Free Republic

Last year, the city of St. Paul paid the largest amount in lawsuits alleging police misconduct -- about $1 million in total costs -- in at least 17 years. One case, settled for $400,000, involved a woman left with serious burns when St. Paul police used a flash-bang distraction device while executing a search warrant at her home. In another case, a man who ran from police wound up with a skull fracture, gashes on his head that required 21 staples to close and burns to his face caused by chemical spray. The city settled his lawsuit, which alleged that...

Joe Carr believes a day is fast approaching when pastors will be charged with hate crimes for preaching that homosexuality is a sin and churches will face lawsuits for refusing to host same-sex weddings. “It’s just a matter of time,” said Carr, the pastor of Waynesville Missionary Baptist Church in Georgia. “What’s happening in Europe – we’re going to see happen here and we’re going to see it happen sooner rather than later I’m afraid.” And that’s why the congregation will be voting next month to change their church bylaws – to officially ban the usage of their facilities for...

California Senate Bill 131, which is ostensibly about protecting victims of child sex abuse, forces private schools to defend claims of sexual abuse as far back as 40 years ago, but exempts public schools from such claims. Because of the Democratic super-majorities in both houses of California, there is no way to stop the passage of the bill. As Valerie Schmalz wrote in Catholic San Francisco: The California state Senate narrowly approved a waiver of the statute of limitations for child sex abuse damage lawsuits – a bill that could have a devastating effect on nonprofits including Catholic Charities and...

... Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and who was a primary sponsor of the 2011 law, said he backs the president’s effort to suppress patent trolls. “The United States patent system is vital for our economic growth, job creation, and technological advance,” Mr. Leahy said in a statement. “Unfortunately, misuse of low-quality patents through patent trolling has tarnished the system’s image.” ...

In a ruling that is being compared to the case that led to free agency in baseball, a federal judge in California upheld an arbitration panel’s decision to release talk-radio host Michael Savage from a contract with his former syndicator, Talk Radio Network. Savage’s lawyer, Dan Horowitz, called it a landmark case for talk radio. “Michael is to talk radio what Curt Flood was to Major League Baseball,” Horowitz told WND, referring to the player who challenged baseball’s reserve clause, which kept a player bound to his team even after fulfillment of his contract. Savage told WND the ruling “should...

Four Pittsburgh firefighters are suing seven companies that manufacture fire trucks or sirens, claiming they've lost hearing due to the blaring sirens. (snip) They're claiming that Mack Trucks Inc., Seagrave Fire Apparatus LLC and five other firms "knew or should have known the products ... were inherently dangerous, defective and hazardous to human hearing." The men claim they've suffered irreversible hearing loss "due to exposure to the intense noise." The firefighters are seeking unspecified monetary damages

Summary: According to a new, comprehensive report by Lex Machina, more than half of all patent lawsuits in the US now come from patent trolls.Patent lawsuits are used as weapons in business wars between companies such as Oracle vs. Google and Apple vs. Samsung. Behind the intellectual property (IP) headlines, however, Lex Machina, a Silicon Valley startup, has found that patent troll lawsuits have increased from 24 percent of cases filed in 2007 to 56% in 2012. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a "patent troll uses patents as legal weapons, instead of actually creating any new products or coming...

Totalitarianism is brewing in the heartland. An Indiana inmate is now serving two years for voicing his online opinions against a judge who took away his child-custody rights during a divorce case. I know the custody case pretty well having written about it in 2009. But I'm convinced that the free speech case that is brewing in its aftermath heaps an even greater injustice upon an existing one. And I'm convinced it is showing the darker side of a dangerous man who needs to be stopped. Dan Brewington is justifiably angry because James Humphrey took his kids away from...

The mayor of a Washington town has directed pastors to stop invoking the name “Jesus Christ” in city council invocations. Don Jensen, the mayor of Longview, Wash., told the Kelso-Longview Ministerial Association that prayers mentioning Christ were not acceptable because they could expose the city to a lawsuit. The decision has sparked controversy in the city – located about 50 miles north of Portland, Ore. Mark Schmutz, who pastors the Northlake Baptist Church, said if they can’t speak the name Jesus Christ, association ministers will no longer provide the invocation. “We need to be able to speak Jesus’ name,”...

If the banking industry had a “biggest losers” award, Bank of America Corp. (B of A) would win – and that’s not a good thing. B of A comes by its image problem honestly, and this may be the only way that “honesty” and “Bank of America” can be paired in a sentence without prompting laughter from bystanders. The company’s sins have been widely reported. B of A essentially crafts laws, much to the chagrin of its customers and taxpayers in general, that are protected in court by well-funded trial lawyers and enforced by the politicians they help keep in...

