into Czechoslovakia, and since 1993 has been a part of Slovakia.
Literature:
Geography.
Krupina lies at an altitude of above sea level and covers an area of . It lies on the Krupina Plain under the Štiavnica Mountains, halfway between Zvolen and Šahy. North of the town the Mäsiarsky bok national nature reserve with cliffs and stone seas is located.
Demographics.
According to the 2014 census, the town had 8,010 inhabitants. In 2001 97.63% of the inhabitants were Slovaks, 1.14% Roma, 0.38% Czechs and 0.30% Hungarians. The religious make-up was 70.32% Roman Catholics, 17.91% Lutherans and 9.27% people with no religious affiliation.
Twin towns — sister cities.
Krupina is twinned with:
References.
"Part of the information is based on the on the German Wikipedia


Curtis Flowers

Curtis Giovanni Flowers (born May 29, 1970) is an American man who was tried for murder six times in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Four of the trials resulted in convictions, all of which were overturned on appeal. Flowers was alleged to have committed the July 16, 1996, shooting deaths of four people inside Tardy Furniture store in Winona, seat of Montgomery County. Flowers was first convicted in 1997; in five of the six trials, the prosecutor, Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans sought the death penalty against Flowers. As a result, Flowers was held on death row at the Parchman division of Mississippi State Penitentiary for over 20 years.
In his first trial, Flowers was convicted of the aggravated murder and robbery of the store owner. This verdict and a conviction in a second trial for the murder of one of the store employees were both overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct. A subsequent trial for all four murders resulted in conviction, but this was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court for racial bias by the prosecutor in jury selection: Flowers is black and the prosecution excluded a disproportionate number of black jurors. Flowers' fourth and fifth trials ended as mistrials. On June 18, 2010, a majority-white jury in Flowers' sixth trial convicted him of the 1996 murders and voted to impose a death sentence.
Flowers' case was one of three that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2016 were to be remanded to lower courts to be reviewed for evidence of racial bias in jury selection. After the Mississippi Supreme Court reaffirmed the conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court again reviewed Flowers' case. It overturned, on a 7–2 vote, the murder convictions in June 2019 in the decision "Flowers v. Mississippi", with conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing for the 7–2 majority. In December 2019, Flowers was released from prison for the first time since his original arrest, on $250,000 bond, pending a state decision on whether it would attempt another prosecution. On September 4, 2020, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a Republican who had taken over the case from District Attorney Evans, announced she would not seek a seventh trial and had dropped the charges against Flowers.
The Flowers case served as the subject of a 2018 podcast, "In the Dark," on American Public Media.
Case.
On the morning of July 16, 1996, a retired employee of Tardy Furniture entered the store and found four bodies: owner Bertha Tardy, and three employees, Robert Golden, Carmen Rigby, and Derrick Stewart, who was 16 at the time of his murder. All had been fatally shot. Curtis Flowers was suspected after police learned that he had been fired from the store 13 days prior to the murders. He also owed Bertha Tardy $30 for a cash advance on his paycheck.
Certain eyewitnesses said they saw Flowers near the front of the store on the morning of the shootings. No gun was found, but bullets from the scene were determined to be the same caliber as a gun that had been stolen from Flowers' uncle's car the same day as the murders. The Mississippi Crime Lab found that bullets fired previously from the uncle's gun matched the ballistics evidence of bullets found at the murder scene. Flowers was charged with murder in the shooting deaths of the four victims.
Trials and state court appeals.
Summary.
State District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted all six of Flower's trials. The first through third trials (1997, 1999, 2004) ended in convictions but were overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court - the first two because of prosecutorial misconduct; the third because District Attorney Evans was found to have discriminated against black jurors during jury selection.
The fourth (2007) and fifth (2008) ended in hung juries. The sixth (2010) resulted in a conviction, and an appeal failed.
In 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court referred the sixth trial back to the Mississippi Supreme Court for review of racial discrimination in jury selection. The following year the state court confirmed the original decision. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Flowers' conviction in 2019 because of Evans' efforts to keep black people off the jury. Flowers was released on bail to await the state's next decision. Evans recused himself from the case and handed the case to the State Attorney General. In 2020, it was announced that charges would be dropped against Flowers.
First trial (1997).
Flowers was first tried in 1997, before Judge Clarence E. Morgan III. The prosecutor decided to try Flowers for the death of the store owner, Bertha Tardy, as occurring in the course of a robbery. This would increase the penalty for conviction, making the defendant eligible for the death penalty. The prosecution said that bloody footprints found at the crime scene were a size 10½, the same as that worn by Flowers. They were identified as Fila's Grant Hill style, which witnesses said Flowers had been wearing that morning.
In addition, prosecution witnesses testified that projectiles found at the crime scene were most likely from a .380 caliber weapon, the same as a gun stolen from Flowers' uncle on the morning of the murders. Forensic evidence revealed gunpowder residue on Flowers' hand. $400 was found to be missing from the till, and $235 was found in Flowers' headboard. According to two of Flowers' cellmates in the first jail in which he was held, Flowers admitted to them that he had stolen the money and committed the murders. Flowers denied this. Of the original two witnesses to the confession, one of the witnesses has since died with no further elaboration on the confession and the other later retracted his testimony. A third witness alleged a later confession by Flowers when the both of them were in a different prison, after the first trial, but that witness also later recanted.
Flowers maintained that he was innocent of the murders and said that he never admitted any crimes to his cellmates. He claimed to simply have stopped going to the job and did not know he had been fired. He said he was wearing Nike shoes that day, the clothes he was wearing did not match the description given by eyewitnesses, and the particulate matter on his hands was due to his having handled fireworks the day before the murders. In 1997 he was convicted of the murder of the store owner by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.
The conviction verdict in the first trial was overturned in 2000 by the Mississippi Supreme Court after Flowers appealed. The court held that evidence presented by Evans on behalf of the state was prejudicial because, in presenting evidence for all four murders, it went beyond that necessary to prove the murder of Tardy alone. In addition, the prosecutor was held to have asked questions "not in good faith" and "without basis in fact." The court remanded the case for a re-trial.
Second trial (1999).
While the first case was still under appeal, prosecutors initiated a second trial for the murder of employee Derrick Stewart at the Tardy store. Morgan was the judge again; one black person was on the jury. Scheduled for September 1998, the court granted the defence a change of venue, moving the trial to Harrison County due to the difficulties in getting a fair and impartial jury in Montgomery County, and the trial started in on 22 March 1999. Flowers was convicted on 30 March and sentenced to death. This verdict was also overturned (in 2003) on appeal by the Mississippi Supreme Court, which held that Evans' prosecution "employed many of the same tactics during the second trial" as it did in the first, the court had improperly allowed evidence regarding the other murders to be admitted, and that other prosecutorial errors were made.
Third trial (2004).
