Tag Archives: supreme court

Blog, Civil Rights, Legal News, Supreme Court

Court rejects state’s appeal in KKK highway cleanup case

BY KATE BRUMBACK Associated Press

Dismissing an appeal on a technicality, Georgia’s highest court granted a victory to a Ku Klux Klan group that has been seeking for years to participate in a state-run highway cleanup program

ATLANTA

Dismissing an appeal on a technicality, Georgia’s highest court granted a victory to a Ku Klux Klan group that has been seeking for years to participate in a state-run highway cleanup program.

The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the state’s appeal of a lower court decision that the state had violated the KKK group’s free speech rights. The Department of Transportation filed its appeal incorrectly, leaving the high court without authority to consider its merits, the opinion said.

The state attorney general’s office, which represents the department, is reviewing the decision and considering its options, spokesman Nicholas Genesi said in an email.

The north Georgia KKK group applied to join the state’s Adopt-A-Highway program in May 2012, hoping to pick up litter along part of Route 515 in the Appalachian Mountains. The program was started in 1989 to get volunteers to clean up sections of roads in the state. In exchange, the Department of Transportation posts a sponsorship sign along the road with the program logo and the volunteer group’s name.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article87664407.html#storylink=cpy

Blog, Business Law, Legal News, Personal Injury, Supreme Court

Merely doing business in Delaware not enough for lawsuit

, The News Journal 11:44 a.m. EDT April 21, 2016

High court overturns decision regarding whether Delaware has legal oversight over businesses registered in state

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

  • The Delaware Supreme Court has issued a ruling over a decades-old decision regarding jurisdiction.
  • It overturns a ruling that says corporations registered in Delaware are subject to state jurisdiction.
  • The ruling was 4-1 and involves an Atlanta auto-parts supplier.

An out-of-state company can no longer be sued in Delaware merely because it does business within the state, the Delaware Supreme Court has ruled.

Under a 1988 state Supreme Court ruling, a plaintiff could sue a company in Delaware for a personal injury or other tort claim that occurred in another state. That meant a large retail chain operating a store in Delaware or a company with an office in the state could be vulnerable to a Delaware lawsuit simply because it did business here.

However, in this week’s rare 4-1 split decision, the Supreme Court reversed that holding in Genuine Parts Co. v. Cepec. The opinion was authored by Delaware Supreme Court Chief Justice Leo E. Strine.

“This is a positive for companies not incorporated in Delaware, but do business in Delaware,” said Donald W. Durandetta, a professor of business at Wilmington University. “It is increased protection for doing business in Delaware.”

Plaintiffs Ralph and Sandra Cepec are Georgia residents who sued automobile equipment supplier Genuine Parts Co., the parent company of NAPA AutoParts. Genuine is a Georgia corporation headquartered in Atlanta and operates more than 60,000 retail stores throughout the nation, including about 15 in Delaware.

Ralph Cepec worked for Genuine Parts in a Jacksonville, Florida, warehouse between 1988 and 1991. He filed a personal injury lawsuit in Delaware saying he was exposed to asbestos during his employment, causing mesothelioma and other illnesses.

Last year, the Cepecs sued Genuine Parts in Delaware, despite that than 1 percent of its stores and employees are based in Delaware and less than 1 percent of its revenue comes from the state, according to the court’s opinion. Genuine Parts is registered to do business in Delaware, giving the state’s court system general jurisdiction over the company under Delaware law.

The case started in the Delaware Superior Court, which upheld the state’s jurisdiction over Genuine Parts, citing the state Supreme Court’s 1988 decision in Sternberg v. O’Neil. Genuine Parts appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court. In the decision, the high court ruled plaintiffs can only file a lawsuit against a company in Delaware if the claim resulted from the defendant’s connection to the state. A plaintiff no longer pursue a claim in Delaware just because a company does business here.

Plaintiffs can still file lawsuits in Delaware against national corporations if the injury occurred in the state or there is some other connection.

Read Full Article – http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2016/04/20/merely-doing-business-delaware-not-enough-lawsuit/83293736/

Blog, Business Law, Criminal, Legal News, Supreme Court

What today’s Supreme Court decision means for the future of legal weed

By Christopher Ingraham March 21 at 1:50 PM

The Supreme Court’s decision today to toss out a lawsuit that could have brought Colorado’s legal marijuana boom to a screeching halt hasn’t deterred opponents of the national legalization effort.

