Court Digest

Ohio
Volkswagen to appeal emissions ruling to US Supreme Court
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Volkswagen, which is now subject to Ohio anti-tampering laws that carry the potential of hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, wants time to stop a state lawsuit seeking such damages, the automaker said in a court filing last Thursday.

At issue is the 2015 scandal in which the automaker was found to have rigged its vehicles to cheat U.S. diesel emissions tests. The company ultimately paid more than $33 billion in fines and settlements.

In the wake of the scandal, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office sued the company, alleging Volkswagen’s conduct — affecting about 14,000 vehicles sold or leased in Ohio — violated the state’s anti-air pollution law.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled last month that the federal Clean Air Act does not preclude Ohio from seeking its own compensation against Volkswagen. State Attorney General Dave Yost successfully argued the federal law doesn’t stop Ohio from suing over emissions test tampering that occurred after new cars were sold.

Ohio is seeking damages that could total $127 billion a year over multiple years, the company noted in its filing. The company asked the state Supreme Court last Thursday to delay its ruling while Volkswagen appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court. Yost’s office is not objecting to the delay.

Washington
Lawyers for Seattle officers leave public records case
By Martha Bellisle
The Associated Press

SEATTLE (AP) — One day after an investigation found that two of six Seattle police officers violated the law while in Washington, D.C., during the Jan. 6 insurrection, lawyers representing the officers in a related public records case filed a motion to withdraw from that case.

The six officers had filed a lawsuit in February against a list of people who had filed public records requests seeking the officers’ identities and information about the investigation by the Office of Police Accountability into their activities while in Washington, D.C.

After a judge ordered the release of their identities in March, the officers appealed. Sam Sueoka, a Seattle University law student who was named in the officers’ lawsuit, has asked the Washington Supreme Court to decide the issue. The court will consider that request at the end of July.

Last Thursday, the OPA released a report  on its investigation. It found that at least two of the officers had violated the law and department policy by trespassing at the U.S. Capitol while rioters stormed the building. OPA Director Andrew Myerberg recommended that the two officers be fired.

Last Friday, the officers’ three lawyers, Kelly Sheridan, Victoria Ainsworth and Kayla Higgins, filed a motion stating their intent to leave the public records case. They did not give a reason for withdrawing. They said it would be effective July 19.

Sheridan declined to comment when reached by email Saturday. A phone message left for Mike Solan, president of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, which funded the lawsuit, was not immediately returned.
Ben Fox, the lawyer representing Sueoka, said now that the OPA investigation has concluded that at least two officers broke the law, the full report, including the officers’ names, should be made public.

The officers had stated in their lawsuit “there has been no allegation — let alone evidence” that any of the six officers participated in any criminal activities or misconduct while in the district on Jan. 6, Fox said.

“It is now apparent that this is a false statement,” he said.

“The public has a right to know if the police officers who patrol our neighborhoods also attended the earlier extremist event outside the White House, attended by white nationalists, fascist groups and QAnon conspiracy theorists,” Fox said. “The public also has a right to know the identities of the police officers in the likely event that they transfer to a different department.”

Tennessee
Federal judge puts brakes on bathroom signage law
By Travis Loller
Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A federal judge last Friday halted enforcement of a new Tennessee law requiring businesses to post special signs if they allow transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice.

The first-of-its-kind law went into effect on July 1 and would require such businesses to post signs on multiperson bathrooms that read, “This facility maintains a policy of allowing the use of restrooms by either biological sex, regardless of the designation on the restroom.”

Businesses in Nashville and Chattanooga sued over the law, claiming that being forced to post those signs would violate their First Amendment rights by compelling them to communicate language they find offensive. The state of Tennessee argued in court that the signs are merely factual.

In her decision last Friday, U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger handed a victory to the businesses that sued, granting a preliminary injunction that effectively prevents the state from enforcing the law while the case works through the courts. She noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has found that compelling individuals to “’mouth support for views they find objectionable’” violates a cardinal constitutional command unless justified by “the strongest of rationales.”

“Particularly repugnant to the First Amendment is when the government forces a private party to voice the government’s compelled message, not merely in private or in direct dealings with government itself, but ‘in public,’ as an involuntary ‘instrument for fostering public adherence to an ideological point of view,’” Trauger wrote, quoting from a Supreme Court opinion.

The law’s sponsor, Republican state Rep. Tim Rudd, has said he is concerned about sexual predators taking advantage of loose restroom policies to assault or rape other restroom users. The law also would require signage on locker rooms, shower facilities and dressing rooms, according to court filings.

The sign requirement is part of the state building codes and violations would be considered a misdemeanor offense, according to court filings. How the measure would be enforced, however, has been unclear.
In June, Republican Senate Speaker Randy McNally told reporters he didn’t think it would be enforced.

In her opinion, Trauger accused the state defendants of pretending “that no one knows how the Act will be enforced, despite the fact that, of course, they know, because they will be among the ones doing the enforcing, and they are simply keeping their plans to themselves.”