A third trial on charges of four counts of murder was concluded on February 12, 2004, and Flowers was convicted of each murder. The jury sentenced him to death. Morgan was again the judge. The verdict was overturned in 2007 by the Mississippi Supreme Court as it held that Evans' peremptory challenges in jury selection were racially motivated and thus unconstitutional. During the selection process, Evans challenged African-American jurors with its first seven strikes, which resulted in a Batson challenge by the defense ("Batson v. Kentucky" (1986) established that peremptory challenge cannot be used to discriminate against jurors based on race, ethnicity, or sex). Following its submission of non-racial grounds for its challenges, Evans used all of the state's five remaining challenges to strike African-American jurors. This left the jury with only two African-American jurors, one of which was subsequently excused after informing the judge that he could not be impartial. Evans then used the state's three alternate juror strikes to exclude African-Americans. The final jury consisted of one African-American and 11 whites. (The county population is 45% African American.)
The state Supreme Court stated that there was disparate treatment by the prosecutor in evaluation of black compared with white jurors on issues such as the jurors' connections with the defendants and the jurors' willingness to use the death penalty; he struck blacks from the jury on grounds for which he did not strike whites. In addition, the court found that although in many cases Evans presented race-neutral reasons to strike, he used the challenge process as "an exercise in finding race neutral reasons to justify racially motivated strikes." The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the conviction, saying there had been "as strong [a] case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge".
Fourth trial (2007).
At the fourth trial, before Morgan in 2007 on four counts of murder, the prosecution did not seek the death penalty on the request of family of the victims who, aware that the defence would have the harder task of appealing a higher court if the sentence was life in prison, wanted the trial concluded so they could 'move on'. Evans exhausted the state's peremptory challenges in jury selection striking off black candidates; the resulting jury, however, had five African Americans on it. The fourth trial ended in a mistrial, as the jury was split 7–5 in favor of conviction; votes could be classified by race, among other factors, with African Americans voting to acquit.
Fifth trial (2008).
The prosecution sought the death penalty for Flowers for the four murders in his fifth trial, which took place in 2008. This time Joseph Loper sat as judge. On the first day of testimony, an alternate juror, the only black woman on the jury, was arrested for perjury for lying during jury selection when she said she did not know Flowers. The trial, with a jury of nine white and three black jurors, concluded in 2008 in a mistrial due to a hung jury. James Bibbs, an African American, was the sole juror opposed to conviction. Immediately after the trial the judge, Joseph Loper, accused Bibbs of perjury for having lied during jury selection. Loper recommended Bibbs be prosecuted by Doug Evans, who, after eight months, recused himself and the new prosecution dropped the charges against Bibbs as there was no evidence. Loper was also recused as judge in Bibbs' trial.
Sixth trial (2010).
A jury for a sixth capital murder trial was convened in Winona, Mississippi on June 10, 2010; it was composed of eleven white jurors and one black juror, and presided over by Judge Loper. Following 30 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Flowers guilty of four counts of capital murder. After deliberating for approximately 90 minutes during the penalty phase, the jury returned a death sentence. An appeal by Flowers failed, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruling in 2014 that the conviction was to be upheld.
First U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
In June 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court included Flowers' case among three capital cases it remanded to lower courts to review for racial bias by the prosecution in jury selection. In November 2017, the Mississippi Supreme Court renewed its prior determination, and affirmed Flowers' conviction and death sentence from the sixth trial.
"In the Dark".
In 2018, the second season of the American Public Media podcast "In the Dark" was based on reporting about the Flowers case, hosted and reported by journalist Madeleine Baran. Through in-depth investigative reporting, serious doubt was cast on the legitimacy of the case against Flowers, including retracted confessions by numerous witnesses, potential misconduct by the prosecutor, and the disappearance of a gun, potentially the murder weapon, after it was turned over to police.
Second U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
New evidence uncovered during the "In the Dark" investigation was used by Flowers' lawyers to attempt to get his conviction overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. A petition for a writ of certiorari was filed, seeking review of the Mississippi Supreme Court's application of "Batson v. Kentucky". The U.S. Supreme Court granted the writ on November 2, 2018.
The court heard oral argument on March 20, 2019. Amicus briefs on behalf of Flowers were filed by the Magnolia Bar Association, the Mississippi Centre for Justice, and Innocence Project New Orleans. On June 21, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Flowers' sixth conviction with a vote of 7–2 in "Flowers v. Mississippi". The Supreme Court's decision was made based on the argument that the prosecutor, Doug Evans, had committed a Batson violation by striking all but one prospective black juror in Flowers' sixth trial. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority decision: "The state's relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the state wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury. We cannot ignore that history."
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented from the Court's decision.
"The Washington Post" described Evans as conducting "a prosecutorial pursuit that may be without parallel". In total in the six trials, Evans had used 41 of 42 challenges to exclude African Americans from the juries.
Resolution of ongoing case.
Flowers continued to be held at Parchman, then at the Grenada County, Mississippi, jail, and the Winston-Chickasaw Regional Correctional Facility, in Louisville, Mississippi, pending decisions from prosecutors and the local court on any future prosecution. Flowers's attorneys petitioned for the charges to be dismissed, or failing that, for bail to be granted and for Doug Evans to be removed from any role in the prosecution, citing the multiple findings of prosecutorial misconduct in the case.
Evans was sued in federal court by the local NAACP chapter on behalf of multiple Flowers's jury pool members, seeking class action status to include all jury-eligible black residents of his district, based on his alleged systematic racial discrimination in jury selection. This suit was later dismissed on procedural grounds.
On December 16, 2019, Judge Loper granted Flowers bail in the amount of $250,000, of which he was required to deposit 10 percent. Flowers was restricted to his residence, and required to wear an ankle monitor. Judge Loper noted in his decision that several of the prosecution's key witnesses had recanted. In addition, the documentary "In the Dark" reported that potentially exculpatory evidence had been uncovered, as well as alternative suspects, seemingly leaving the prosecution with a weaker case than in the previous trials.
Judge Loper reprimanded Evans, who was expected to but did not attend the hearing, for taking no action over the preceding four months to further Flowers' case despite court orders to do so. District Attorney Evans, prosecutor in all six of Flowers's trials, recused himself from the case in January 2020 and asked the presiding judge to turn over prosecution to the Mississippi Attorney General's office. The state declined to prosecute Flowers for the seventh time, officially dropping all charges against Flowers on September 4, 2020. The Attorney General's office stated that it would be nearly impossible to convict Flowers due to the lack of any available living witnesses who had not recanted or otherwise rendered their testimony unusable by making multiple conflicting statements, the identification of alternative suspects, and new potentially-exculpatory evidence. The case was dismissed with prejudice, barring further prosecution and thus freeing Flowers and bringing the case to a formal conclusion.


