TV News LIES

California's system for imposing and carrying out the death penalty is so long and drawn-out that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and thus is unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.

Ruling in the case of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was condemned to death in 1995 and has yet to be executed, Judge Cormac J. Carney of the U.S. Central District of California said that to take "nearly a generation" to decide on Jones' appeals was unconstitutional.

As part of the ruling, Carney vacated the death penalty sentence in Jones' case.

More cities are passing laws that make it illegal to camp in public, sleep in vehicles on city streets, or sit or lie down in public, a new report shows.

The laws are meant to curb the problems associated with homelessness, such as public drunkenness and sleeping on the sidewalk. But the report, released Wednesday by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, says the laws criminalize people just for being homeless.

Maria Foscarinis, the center's executive director, says there has been a striking increase in city laws prohibiting camping on any park, sidewalk or public space.

A federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday that the University of Texas can continue using race in its undergraduate admissions, a year after the US supreme court sent the case back to a lower court.

A 5th US circuit court of appeals panel ruled 2-1 that barring the university from using race would hurt diversity on campus. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed in 2008 by Abigail Fisher, who is white and was denied admission.

In the culmination of the most sweeping political scandal in Utah history, former Attorneys General John Swallow and Mark Shurtleff were arrested early Tuesday and charged with a combined 23 counts that could total 30 years each in prison.

The two men were taken into custody at their homes without incident Tuesday morning and booked into the Salt Lake County Jail. Bail was set at $250,000 each. Shurtleff was released about 11:45 a.m. Swallow was released about 12:15 p.m.

A canon lawyer alleging a widespread cover-up of clergy sex misconduct in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has made her most detailed claims yet, accusing archbishops and their top staff of lying to the public and of ignoring the U.S. bishops' pledge to have no tolerance of priests who abuse.

Jennifer Haselberger, who spent five years as Archbishop John Nienstedt's archivist and top adviser on Roman Catholic church law, also charged that the church used a chaotic system of record-keeping that helped conceal the backgrounds of guilty priests who remained on assignment.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas was arrested Tuesday after attempting to board a plane out of McAllen, Texas, according to United We Dream, an immigration advocacy group.

On July 10, Vargas, who is an undocumented immigrant, flew to the small border town with a camera crew from his own organization, Define American. Vargas, like many other immigration activists, was there to interview and film undocumented minors fleeing escalating violence in their home countries in Central America. But what Vargas didn't know is that in order to leave the border town, he would need to pass through an interior U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint set up within 45 miles of McAllen.