Court: Man can’t withdraw guilty pleas in 2 Topeka killings
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas Supreme Court last Friday blocked a man’s attempt to withdraw his guilty pleas after he was sentenced to serve at least 50 years in prison for the 2018 murders of a woman and her cousin.

The high court rejected Matthew Douglas Hutto’s claim that his court-appointed attorney’s advice to plead guilty to two charges of premeditated first-degree murder meant that the lawyer did not adequately represent him.

Hutto was part of what the Supreme Court called a “murderous group” living with Brad Sportsman in the small town of Greenleaf, about 75 miles (121 kilometers) northwest of Topeka. Sportsman’s estranged wife, Lisa, had moved to Topeka, and the group traveled to Topeka in July 2018 to kill her. A cousin, 17-year-old Jesse Polinskey, was staying with her.

Polinskey and Lisa Sportsman were beaten and stabbed to death, and evidence showed that Hutto actively participated in their killings. Hutto’s attorney advised him that with a trial, the evidence against him would be strong that he was almost certain to face conviction and a 25-year prison sentence.

Hutto argued that his attorney “fear mongered” him into the guilty pleas, but Shawnee County District Judge David Debenham refused to let Hutto withdraw them.


Kentucky
Inmate who dated deputy’s wife, beaten in jail wins suit
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A former Kentucky inmate has been awarded $2.2 million in a federal lawsuit that accused a deputy jailer of ordering inmates to beat him because he had dated the deputy’s wife.

A jury returned the verdict in the suit filed by Joshua Reece, the Courier Journal reported. Reece suffered a brain injury and facial fractures in the 2015 attack at the Shelby County Detention Center shortly after he was jailed on shoplifting charges.

Garry Adams, one of Reece’s lawyers, said Shelby County will have to pay the damages because ex-jail officer William Anthony Carey was acting within the scope of his employment.

Carey was fired, pleaded guilty in state court to official misconduct and aiding and abetting the assault, then was convicted of federal civil rights violations. He is serving a four-year sentence at a federal prison in New Jersey.

Adams said Reece had dated Carey’s wife years earlier.

Virginia
Group asks judge to halt university’s anti-bias policies
BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — A conservative group is asking a court to temporarily prohibit Virginia Tech from enforcing some of its policies against harassment and discrimination.

The Roanoke Times reported last Friday that the group is called Speech First Inc.

The group has already filed a lawsuit on behalf of three students against the school’s anti-bias policies. Now the group wants a federal judge to temporarily prevent the university from enforcing the policies until he rules on the lawsuit.

The group contends that the students hold views that are unpopular on a campus of roughly 35,000 students. Those views include opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement as well as same-sex marriage and abortion.

The lawsuit claims Virginia Tech’s policies are overly vague because they forbid “telling unwelcome jokes about someone’s identity” and urging “religious beliefs on someone who finds it unwelcome.”

The school has revised one of its policies by clarifying that a ban on speech for “partisan and political purposes” applies only to employees. But Virginia Tech is defending the rest and urged the judge not to grant the group’s request for a preliminary injunction.

“It cannot be that Virginia Tech is essentially prohibited in the face of the First Amendment” from having anti-harassment policies, said counsel to the Attorney General Jessica Samuels, who represents university president Tim Sands.

Missouri
Ex-Missouri prisons officer’s lawsuit says she was harassed
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — A former corrections officer has sued the state of Missouri, alleging she was sexually harassed and subjected to retaliation when she complained about a hostile work environment at Potosi Correctional Center.

The lawsuit by Patricia Lawson is the latest in a string of complaints about harassment within Missouri’s prisons that has seen millions in damages paid out in recent years to other women who had worked in the system.

Lawson worked as a corrections officer at the eastern Missouri prison from July 2007 through June 2019. Her lawsuit says she was subjected to sexual propositions, called vulgar sexist names and threatened with violence by a fellow male officer in 2018 after she complained, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Lawson’s bosses at the prison increasingly made her job more difficult after she complained and eventually fired her in 2019, according to the lawsuit.

Karen Pojmann, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Corrections, told the Post-Dispatch that the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount in damages.

Indiana
Inmates claim prison kept them in cruel conditions
BUNKER HILL, Ind. (AP) — Six inmates at an Indiana prison are alleging in lawsuits that they were kept in near-total darkness for weeks at a time and suffered electric shocks from exposed wires.

The lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana claim the conditions at the maximum-security Miami Correctional Facility near Peru amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

The lawsuits claim the six men were held in isolation cells that had no lights and that some of them suffered cuts from broken window glass and were shocked by dangling wires from a broken light fixture while trying to make their way around in the dark.

ACLU of Indiana attorney Ken Falk called the prison’s action “torture.”

Inmate Jeremy Blanchard’s lawsuit filed in March said he was kept in nearly total darkness for about a month last year and that the conditions led to hallucinations and severe anxiety. Attorneys for the state have denied the allegations and asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit.

The other five lawsuits were filed this month. A Department of Correction spokeswoman declined to comment on those cases.