R v Bournewood Community and Mental Health NHS Trust

In R v Bournewood Community and Mental Health NHS Trust the House of Lords ruled that a man who had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital without capable consent had not been unlawfully detained under the common law. A later European Court of Human Rights ruling, however, found that the man had been unlawfully deprived of his liberty in the meaning of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Facts.
HL was an adult male who was autistic and had profound learning disabilities. He had lived in Bournewood Hospital from the age of 13 for over thirty years. In 1994 he was discharged into the community to live in an adult foster placement with carers Mr and Mrs 'E'. On 22 July 1997 HL became agitated at a day centre he attended and was admitted to the Accident and Emergency Department at Bournewood Hospital under sedation. Due to the sedative, HL was compliant and did not resist admission, so doctors chose not to admit him using powers of detention under the Mental Health Act. HL never attempted to leave the hospital, but his carers were prevented from visiting him in order to prevent him leaving with them. A report by the Health Service Ombudsman heard evidence from a range of professionals that the standard of HL's care had been poor in the hospital, and he had become distressed and agitated. Mr and Mrs 'E' sought from the court a judicial review of the decision of the Bournewood Community and Mental Health NHS Trust "to detain the appellant on 22 July 1997 and the Trust's ongoing decision to continue the Appellant's retention" and a writ of "Habeas Corpus Ad Subjiciendum" to direct that HL be discharged and returned to their care.
Judgment.
Appeals.
In the High Court the judge considered whether HL had been unlawfully detained under the common law. He reasoned that 'there will be no restraint of the applicant until he has attempted to leave and the respondent, by its agent, has done something to prevent this'. The Court of Appeal, however, held that the actions of the Trust had been based on a false premise that they were 'entitled to treat L as an in-patient without his consent as long as he did not dissent'. The court held that HL should have been detained under the Mental Health Act 1983, as the common law only provided for situations not already encompassed by statute. The Court also commented that a troubling feature of the appeal was that the respondent Trust was not alone in misinterpreting the Act, and potentially the judgement could apply to many patients informally detained like HL. They stated that the practice of informal detention in cases like HL could not justify disregarding the Act, especially in light of this bypassing its safeguards to detained patients.
House of Lords.
The House of Lords considered whether HL had been unlawfully detained under the common law. They heard evidence that the ruling of the Court of Appeal might mean several tens of thousands of patients would have to be detained under the Mental Health Act. They considered that this might excessively stigmatise informal patients and have dire resource implications due to the costs of administering the Mental Health Act. In assessing whether HL had been detained, they concluded by a majority verdict that he had not been detained in the meaning of the common law tort of false imprisonment because there must be "actual" and not just "potential" restraint to engage the tort. Some commentators have suggested this reasoning might be at odds with other false imprisonment precedents. Lord Steyn dissented from this aspect of the judgement, stating that the Trust's argument that HL, not being formally detained, was always free to go 'stretched credulity to breaking point' and was 'a fairytale'. Unanimously their Lordships also held that even if HL had been found to have been detained, it would have been justified under the common law doctrine of necessity. Although concurring with this finding, Lord Steyn commented that this was an 'unfortunate' result as it left compliant but incapacitated patients without the safeguards of patients detained formally under the Mental Health Act.
European Court of Human Rights.
Although HL was in fact released back into the care of Mr. and Mrs. E in December 1997 after being held in hospital for five months, the case was pursued at the European Court of Human Rights(ECtHR) for a declaration that HL had been deprived of his liberty unlawfully in the meaning of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights ('the Convention'). The ECtHR concurred with Lord Steyn that HL had in fact been detained, finding that the distinction relied upon by the House of Lords between actual and potential restraint was not 'of central importance under the Convention'. They further found that the common law doctrine of necessity did not provide the requisite safeguards for informal detention of compliant but incapacitated patients to be described as 'in accordance with a procedure described by law' as required under Article 5(1)(e).
Response of the UK government to 'the Bournewood judgment'.
Following the ruling of the ECtHR, the UK government launched a widespread consultation about the potential consequences of 'the Bournewood judgment', as it became known. During this consultation it was considered that compliant but incapacitated adults in care homes, as well as hospitals, might be deprived of their liberty in the meaning of the Convention. This consultation resulted in the amendment of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 to contain the 'deprivation of liberty safeguards'. The deprivation of liberty safeguards were intended to plug the 'Bournewood gap' by providing administrative and judicial safeguards for adults who lack mental capacity who are deprived of their liberty in care homes and hospitals. The safeguards came into force in April 2009, but their uptake has not been as widespread as expected and their implementation has been subject to criticism from a wide range of interested parties.


