The pro-death-penalty initiative limits the number of petitions prisoners can file to challenge their convictions and sentences, and would provide new deadlines intended to expedite appeals.
The Dec. 13 deadline is intended to give the House and Senate time to translate any agreement into spending bills for financing government operations after current funding runs out Jan . 15
The strike deadline is intended "to move things faster," said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
The July 2011 deadline was intended, among other things, to force Mr. Karzai to address urgent problems like corruption and ineffective governance, which polls show were leading reasons that led Afghans to support the insurgency.
Meanwhile, Cook County's chief prosecutor Anita Alvarez admitted her decision to release the footage a day before a court-set deadline was intended to assuage any violence that may have been anticipated in the public's reaction to the tape, which had already been leaked to a local television station.
Rejecting the circuit court's conclusion that Palm Beach County lacked the authority to include the 215 net votes submitted past the Nov. 26 deadline, the Supreme Court explained that the deadline was not intended to exclude votes identified after that date through ongoing manual recounts.
Foster Maer, a lawyer for the defense fund, said it would soon file motions asking the court to order the agency immediately to meet the September deadline, which is intended to leave new citizens time to register to vote.
The deadline was never intended to prohibit legal votes identified after that date through ongoing manual recounts to be excluded from the statewide official results in the Election Canvassing Commission's certification of the results of a recount of less than all of a county's ballots.
The July 2011 deadline he set was intended to "begin a process of transition," he said, but "that doesn't mean we suddenly turn off the lights and let the door close behind us".
Noting that state law also provided for manual recounts, and for such recounts to begin up until the time the county canvassing board certifies the returns, the court said it was not logical to assume that the Legislature intended the deadline as a tool to permit the secretary of state to "summarily disenfranchise innocent electors" by refusing to count late-filed returns.
