Utah Supreme Court hears arguments on abortion trigger law injunction
The Utah Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday over Utah’s anti-abortion trigger law.
The trigger law bans nearly all abortions, but an injunction from the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah has blocked it from going into effect while a lawsuit considers the ban. The Utah Attorney General’s Office is now appealing a lower court’s decision to grant that injunction.
Tuesday, attorneys for the state of Utah and for Planned Parenthood were questioned on topics such as if an equality clause in the Utah Constitution includes the right to abortion, and whether Planned Parenthood had standing to bring a lawsuit themselves.
The hearing will not decide whether the trigger law was constitutional, just if the lower court was correct in issuing the injunction. The Court took the case under advisement with no timeline for a ruling.
In the meantime, Utah’s trigger law remains blocked, which means abortion is legal in the state up to 18 weeks of pregnancy.
Sensitive info exposed from domestic violence assessment tool
A new tool designed to shield domestic violence victims may be inadvertently sharing sensitive information about victims.
The recently passed SB 117 requires officers to do lethality assessments where they pose specific questions to victims about potential threats from an assailant to gauge if the victim is at risk and if the suspect had prior similar incidents.
KUTV recently uncovered a public domestic violence arrest document with a lethality assessment. Since the document is public, there’s concern the accused could view their victim’s responses.
The department had reportedly been told to include a summary of the assessment or the threat level but had misunderstood and uploaded the assessment itself. Lt. Nick Street of the Department of Public Safety said they will fix misunderstandings like this one with agency-wide re-education.
It is not currently clear if any other lethality assessments have been made public in this way.