New Orleans Freedmens Aid Association

The New Orleans Freedmens Aid Association was a fraternal benevolent society for freedmen, established seven months after the end of the American Civil War in New Orleans. The first group of its kind in the area, it helped with burial services and life insurance. This type of organization helped establish traditional second lines celebrations in New Orleans.


Jenny Slew

Jenny Slew (1719 – unknown) was one of the first black Americans to sue for her freedom, and the first person to succeed through trial by jury.
Biography.
Early life.
Jenny Slew was born around 1719 to a free white woman, Betty Slew, and a man of African descent, likely a slave. Slew lived a life as a free woman in Ipswich, Massachusetts up until 1762.
Marriages.
Slew was married several times, all to enslaved men.
Kidnapping.
In January 1762, when Slew was forty-three, she was kidnapped from her home in Ipswich and forced into servitude by John Whipple Jr.
"Slew vs. Whipple".
In 1765, three years after her kidnapping, Slew brought a suit to court. She demanded her freedom and 25 pounds in damages, charging Whipple with violating her liberty. Most colonies denied slaves to sue in court, but Massachusetts allowed slaves to bring forward civil suits, even though they would still be regarded as property. Furthermore, most civil suits were brought forward by men. Slew's attorney Benjamin Kent argued that her mother was a white and free woman, so she was free. In the colonies at the time, a child's legal status descended from a mother. Slew filed her complaint in the Inferior Court of Common Pleas in Newburyport which threw out her petition since she filed under the name "Jenny Slew, Spinster". The court argued that since she had been married, such a name was incorrect. Slew was charged with the expense of the suit.
A year later, Slew brought an appeal to the Essex Superior Court of Judicature in Salem, Massachusetts where she faced a trial by jury. The jury's members were composed of "white Gentlemen". Whipple argued that Slew could not prove that she was free and that he owned proof of sale for when he purchased her. He also argued that Slew also did not have any legal rights since she was married and thus under the rulings of her husband. However, Slew was not married during the time of the trials and her marriages had been to slaves. In all of the colonies at that time, the law did not legal marriages between slaves. Thus, the Superior considered Slew a "spinster" and able to sue for her freedom. The superior court reversed the ruling by deciding that whether a child was a slave or not was determined by the mother's race.[2] Slew won her freedom and was awarded her court costs and four pounds in damages.
John Adams, future president of the United States, was most likely present at Slew's trial. Adams has records of the trial in his legal papers and according to one of his diary entries on November 5, 1766, Adams wrote about a trial of a "mulatto woman... suing for liberty" against a white man accused of kidnapping.


Statute of Enrolments

The Statute of Enrolments was a 1536 Act of the Parliament of England that regulated the sale and transfer of landsmen. The Statute is commonly considered an addition to the Statute of Uses, which was passed within the same Parliament, probably due to an omission in the Statute of Uses. It is thought to have been intended to prevent secret conveyancing, although modern academics instead assert that it was so Henry VIII could keep an accurate record of who his freeholders were. The Statute, which only provided for estates "of inheritance and freehold", was easily evaded through the sale of an estate for a limited time period, as leasehold, something given validity at the common law level in 1621 by "Lutwich v Mitton".
Statute.
The Statute was intended as an addition to the Statute of Uses, and was passed in the same session of Parliament; Edward Coke, for example, referred to it as "but a Proviso" to the Statute of Uses. The Statute was drafted quickly, by the Clerk of the House of Commons rather than a legislator, and is interesting in that unlike most government bills it completely lacks a preamble. It is thought by Charles Isaac Elton that it was drafted "as some sort of emergency legislation", which Kaye backs up, saying that it was most likely due to some omission in the Statute of Uses. The Statute provided that after 31 July 1536, no land was to be transferred based on a sale unless that sale had been certified by either the courts in Westminster or the local Justices of the Peace, unless it was in those cities or boroughs where this was already required.
The Statute was evaded through simply selling the land for a period of years, rather than freehold, something given validity at the common law by "Lutwich v Mitton" in 1621. This was valid because the statute only applied to estates "of inheritance and freehold", not of leasehold. The common impression is that the Statute was intended to prevent secret conveyancing; Oxland instead interprets it as being a way for Henry VIII to keep an accurate record of who his freeholders were at any one time.


