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Federal court sides with lobster fishers in whale protection case
Legal News Interview |
2023/06/15 13:31
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A federal appeals court has sided with commercial fishermen who say proposed restrictions aimed at saving a vanishing species of whale could put them out of business.
The fishermen harvest lobsters and crabs off New England and oppose tough new restrictions on the way they fish that are intended to protect the North Atlantic right whale. The whale numbers only about 340 in the world and it’s vulnerable to lethal entanglement in fishing gear.
The fishermen and the state of Maine appealed their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit after losing in a lower court. The appeals court said Friday it disagreed with the lower court’s ruling.
The appeals court ruling could mean that the federal government must take another stab at crafting new rules to protect the whales. The restrictions would limit where lobster fishers can fish and what kind of gear they can use to try to prevent the whales from becoming entangled in fishing ropes.
The changes would represent a potential worst-case scenario for the lobster fishing industry, wrote Douglas H. Ginsburg, the senior judge of the appeals court, in Friday’s ruling.
“The result may be great physical and human capital destroyed, and thousands of jobs lost, with all the degradation that attends such dislocations,” Ginsburg wrote.
The fishers sued the National Marine Fisheries Service, an arm of the federal government. The service declined to comment on the lawsuit. |
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Biden and GOP rush to finalize debt ceiling deal, shore up support to prevent default
Legal News Interview |
2023/06/02 11:05
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A federal appeals court in a rare move overturned the death sentence of a man who was convicted of robbing and killing two people in Fresno in 1988, saying prosecutors knowingly presented false testimony from a key witness.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in its Wednesday ruling upheld Colin Dickey’s robbery conviction and said prosecutors could decide whether to retry him for murder. Dickey remains in prison.
“This is an exceptional case in which the prosecutor deliberately elicited, and then failed to correct, false and misleading testimony from the State’s star witness,” the court said in a ruling overturning Dickey’s 1991 death sentence.
The Fresno County prosecutor elicited the testimony from key witness Gene Buchanan, who told the jury he had not met with prosecutors or accepted any benefits from them. In fact, the court said, they had met a dozen times during the investigation, and the district attorney’s office had dismissed drug charges against him and helped him collect a $5,000 reward for implicating Dickey, one of his roommates.
Dickey was convicted in the murders of two neighbors, Marie Caton, 76, and Louis Freiri, 67, who were beaten and stabbed to death in November 1988 at Caton’s home in Fresno, where Freiri was a boarder, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Both Dickey and Buchanan lived with Caton’s grandson, Richard Cullumber, who according to witnesses was a drug user who frequently requested money from Caton. Five days after the attack, the court said, Cullumber fled police in a car, said he had “killed a woman,” was cornered after a high-speed chase and shot himself to death.
According to another roommate, Dickey said he had gone to Caton’s house with Cullumber to help him get the money but had nothing to do with the killings. But Buchanan testified that Dickey told him he was at the scene of the attacks, saw Freiri lying with his head slumped down, and decided that “if you kill one you might as well kill them both.”
Buchanan’s testimony “was the centerpiece of the state’s case” and without his dubious statements, “the state’s case against Dickey was weak” and lacked any direct evidence of intent to kill, Judge Morgan Christen said in the 3-0 ruling. |
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Nigeria court hears opposition’s presidential vote challenge
Legal News Interview |
2023/05/09 10:54
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A Nigerian court on Monday began its hearing on separate suits filed by the opposition to challenge the incumbent party’s victory in the country’s presidential election.
The presidential tribunal at the Court of Appeal in the capital, Abuja, heard the opening statements of lawyers representing opposition parties, which are the challenging the outcome of the February vote won by Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress.
As the court hearing began, armed security personnel blocked major access roads and prevented a handful of journalists and lawyers from entering the facility. Some protesters waved Nigerian flags and displayed placards, alleging that the electoral process was flawed.
“Why I am demonstrating is because of the anger and the pain I have as a Nigerian not allowed to express and enjoy the resources of the land,” said protester James Mike, who accused the Nigerian political class of pilfering the country’s wealth from huge mineral and crude oil resources.
Nigeria’s election commission declared Tinubu the winner of the election in a televised broadcast after he garnered 37% of the votes. But the two main opposition candidates rejected the result, questioning Tinubu’s qualification and alleging that results from the country’s 177,000 polling stations were tampered with.
Analysts and observers said that the voting on Feb. 25 was largely an improvement from Nigeria’s previous elections, but said that delays in uploading results might have given room for the figures to be tampered with.
In separate petitions, both second-place finisher Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party and No. 3 finisher Peter Obi of the Labour Party argued that Nigeria’s electoral commission violated the provisions of the law in announcing the results of the election.
Obi has said he has evidence to show he tallied the majority votes in the election while Abubakar has asked the court to disqualify Tinubu, alleging that he has a Guinean passport and therefore wasn’t eligible to enter the presidential contest under the Nigerian Constitution. |
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Pence subpoenaed by special counsel probing Trump
Legal News Interview |
2023/02/10 14:43
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Former Vice President Mike Pence has been subpoenaed by the special counsel overseeing investigations into efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to a person with direct knowledge of the event.
The subpoena to Pence as part of the investigation by special counsel Jack Smith was served in recent days, according to the person, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Thursday to discuss a sensitive issue.
The extraordinary scenario of a former vice president potentially testifying against his former boss in a criminal investigation comes as Pence considers launching a 2024 Republican presidential bid against Trump. The two have been estranged since a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to stop Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.
The subpoena is an aggressive step from a prosecutor who for years led the Justice Department’s public corruption section and who oversaw indictments against major political figures. The move sets the stage for a likely executive privilege fight, given Pence’s close proximity to Trump for four years as major decisions were being contemplated and planned. It is unclear whether efforts to secure voluntary testimony from Pence stalled before the subpoena was issued. |
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Family loses Supreme Court bid to extend boy’s life support
Legal News Interview |
2022/08/02 12:01
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Britain’s Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to prevent a hospital withdrawing life support from a 12-year-old boy with catastrophic brain damage, rejecting a bid by his parents to extend his treatment.
The parents of Archie Battersbee had aske Supreme Court justices to block a lower court’s ruling that the Royal London Hospital can turn off the boy’s ventilator and stop other interventions that are keeping him alive.
Archie’s treatment had been due to end at noon on Tuesday, but the hospital said it would await the decision of the Supreme Court.
Justices at the U.K.’s top court said Archie had “no prospect of any meaningful recovery,” and even with continued treatment would die in the next few weeks from organ and heart failure.
The judges agreed with a lower court that continuing treatment “serves only to protract his death.”
Archie was found unconscious at home with a ligature over his head on April 7. His parents believe he may have been taking part in an online challenge that went wrong.
Doctors believe Archie is brain-stem dead and say continued life-support treatment is not in his best interests. Several British courts have agreed.
The family appealed to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and wanted the withdrawal of treatment put on hold while the committee examines the case.
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