The legal challenges over religious freedom and the birth control coverage requirement in President Barack Obama's health care overhaul appear to be moving toward the U.S. Supreme Court. Faith-affiliated charities, hospitals and universities have filed dozens of lawsuits against the mandate, which requires employers to provide insurance that covers contraception for free. However, many for-profit business owners are also suing, claiming a violation of their religious beliefs. The religious lawsuits have largely stalled, as the Department of Health and Human Services tries to develop an accommodation for faith groups. However, no such offer will be made to individual business owners....

Twice, I have had the unpleasant task of assisting school districts in the aftermath of school shootings. First, Columbine, and then in 2006, an intruder took a classroom hostage in Platte Canyon just west of Columbine, and killed a student. The news from Newtown, Conn., last week was both sickening and infuriating. Everyone, including the gun industry, acknowledges that a risk of catastrophic loss is created when irresponsible persons are given access to firearms. The industry's response is that we can negate this risk by placing more guns in the hands of responsible persons. It's a nice piece of marketing,...

It just would not be right for California to finish off 2012 without one more designation as being the worst at something. Our state seems to receive several of these each year: one of the worst legal climates, the state with the worst government, the worst place to do business, and now, we are the #1 “Judicial Hellhole” in the nation. The American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) released its annual list of “Judicial Hellholes” – places where frivolous lawsuits thrive and courts produce uneven rulings that often favor plaintiffs – and California earned the #1 slot.

<p>"Tom Monaghan, a devout Roman Catholic, says contraception is not health care and instead is a "gravely immoral" practice. He's a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court, along with his Domino's Farms, which runs an office park near Ann Arbor.</p>

"...The same principles can be applied with employees of companies in the maligned coal industry, or the latest cash rich sector defending against plunder - "Big Fast Food." Many are aware, including executives at McDonald's (NYSE: MCD), that the cash-strapped governments of states like California are seeking whom they may devour in order to support spending while tax receipts are declining. As we witnessed with "Big Tobacco", there is a viral effect from state to state..." This explains McDonald's flying flag upside down. "Big Fast Food WILL be an easy target for bankrupt states like Cali. Don't count on the...

In her Thursday debate against Sen. Scott Brown (R., Mass.), Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren said she did not assist the nation’s largest insurer deny settlements in asbestos-related cases. “It’s just not true,” Warren said of the charge. “The Boston Globe has looked at this; they’ve written about it.” Warren wrote a U.S. Supreme Court brief for Travelers Insurance in 2009; in the case–Travelers v. Bailey–the company sought to achieve permanent immunity against any new asbestos-related claims through the establishment of a $500 million trust. After Warren left the case, and as an extension of the legal work she did,...

Los Angeles--Environmentalists in this greenest of places call the California Environmental Quality Act the state's most powerful environmental protection, a model for the nation credited with preserving lush wetlands and keeping condominiums off the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. But increasingly, the landmark law passed in 1970 has also been abused, opening the door to lawsuits - sometimes brought by business competitors or for reasons unrelated to the environment - which, regardless of their merit, can delay even green development projects for years or sometimes kill them completely. "Something is broken," said Leron Gubler, president of the Hollywood Chamber of...

Don Barrett, a Mississippi lawyer, took in hundreds of millions of dollars a decade ago after suing Big Tobacco and winning record settlements from R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris and other cigarette makers. So did Walter Umphrey, Dewitt M. Lovelace and Stuart and Carol Nelkin. Ever since, the lawyers have been searching for big paydays in business, scoring more modest wins against car companies, drug makers, brokerage firms and insurers. Now, they have found the next target: food manufacturers. More than a dozen lawyers who took on the tobacco companies have filed 25 cases against industry players like ConAgra Foods,...

Lawsuit #1, Voter ID suit asks for ballot measure to be stricken: A suit from The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, League of Women Voters Minnesota, Jewish Community Action and Common Cause Minnesota claims the ballot question itself is misleading and asks that it be stricken. Here is the language that is alleged to be misleading: "Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to require all voters to present valid photo identification to vote and to require the state to provide free identification to eligible voters, effective July 1, 2013?" Intervention by legislators in Voter ID suit: After the Secretary...

Egypt denied on Tuesday evening the reports that President Mohammed Morsi had sent a letter to Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres. Dr. Yasser Ali, Morsi’s official spokesman, denied the reports which appeared in the Israeli press and which said that Morsi thanked the Israeli president for his Ramadan greetings and said he is looking forward to Egypt helping to get the peace process “back to its right track.” However, according to a report on the website of the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, Ali described these reports as completely incorrect and stressed that Morsi did not send any letter to Peres. Another report...