Armed Forces (Parliamentary Approval for Participation in Armed Conflict) Bill

Armed Forces (Parliamentary Approval for Participation in Armed Conflict) Bill was a bill of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It attempted to limit the royal prerogative of declaring war by providing that only Parliament declare war or, except in certain emergencies, could sanction the United Kingdom's participation in armed conflicts.
Passage through Parliament.
Clare Short presented the bill to Parliament on 22 June 2005, supported by senior politicians from all three major parties including William Hague, Ken Clarke, Ming Campbell and Alex Salmond, and received its first reading. After publication, it received its second reading on 21 October 2005. It failed to pass the second reading, and move on to committee stage, because it was talked-out (discussed until there was no time left). A vote was cast but only 91 aye votes were cast and 12 no votes. A minimum of 100 aye votes are required for it to succeed.
It was argued by David Burrowes during the debate of the second reading that the bill was a "Trojan horse for voicing disapproval about going to war in Iraq".
Making his first speech to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown proposed reforms which would have delivered the heart of this Bill. However no further action occurred.
Provisions.
In Parliament, a bill is divided into clauses. Clauses are further divided into sections. This bill drafted 11 clauses: clauses 1-3 defined prior approval, clauses 4-6 defined retrospective approval, clause 7 defined a declaration of war, and clauses 8-11 contained miscellaneous provisions.
Clause 1 - Prior approval: application.
If the Prime Minister proposes that the British Armed Forces participate in an armed conflict, both Houses of Parliament must give permission otherwise it is unlawful. There are two exceptions under clause 4 and 6.
Clause 2 - Report relating to proposed participation.
If the Prime Minister wishes to send the British Armed Forces into armed conflict, he must lay a report before both Houses of Parliament detailing:
Clause 3 - Resolutions to approve proposed participation.
Each House of Parliament shall agree by approving the report. The Prime Minister must bring the motion in the House of Commons.
Clause 4 - Participation in armed conflict in circumstances of urgency, etc..
This clause would apply if the British Armed Forces were in armed conflict before the bill was assented or where the Prime Minister decides to act as a matter of urgency and a report cannot be made in time.
If the Prime Minister acts as a matter of urgency and Parliament is prorogued (not in session) for at least five days, then the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Chancellor (now the Lord Speaker) shall meet within that five days.
The Prime Minister will lay a report before both Houses as soon as is practicable.
Clause 5 - Resolutions to approve participation retrospectively.
Both Houses will vote on the report as soon as is practicable.
Clause 6 - Provisions in case where resolution not come to.
If either House of Parliament cannot decide within ten days or does not approve the report after ten days, then the Prime Minister has thirty days to withdraw the British Armed Forces or as long as it takes to remove them.
Clause 7 - Declaration of war.
Only Parliament can declare war.
Clause 8 - Action in defence of members of the armed forces.
Nothing in this act would stop a member of the British Armed Forces from following a lawful command or following established rules of engagement in order to take immediate defence.
Clause 9 - Prime Minister unable to act.
If the Prime Minister cannot act, the Secretary of State can act in his stead.
Clause 10 - Interpretation.
This clause sets interpretations.
Clause 11 - Short title and commencement.
This clause defines the short title and the commencement date is enacted.


Howe and Hummel

Howe and Hummel was a New York City law firm, celebrated in the latter half of the nineteenth century and principally renowned for its active involvement in the world of crime and corruption.
The partners.
The senior partner in the firm was William F. Howe (1828 – September 2, 1902), a corpulent UK-born and later naturalized American trial lawyer who had served 18 months in jail in Britain for false representation, and who was strongly suspected of possessing a more extensive criminal background. Prosecuted in 1874 by a pair of white slavers, William and Adelaide Beaumont, "who maintained that they had in some fashion been cheated by the partners",
In 1869, Howe made a partner of Abraham Hummel (July 27, 1850 – January 21, 1926), his physical opposite and former clerk, a runtish, rake-thin genius renowned for his ability to spot loopholes in the law.
Criminal and civil practice.
Howe handled most of the firm's criminal work, participating in more than 600 murder trials in the course of his fifty-year career and winning a large but unstated proportion of them. He was noted for his extravagant dress, favoring bright waistcoats and large jeweled rings—although he steadily dressed down as a capital trial progressed, invariably ending it in a funereal suit and black tie. He had a markedly florid rhetorical style, on one occasion delivering an entire summing-up, two hours, while on his knees before the jury box. One of his most remarked upon talents was an apparent ability to weep at will, although legal historian Sadakat Kadri notes that his frequent opponent Francis L. Wellman "suspected that he used an onion-scented handkerchief to get in the mood". The less extrovert but more intelligent Hummel specialized in civil law and ran the firm's thriving blackmail racket, representing chorus girls and thwarted lovers, threatening married men with exposure and well-off young bachelors with suits for breach of promise of marriage.
At its peak, operating from offices just across the road from NYPD headquarters on Centre Street, Howe and Hummel received fat retainers from a significant proportion of the criminals, brothel-keepers, and abortionists of New York. All 74 madams rounded up during a purity drive in 1884 named Howe and Hummel as their counsel, and at one time the firm represented 23 out of the 25 prisoners awaiting trial for murder in the city's Tombs prison and had an undeclared interest in the twenty-fourth.
Bill Howe's persuasive abilities were the stuff of legend. Perhaps his most notable achievement was to get a client, Ella Nelson, acquitted on a charge of willful murder. Howe admitted that the girl had been armed with a revolver, but successfully persuaded a jury that her trigger finger had accidentally slipped not just once, but four times in the course of an argument with her married lover.
Another of Howe's most spectacular defenses, according to the "New York Tribune" of 2 September 1902:
One of Howe's most notorious cases, however, may have been that of John Dolan, convicted in the murder of merchant James H. Noe. Despite a desperate legal to save his life, Dolan went to the gallows on April 21, 1875. "New York Times" coverage of the case, which riveted New York for several months, identifies one William F. Howe as Dolan's attorney. In a noticeable omission, it does not mention Dolan in its obituary for Howe.
Among Abe Hummel's most celebrated achievements was the discovery of an error in procedure that led to the release of 240 of the 300 prisoners on Blackwell's Island in a single day. On another occasion, the partners invoked a technicality that, had it been allowed, would have set free every prisoner awaiting trial, or recently convicted, of first degree murder in the state of New York, and made it impossible for the authorities to obtain further capital convictions for murder for a period of several months.
Collapse of the firm.
The final collapse of the firm came in 1907, five years after Howe's death, when Hummel was convicted in New York of suborning perjury, disbarred, and sentenced to a year in jail. After his release, Hummel left the United States and lived chiefly in Paris.
Howe and Hummel kept no records, actively courted publicity, and were much discussed in their day among the members of the legal profession. As such, many of the stories told about them have the aura of tall tales. Nevertheless, their decades of effective practice suggest that the partners were among the most effective and innovative attorneys to practice in the United States during the nineteenth century.
Although nobody can deny a strong element of "sharp practice", including using suspect surprise witnesses in some trials, there was genuine talent in the team, especially in the abilities of William Howe in court. A recent study of the 1897 murder of Willie Guldensuppe, and the 1898 trial of his killer Martin Thorne, gives clear proof of Howe's mastery of cross-examination. At the first trial of Thorne his co-conspirator, Mrs. Augusta Nack, testified against Thorne. Howe's simple and direct cross-examination ripped her apart on the stand, which led to the prosecution deciding not to use her again in a retrial. Thorne was convicted and sentenced to be executed in the second trial. In the end, however, it was the (mis)use of that talent that ultimately brought down the firm.
Detail of the firm’s collapse.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13172
Chapter X “Flight into Texas”


