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Court: Broad protection for whistleblowers
Court Watch |
2014/03/05 13:32
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The Supreme Court says whistleblower protections in a federal law passed in response to the Enron financial scandal apply broadly to employees of publicly traded companies and contractors hired by the companies.
The justices ruled 6-3 Tuesday in favor of two former employees of companies that administer the Fidelity family of mutual funds. The workers claimed they faced retaliation after they reported allegations of fraud affecting Fidelity funds.
The case involved the reach of a provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in 2002 in response to the Enron scandal, that protects whistleblower activity. The measure was intended to protect people who expose the kind of corporate misdeeds that arose at Enron. |
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Court-martial date set in Naval Academy case
Court Watch |
2013/11/04 12:45
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A court-martial has been scheduled for February for a U.S. Naval Academy student accused of aggravated sexual assault.
Midshipman Josh Tate appeared at an arraignment Monday at the Washington Navy Yard.
The court-martial is scheduled to begin Feb. 10. The case stems from an April 2012 party at an off-campus house in Annapolis. The alleged victim had been drinking heavily and has testified that she cannot remember having sex with Tate.
Another student also faces a separate court-martial in the case. It is scheduled for Jan. 27. Midshipman Eric Graham is charged with abusive sexual contact.
If you are facing trial by court-martial, you also have the right to hire an experienced civilian defense attorney to represent and defend you. It is your career and future that is at stake and it is important that you have an experienced attorney who will advocate aggressively on your behalf. Please contact Las Vegas Military Defense Attorneys. |
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Adoption case returns to SC from US Supreme Court
Court Watch |
2013/07/02 09:32
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The U.S. Supreme Court is pushing South Carolina courts to quickly take up a custody case that will decide whether a Native American girl's life will be with her biological father in Oklahoma or the South Carolina couple who adopted her.
A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that federal law doesn't require that the girl named Veronica stay with her biological father, but also doesn't give her adoptive parents immediate custody of the now 3-year-old child.
The high court issued an order Friday speeding up the case being sent back to South Carolina's Supreme Court.
Melanie and Matt Capobianco of James Island had lost in South Carolina courts before the nation's highest court ruled the Indian Child Welfare Act didn't apply because the biological father never had custody of the child and abandoned her before birth.
Dusten Brown, a member of the Cherokee Nation, invoked the federal law to stop the adoption arranged by the girl's non-Indian mother when she was pregnant. The Capobiancos were was present at Veronica's birth in Oklahoma. Brown had never met his daughter and, after the mother rebuffed his marriage proposal, played no role during the pregnancy and paid no child support after Veronica was born.
But when Brown found out Veronica was going to be adopted, he objected and said the law favored the girl living with him and growing up with tribal traditions.
South Carolina courts sent Veronica back to Oklahoma at the end of 2011, even though she had lived with the Capobiancos for the first 27 months of her life. |
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Court says human genes cannot be patented
Court Watch |
2013/06/13 09:24
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The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that companies cannot patent parts of naturally-occurring human genes, a decision with the potential to profoundly affect the emerging and lucrative medical and biotechnology industries.
The high court's unanimous judgment reverses three decades of patent awards by government officials. It throws out patents held by Salt Lake City-based Myriad Genetics Inc. on an increasingly popular breast cancer test brought into the public eye recently by actress Angelina Jolie's revelation that she had a double mastectomy because of one of the genes involved in this case.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the court's decision, said that Myriad's assertion — that the DNA it isolated from the body for its proprietary breast and ovarian cancer tests were patentable — had to be dismissed because it violates patent rules. The court has said that laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas are not patentable.
"We hold that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated," Thomas said.
Patents are the legal protection that gives inventors the right to prevent others from making, using or selling a novel device, process or application. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been awarding patents on human genes for almost 30 years, but opponents of Myriad Genetics Inc.'s patents on the two genes linked to increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer say such protection should not be given to something that can be found inside the human body.
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Court: Police can take DNA swabs from arrestees
Court Watch |
2013/06/03 14:11
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A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.
"Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court's five-justice majority.
But the four dissenting justices said that the court was allowing a major change in police powers.
"Make no mistake about it: because of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason," conservative Justice Antonin Scalia said in a sharp dissent which he read aloud in the courtroom.
At least 28 states and the federal government now take DNA swabs after arrests. But a Maryland court was one of the first to say that it was illegal for that state to take Alonzo King's DNA without approval from a judge, saying King had "a sufficiently weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches."
But the high court's decision reverses that ruling and reinstates King's rape conviction, which came after police took his DNA during an unrelated arrest. Kennedy wrote the decision, and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer. Scalia was joined in his dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
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Court: Calif. erred in new lethal injection regs
Court Watch |
2013/05/31 11:02
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Executions in California will remain suspended after a state appeals court ruled that corrections officials made several "substantial" procedural errors when they adopted new lethal injection rules.
The 1st District Court of Appeals said the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation failed to explain, as required by state law, why it was switching from a three-drug injection method to a single drug.
The court's opinion, which affirmed a lower court ruling, also said the agency misled the public by not providing the documents and information it used to reach its decision.
Corrections spokeswoman Deborah Hoffman said in an email that the agency was reviewing the ruling.
"In the meantime, at the governor's direction, CDCR is continuing to develop proposed regulations for a single-drug protocol in order to ensure that California's laws on capital punishment are upheld," Hoffman said.
California has not executed an inmate since 2006, when a federal judge halted the practice, finding that the three-drug mixture amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. The state was ordered to redo its capital punishment system.
Since then, California has built a new death chamber at San Quentin State Prison and trained a new team to carry out executions.
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