Already, the plaintiffs and their supporters are looking to regroup. “The Court’s decision does not bar additional challenges to Colorado’s scheme in federal district court,” said Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson in a statement.

Oklahoma and Nebraska asked the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to Colorado’s marijuana legalization framework, saying that the state’s legalization regime was causing marijuana to flow across the borders into their own states, creating law enforcement headaches.

But by a 6-2 majority, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, without comment.

[Supreme Court turns down case that challenges Colorado marijuana law]

In a statement, Peterson’s office said it would work with Oklahoma and other states “to determine the best next steps toward vindicating the rule of law.”

Other opponents are remaining optimistic, as well. “It’s obviously a disappointment,” said Kevin Sabet of Smart Approaches to Marijuana in an email. “But we think legalization will be defeated on its own policy merits,” he added.

They’re facing an increasingly steep uphill battle.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that since marijuana is illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA), it can’t be regulated at the state level. But numerous legal experts have pointed out that assumption is incorrect.

“Congress has no power to compel states to prohibit the cultivation, possession and transfer of marijuana,” according to Randy Barnett, an attorney who litigated a Supreme Court case exploring the limits of the CSA. “In the absence of such state prohibition, all such activities are completely legal under state law, notwithstanding that they are illegal under federal law,” he wrote last year.

In short, Congress can say that marijuana is illegal at the federal level. But if a state doesn’t want to enforce that prohibition itself, it doesn’t have to do so. And if it wants to go one step further and set up a market to regulate the trade in the drug, it’s free to do that as well.

“This is the result that most of us were expecting,” legal professor Sam Kamin, who was part of the task force implementing Colorado’s marijuana laws, said in an email. “This never seemed like the right case to test the power of the states to tax and regulate marijuana (everyone seems to agree that they have the right to legalize marijuana).”

The U.S. Justice Department filed a brief last December urging the Supreme Court to throw the lawsuit out. “With the federal government uninterested in bringing such a suit at the moment, this seems to take things out of the courts and into the political process for the near term,” Kamen said.

Legalization advocates say that while the decision likely won’t have any big practical effects in the near-term, it does send a signal to other states mulling their own marijuana policy in the coming years. “The Supreme Court’s rejection of this misguided effort to undo cautious and effective state-level regulation of marijuana is excellent news for the many other states looking to adopt similar reforms in 2016 and beyond,” said Tamar Todd, director of the office of legal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, in a statement.

Observers on both sides of the issue point out that the court’s majority did not issue any explanation of their dismissal, which is standard practice in cases like this. The justices may have objected to the lawsuit on its merits, or they may have simply felt that it wasn’t proper for them to take up the case at this time, preferring instead to let the state-level legalization experiments play out.

“Of course, everything may change with a new administration in 2017,” law professor Sam Kamin said in an email. “But with marijuana on the ballot in another big handful of states this fall, the genie may be out of the bottle by the time the next president is sworn into office.”

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Full Article Sourced From – https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/21/what-todays-supreme-court-decision-means-for-the-future-of-legal-weed/

Blog, Criminal, Legal News, Supreme Court

Marijuana residue laws too vague, lawyer tells Nevada Supreme Court

By David Ferrara
Las Vegas Review-Journal

A former Las Vegas stripper, who has spent 16 years in prison for killing six teenagers working on a road cleanup crew, is appealing once again to the Nevada Supreme Court.

A jury found Jessica Williams guilty in February 2001 of six counts of felony driving with a prohibited substance in her blood, part of the state’s law on driving under the influence.

Michael Pescetta, assistant federal public defender, argued that state laws regarding marijuana residue and driving under the influence conflict with one another. In one statute, marijuana metabolite does not qualify as a prohibited substance, he said.

“Why does this one (statute) control and not that one? This situation is at best a tie,” he said, adding that a “tie goes to the defendant.”

A panel of three — Chief Justice James Hardesty and Justices Nancy Saitta and Kristina Pickering — heard about 30 minutes of arguments Thursday but did not make a ruling.

Williams, who was 20 at the time of the March 2000 crash, admitted that she had smoked marijuana two hours before she fell asleep behind the wheel of a white Ford van. Her lawyer at trial said that she had used the stimulant-hallucinogen Ecstasy 10 hours earlier but maintained that she was not impaired and simply fell asleep before her van ran off Interstate 15 just north of Las Vegas.