An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act (43rd Canadian Parliament, 2nd Session)

An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act (Bill C-10) is a proposed Canadian federal legislation, introduced on November 3, 2020 by Minister of Canadian Heritage Steven Guilbeault during the second session of the 43rd Canadian Parliament. The bill seeks to amend the "Broadcasting Act" to account for the increased prominence of internet video and digital media, by adding undertakings that conduct "broadcasting" over the internet to the regulatory scope of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
The bill will also update Canada's broadcasting policy to prioritize the "needs and interests" of Canadians, and the inclusion and involvement of Canadians of diverse backgrounds in broadcast programming. It removes the "Act"s requirement that all broadcasters be fully owned by Canadians, removes the seven-year term limit for CRTC-issued broadcast licenses (a regulatory process which will not apply to internet broadcasters), and adds a mechanism of imposing "conditions" on broadcasters (including radio, television, and online undertakings) without them being bound to a license term. The bill also introduces monetary fines for violating orders and regulations issued by the CRTC.
Supporters of Bill C-10 state that it would allow the CRTC to compel foreign streaming services to follow similar regulatory obligations to conventional radio and television broadcasters, including mandating that they make contributions to the Canada Media Fund to support the production of Canadian content (which was projected by government officials to result in at least $830 million in additional funding by 2023), and improve the discoverability of Canadian content on their platforms.
Bill C-10 has faced criticism for granting a large amount of power to the CRTC, who are unelected regulators and receive very little guidance from Parliament or the government. Its unclear applicability to user-generated content on social media services has also faced concerns that it infringes freedom of expression. Guilbeault has argued that the bill is meant to only apply to "professional" media and not individual users, but the "Broadcasting Act" would still be applied to the platform itself.
History.
On January 19, 2020, the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel issued a report to Minister of Heritage Steven Guilbeault and Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains, calling for reforms of Canada's broadcasting system to account for digital media. Among other reforms, the panel urgently recommended that any company "with significant Canadian revenues" that distributes or curates audio, audiovisual, or news content be required to register with and be regulated by the CRTC (which the review proposed be renamed to the "Canadian Communications Commission" to signify its wider scope), and become obligated to make expenditures towards the creation of Canadian content (just as licensed radio and television broadcasters must do under the existing "Broadcasting Act" and CRTC policy). The CRTC does not currently regulate internet content.
The panel's urgent recommendations were incorporated into Bill C-10. The bill is the first in a series of three bills intended to address online platforms and their influence in Canada, alongside a proposed "online harms" bill that will seek to address online hate speech. On February 16, 2021, the bill completed its second reading and was referred to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (CHPC). The Standing Committee's most recent meeting took place on April 26, 2021.
Contents.
The bill consists primarily of amendments to the "Broadcasting Act", along with consequential and related amendments to existing legislation such as "Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation", the "Cannabis Act," the "Copyright Act", and the "Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Act." The exact regulatory policies would be determined by the CRTC based on its interpretation of the amended "Broadcasting Act" after royal assent.
The broadcasting policy of Canada as defined by the "Broadcasting Act" is modified, stating generally that the broadcasting system must serve the needs and interests of Canadians (replacing a clause requiring all broadcasters to be owned and controlled by Canadians), make use of Canadian resources "to the extent that is appropriate for the nature of the undertaking", and provide opportunities for Canadians of all backgrounds via "programming and employment opportunities" (including "Indigenous people, racialized communities and people of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds", among others).
The CRTC is given authorization to impose "conditions" on broadcasters to uphold the broadcasting policy of Canada, including the production, presentation, and discoverability of Canadian content, accessibility of content to individuals with disabilities, and other regulatory matters. These would be similar to the current "conditions of licence" used to regulate broadcasters, but would not be bound to licence terms. The licensing framework for broadcasters is modified to remove the seven-year limit for fixed terms, and authorize the CRTC to issue indefinite licenses. The CRTC will be prohibited from imposing any obligation on the industry that "does not contribute in a material way to implementing the broadcasting policy for Canada."
The "Act" is amended to include a definition of "online undertakings", which are any internet service that broadcasts "programs" over the internet. The definition of "broadcast undertaking" and "broadcasting" under the "Act" would also be amended to include online transmission. Unlike conventional broadcast undertakings, online undertakings are exempt from the requirement that all broadcasters must be licensed. However, the bill would still allow the CRTC to require that all broadcasters (including "online undertakings") be registered with the Commission, and to impose regulatory "conditions" and obligations on them, such as making contributions to the Canada Media Fund, giving prominence to Canadian content on their platforms, and being compelled to provide information to the Commission on such matters when requested.
Section 2(1) of the bill states that individual users who upload "programs" to a social media service, and are not "the provider of the service or the provider's affiliate, or the agent or mandatary of either of them", are not considered to be "carry[ing] on a broadcasting undertaking" for the purposes of the "Act".
Bill C-10 prescribes monetary penalties for violating any regulation or order issued by the CRTC, with fines of up to C$25,000 for the first offense by an individual, and up to $10 million for the first offense by a corporation.
Reception.
