Cultivated Compendium

According to the Associated Press, the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation is being accused of violating a law meant to protect the cultural property of American Indian tribes. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel has told the Interior Department to investigate if the bureau has violated the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which provides a way for American Indian remains and other cultural property to be returned to tribes out of federal custody. The law was enacted to rectify a history in which American Indian remains and sacred objects were scooped up into museum archives and the hands of government bureaucrats.

A whistleblower reported that the office was not keeping detailed records that would ensure the law functions the way it is supposed to, the AP reports.

The remains and artifacts were collected during the construction of dams and waterways in California, Nevada and Oregon, according to the AP.

Florida's ban on same-sex marriage was struck down today by Florida Circuit Judge Luis M. Garcia, the Associated Press reports. Garcia characterized the issue as one of equal protection for a powerless minority: "'Whether it is ... when Nazi supremacists won the right to march in Skokie, Illinois, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood; or when a black woman wanted to marry a white man in Virginia; or when black children wanted to go to an all-white school, the Constitution guarantees and protects ALL of its citizens from government interference with those rights."

Florida's ban prohibited both same-sex marriages and domestic partnerships, the AP reports.

U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney has ruled that decades-long delays in carrying out the death penalty sentence of an inmate violates the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel or unusual punishment, the Los Angeles Times reports. Whether the ruling will be upheld on appeal is uncertain. "'I think it has a shot in the 9th Circuit, but I don't know about the U.S. Supreme Court,'" Gerald Uelmen, a Santa Clara University law professor and who was chairman of a "state commission that concluded the system needed substantially more money to operate effectively," told the LA Times. '"It is conceivable that the U.S. Supreme Court and the 9th Circuit could say California is such an outlier — its system is so dysfunctional, with twice the national delay — that it cannot be sustained,"' Uelmen added.

After a Colorado state judge ruled that the state's same-sex marriage ban is "hanging on by a thread," at least three counties have been issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the Associated Press reports.

In one decision, Adams District Judge C. Scott Crabtree ruled Wednesday that the ban violates the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause and the arguments in support of the ban about protecting family and promoting the procreation of children are just a "'pretext for discriminating against same-sex marriages,'" Fox 31 out of Denver reports. Some counties were already issues licenses after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Utah's ban on same-sex marriage, Fox 31 also reports.

In another decision, Boulder District Judge Andrew Hartman allowed the Boulder County Clerk to continue issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, The Daily Caller reports. Hartman opined that that the ban is "'hanging on by a thread and the court must presume that it remains valid.'"

USA Today reports that the incentives being provided by the federal government to get doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic health records are being offered even though those EHRs "currently make it easier for health care providers to defraud government-paid health programs." The issue, according to USA Today, is that the EHRs don't have auditing safeguards in place to prevent fraud or the safeguards are "vulnerable to corruption" from providers adding unnecessary notes to existing records or creating new records where none existed before.

 The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has spent $22.5 billion in financial incentives for healthcare providers to use EHRs, USA Today also reports.

Investigative journalist Will Potter is hoping to get around ag gag laws making it illegal to sneak onto agricultural operations by using drones to photograph factory farms from the air, Fast Company reports. He has started a Kickstarter campaign to pay for drones, legal expenses and video production. One thing he hopes to expose are farms that generate meat labeled as "humane" or "free range" "for what they are: big industrial operations," Fast Company also reports.

The Washington Post has a compelling feature of Nora Sandigo, who is a guardian to hundreds of U.S. children born to undocumented immigrants who are subject to deportation. Sandigo began caring for the U.S.-citizen children of deported parents five years ago and she has become "Miami's most popular solution to a growing problem in immigration enforcement affecting what the government refers to as 'mixed-status families.'" When legal guardians are named to protect the childrens' legal interests, they can stay with relatives or friends who are in the country illegally.

The Canada Supreme Court ruled for the first time in favor of issuing a declaration of aboriginal title, or that an aboriginal group owns their land, David C. Nahwegahbow writes for CBC. The decision was in favor of the Tsilhqot'in Nation, who reside in the British Columbia province and who say they were not consulted about forestry operations within thier lands. According to Nahwegahbow, the Supreme Court rebuked with its ruling the doctrine of terra nullius, a theory that "espouses that Indigenous peoples were so uncivilized that they could not be seen in law to be true legal occupants and owners of their lands."

The Washington Post has another Edward Snowden-related piece: those who are not targeted in surveillance by the National Security Agency far outnumber the foreigners who are legally targeted. Nine of 10 accountholders found in a cache of intercepted conversations were not the intended surveillance targets "but were caught in a net the agency has cast for someone else," the Post reports. The newspaper reviewed 160,000 email and instant-message conversations and 7,900 documents taken from 11,000 online accounts, finding. for example, medical records sent by one relative to another, resumes, and schoolchildren's academic transcripts.

In an interview, Snowden told the Post he did want the full archive released, but he did not think journalists could understand the NSA programs '"without being able to review some of that surveillance, both the justified and unjustified.”'

Last month, the Iowa Supreme Court threw out the 25-year prison sentence of a man who pled guilty to criminal transmission of HIV for failing to inform a sexual partner of his HIV-positive status, ProPublica reports. The Supreme Court, 6-1, determined that the defendant's defense lawyer provided ineffective counsel when he allowed his client to plead guilty to a charge for which there was no factual basis. Many states criminalize HIV-positive people's sexual activity without informing their partners, even if there is no evidence if the exposure was likely to result in the transmission of HIV, ProPublica reports.