Six teenagers died when the van veered into the I-15 median near Las Vegas Motor Speedway at a spot where a youth offenders work crew had been assigned to pick up trash.

Killed were Anthony Smith, 14; Scott Garner Jr., 14; Alberto Puig, 16; Maleyna Stoltzfus, 15; Rebeccah Glicken, 15; and Jennifer Booth, 16.

Pescetta wrote in court papers that Williams was denied fair warning that having marijuana metabolite in her blood would subject her to criminal liability.

He argued before the court that prosecutors did not thoroughly examine the conflicting statutes because the “notorious case” gained so much public attention.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Bruce Nelson said the high court had previously ruled — in 2004 — that state law was not vague.

“What’s changed?” he said. “Nothing. There is absolutely nothing new in this case.”

Hardesty responded: “I’m not sure the 2004 decision addressed the conflict adequately.”

Pescetta said the court did not perform a “vagueness analysis” on two statutes, “one of which says the defendant is guilty, and one of which says the defendant is not guilty.”

Nelson also said that medical marijuana was not legal at the time in Nevada. Since legalization, people can still face prosecution for driving under the influence of medical pot.

Pescetta also argued that her previous attorney, John Watkins, failed to raise the issue that marijuana metabolite was not a prohibited substance at the time of the crash. The prosecutor said Watkins’ representation was effective.

Williams, 36, remains in custody at the Jean Conservation Camp.

Contact reporter David Ferrara at dferrara@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039. Find him on Twitter:@randompoker

Read Full Article – http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/las-vegas/marijuana-residue-laws-too-vague-lawyer-tells-nevada-supreme-court

Blog, Business Law, Drug Companies, Legal News, Personal Injury, Supreme Court

Time for J&J to pay up in $124M Risperdal case as SCOTUS deflects final appeal

January 11, 2016 | By

Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) fell short Monday in its final effort to escape a Risperdal marketing penalty in South Carolina. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up J&J’s last appeal in the case, putting the company on the hook for a $124 million penalty.

J&J had cited the Eighth Amendment in arguing against the penalty, saying it qualified as an “excessive fine.” As Reuters notes, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had backed the drugmaker in seeking Supreme Court review.

J&J’s Janssen unit has been fighting South Carolina’s deceptive trade practices court win since 2011, when a jury ordered the drugmaker to pay $327 million for Risperdal marketing violations. The company succeeded in lowering the judgment twice, first to $136 million and then, last year, to the final $124 million.

The lawsuit centered on promotional materials Janssen used to market the antipsychotic drug. Key to the case was a letter sent to South Carolina physicians, which overstated Risperdal’s benefits compared with other drugs in its class and downplayed side effects, the jury found. The trial court judge ordered Janssen to pay about $4,000 for each of the more than 7,000 letters mailed.

The original $327 million judgment dwarfed other similar rulings in drug-marketing lawsuits, including sizable decisions and settlements in other Risperdal-related litigation, but it fell far short of a $1.2 billion verdict in Arkansas. The Arkansas Supreme Court struck down that judgment in March 2014, and the company later negotiated a settlement of $7.5 million.

The South Carolina decision survived that state’s top court in a ruling last year, in which Justice John Kittredge backed the decision at trial, but lowered the $327 million penalty to $136 million.

In affirming the judgment against the company, Kittredge echoed the trial judge’s “profit-at-all-costs” characterization of Janssen’s marketing efforts. “Janssen’s desire for market share and increased sales knew no bounds, leading to its egregious violation of South Carolina law,” Kittredge wrote in the February 2015 ruling.

Janssen had argued that it did not intentionally deceive doctors with the now-notorious “Risperdal letter” that has featured in several state-court lawsuits. The drugmaker also contended that South Carolina’s attorney general didn’t prove patients were actually harmed by the drug. It was on that point that Kittredge lowered the judgment.

The “Risperdal letter” lawsuits compose only part of the mountain of litigation J&J has fought over the antipsychotic drug. The company agreed to pay $2.2 billion in a marketing settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and a group of states.

And the litigation isn’t over yet. The company now faces more than 1,000 lawsuits over Risperdal’s ability to trigger breast development in boys. J&J lost the first court battle last February, as a Philadelphia jury ordered J&J to pay almost $2.5 million to a young man who developed breasts while using Risperdal. In November, another jury awarded $1.75 million in a similar case.

Read Full Article – http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/time-jj-pay-124m-risperdal-case-scotus-deflects-final-appeal/2016-01-11