Bill C-10 has faced mixed reception. Supporters of the bill argue that it creates a level playing field between legacy and digital broadcast undertakings, and would allow the CRTC to compel foreign streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube to make expenditures towards the production of Canadian content in the same way as conventional broadcasters, and be required to prepare reports to the CRTC on the discoverability of Canadian content on their platforms. Federal officials estimated that mandating participation in the Canada Media Fund by major streaming services could generate up to $830 million in new funding per-year by 2023.
Critics of the proposed legislation have argued that it gives broad power to the CRTC, who are unelected regulators and receive very little guidance from Parliament or the government, to enforce regulations on digital media platforms. University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist criticized the bill for removing a number of long-standing policies from the "Act" that were intended to protect Canada's broadcasting system, including the requirement that all broadcasters be Canadian-owned and controlled, and the expectation that broadcasters make "maximum use, and in no case less than predominant use" of Canadian talent in programming,
Applicability to social media.
The bill previously contained a clause, Section 4(1), which excluded "programs" that are uploaded by users of social media platforms, who are not an owner, operator, or affiliate of the platform, as well as any "online undertakings" that consist only of such content, from the scope of the "Broadcasting Act". It was removed from the bill in April 2021, due to concerns that it could be used as a loophole by video sharing platforms to declare music content as being user-generated because it was uploaded to a musician's own channel, and thus not provide reports on such content to the CRTC. Concerns were raised by critics that removing the clause would place a burden on the operators of social media platforms to regulate user content for compliance with CRTC regulations.
Former CRTC commissioner Peter Menzies stated that "granting a government agency authority over legal user generated content — particularly when backed up by the government’s musings about taking down websites — doesn’t just infringe on free expression, it constitutes a full-blown assault upon it and, through it, the foundations of democracy." Guilbeault stated that Bill C-10 was intended to cover "professional series, films, and music", and argued that the bill included "safeguards" to protect individual users. Liberal MP and Guilbeault's secretary Julie Dabrusin argued that "we do not want to regulate your cat videos."
On May 3, 2021, Guilbeault stated that the bill would be amended to reinstate a more explicit exclusion of user-generated content from the bill, stating that "[Bill C-10] is not about what Canadians do online. It is about what the web giants do not do, which is to support Canadian stories and music." However, on May 9, 2021 in an interview with CTV's political talk show "Question Period", Guilbeault stated that the "Broadcasting Act" as amended by Bill C-10 "should apply to people who are broadcasters, or act like broadcasters", and suggested that social media users that have a large audience or derive a large amount of revenue (insofar that they have a "material impact on the Canadian economy") would also be classified as broadcasters.
Concerns were raised over the comments, as they had contradicted Guilbeault's previous assurance that the "Act" would not apply to individual users of social networks, and it was unclear what the threshold would be under this criteria. Guilbeault later admitted that he had used "unclear language" during the "Question Period" interview, and argued that individual persons would not be considered broadcasters under the "Act", and that social media platforms would be regulated when they themselves "produce content for Canadians to watch or listen to — for broadcast." In regards to social media platforms likely being required to improve discoverability of Canadian content, he explained that "it does not mean the CRTC would dictate, limit or prohibit a feed or what you can post, watch or listen to on social media. As the Internet is infinite, discoverability won’t limit the content you see on a feed – it will just add more."
Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole commented that Justin Trudeau's government was the most "anti-internet government in Canadian history". Conservative Party heritage critic Alain Rayes stated that "Conservatives support creating a level playing field between large, foreign streaming services and Canadian broadcasters, but not at the cost of Canadians’ fundamental rights and freedoms." Conservative MP Michael Barrett accused Bill C-10 of "silencing Canadians online", and argued that Trudeau was attempting to make "every aspect of Canadian life" conform to "his Liberal vision of Canadian society". In response, Trudeau argued that free speech is "not negotiable by our government", and commented that "the tinfoil hats on the other side of the aisle are really quite spectacular."
On May 9, Kate Taylor of "The Globe and Mail" published an opinion piece in support of Bill C-10, stating that concerns over the bill were being "overblown" by the Conservatives, that the "Broadcasting Act" has always required that it be applied by the CRTC "in a manner that is consistent with the freedom of expression and journalistic, creative and programming independence", and that all Canadian creators "deserve a broadcasting law that offers basic fairness".
The Conservative Party and the NDP supported a motion to reassess the bill's compliance with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms ("charter statement"). On May 10, 2021, members of Parliament on the Heritage Committee voted in favour of a motion requesting a new charter statement, and that Guilbeault and Minister of Justice and Attorney General David Lametti appear before the committee and an expert panel to discuss the implications of the amendments to Bill C-10. That night, Guilbeault shared a Medium post on Twitter which conspired that opposition to Bill C-10 was the product of "public opinion being manipulated at scale through a deliberate campaign of misinformation by commercial interests that would prefer to avoid the same regulatory oversight applied to broadcast media."
On May 13, the Department of Justice issued the new charter statement, finding that the current draft of Bill C-10 was compatible with the Charter, citing that the CRTC would not be able to impose the regulations on individual users, and would have to interpret the "Act" "in a manner consistent with freedom of expression". Geist felt that the charter statement did not address the main concern of allowing the CRTC to regulate the presentation of Canadian content on internet platforms, stating that "suddenly now we're going to ask the CRTC to decide which cat video constitutes Canadian content, and which one doesn't."


Religious Organizations Law

The was a Japanese law passed by the National Diet in 1939 and enacted in 1940. The law gave the state authority control over religious organizations. Following Japan's defeat in World War II, the Religious Organizations Law was repealed on December 28, 1945, and replaced by the "Religious Corporations Ordinance".


Nikolaus Georg von Reigersberg

Nikolaus Georg von Reigersberg (1598 – 7 June 1651) was an imperial official, Chancellor in the Electorate of Mainz and Mayor of Aschaffenburg. He came to wider prominence as a delegate from Mainz to the negotiations at Münster that eventually ended the Thirty Years' War.
Life.
Provenance, early years and family.
Born in 1598, Nikolaus Georg von Reigersberg was the son of a butcher, also called Georg von Reigersberg, in Diedenhofen and his wife Anna Gudnacht. The younger Georg von Reigersberg studied Jurisprudence at Cologne and Mainz, concluding his studies with a double doctorate in canon and civil law. His first marriage, which took place on 24 August 1624, was to Maria Salome von Faber, the daughter of the cup-bearer Nikolaus Faber. She died in 1639, by which point the marriage had produced four recorded sons and one daughter. His second marriage was to the heiress Eva Maria von Münster, who brought the into the family. The Collenburg (hill), and a century later the , would become the family seat for their heirs.
Career.
His professional career began in 1622 with a court appointment as secretary in the electoral chancelry of Mainz. From 1624 till 1651 he also served as Schultheiß in Aschaffenburg. He also presided as inquisitor in witch trials at Aschaffenburg, Großkrotzenburg, Wörth und Mönchberg. However, he was relieved of his inquisitorial responsibilities in 1628 following allegations that he was using the office to enrich himself. In 1635 Elector-Archbishop Anselm Casimir Wambold von Umstadt appointed him to the nobility. Between 1640 and 1643 he was a member of the Elector-Archbishop's privy council, and Chancellor of the Archbishopric of Mainz.
The size of von Reigersberg's footprint on history results not merely from a succession of court appointments and meetings with princes, but also from his participation in the peace negotiations at Münster and Osnabrück in March 1648 which led to the Peace of Westphalia and the end of thirty years of exceptionally destructive warfare. As the representative of Johann Philipp von Schönborn, who had taken over as Elector-Archbishop of Mainz in 1647, on 24 October 1648 von Reigersberg placed his signature on the treaty document. His was the first of the signatures placed by or on behalf of the Prince-electors. His contribution was prominently acknowledged by Emperor Ferdinand.
In 1651, his politics being no longer in tune with the times, he requested to be released from his chancellorship. He died in 1652 and was buried in in Aaschafenburg.


Georg Groscurth

Georg Groscurth (; December 27, 1904 – May 8, 1944), was a German doctor and member of the resistance to Nazism in the time of the Third Reich.
Life.
Georg Groscurth was born a farmer's son in the village of Unterhaun in the Province of Hesse-Nassau, now part of Hauneck in the "Bundesland" of Hesse. He studied medicine at the University of Marburg, the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, the University of Graz, and the University of Vienna. He finished his studies in Berlin with a doctorate in medicine. Thereafter, Groscurth worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. There he got to know Robert Havemann, with whom he founded a resistance group some years later.
From 1933 Groscurth worked as an internist at the Robert Koch Hospital in Berlin, and later at the Moabit Hospital, also in Berlin. In 1940, Groscurth was appointed as a lecturer at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, where he came to Rudolf Hess's attention when he became Groscurth's patient.
Since Groscurth witnessed not only his Jewish colleagues being removed from their positions when Hitler came to power beginning in 1933, he knowingly broke his professional discretion and tried to communicate to resistance groups everything that Hess had told him during medical consultations. This included, for example, plans for new concentration camps and for an attack on the Soviet Union. Together with the chemist Robert Havemann, the architect Herbert Richter-Lukian and the dentist Paul Rentsch, Groscurth then founded the resistance group "Europäische Union" ("European Union"). They hid Jews and fugitives. Whenever he could, Groscurth certified soldiers unfit for combat duty. In 1943, he got to know Galina Romanova, a Soviet doctor from Dnepropetrovsk who had been forcibly brought to Germany as a slave labourer. He treated her with medications, gave her professional advice, and supported her in organizing the resistance.
The "European Union" resistance group was betrayed in 1943 and Groscurth was seized on September 4, 1943. Afterwards, he was sentenced to death at the "Volksgerichtshof". The death sentence was signed by the judges, Roland Freisler and Hans-Joachim Rehse. Groscurth was hanged at the Brandenburg-Görden Prison on May 8, 1944.
Posthumous recognition.
After the war ended, his widow, Dr. Anneliese Groscurth, lived in Wehrda in Hesse, and later in West Berlin together with the couple's two sons. Friedrich Christian Delius, who later became a writer, grew up with the two Groscurth boys and later wrote the book "Mein Jahr als Mörder" ("My Year as a Murderer"), a novel with both autobiographical and historical elements, based on the lives of Georg and Anneliese Groscurth. His book played a major role in bringing recognition to the Groscurth's story.
A memorial plaque which recalls Georg Groscurth's activities can be found at the former Moabit Hospital, Turmstraße 21 in Berlin. Furthermore, a street in the Pankow section of Berlin was named Groscurthstraße in his honour on August 31, 1977. In 1980 a memorial to Groscurth with the inscription "I die for a world without hate" was erected within the cemetery of Unterhaun. In 2005, Israel awarded Groscurth with the designation, Righteous among the Nations.