Arizona
Judge tosses Republican lawsuit that sought to declare state’s elections manual invalid
A judge has dismissed a lawsuit by Republicans who sought to have Arizona’s election procedures manual declared invalid, marking the defeat of one of three challenges seeking to throw out parts of the state’s guide for conducting elections.
In a ruling released Tuesday, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge threw out a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee, the Republican Party of Arizona and the Yavapai County Republican Party that alleged the period for public comment on the manual was too short. The challenge also asked the court to block enforcement of certain portions of the manual.
The court concluded that Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who had created the manual as the state’s chief election officer and who was targeted in the lawsuit, had complied with Arizona’s notice-and-comment requirements.
The Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Arizona didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the dismissal.
Fontes’ office stood by the manual in a statement.
“We used this manual to effectively run the presidential preference election in March and will continue using the EPM to ensure fair elections in the upcoming primary and general” elections, the statement said.
Two other lawsuits challenging the manual remain alive in Maricopa County Superior Court.
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club had filed a lawsuit that zeroed in on the manual’s instructions on operating ballot drop-off locations and preventing voter intimidation.
Another lawsuit by Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Ben Toma, both Republicans, alleged that parts of the manual conflicted with state law.
Colorado
City agrees to settle police beating lawsuit for $2.1 million
DENVER (AP) — Colorado Springs leaders agreed Tuesday to pay $2.1 million to settle a federal lawsuit brought by a Black man who was punched and kicked by police during a traffic stop in 2022.
City councilors voted to back the agreement to settle Dalvin Gadson’s lawsuit, which still needs to be formally signed, city spokesperson Max D’Onofrio said.
Gadson was stopped on Oct. 9, 2022, after police said they saw him driving slowly in a car without a license plate. His lawsuit alleged three officers beat him “beyond recognition” and left him with significant PTSD-like symptoms.
After an officer told Gadson to get out of the car, police body camera footage showed him open the driver’s side door, turn his body to face toward them and ask to remain seated inside.
Officers told him to get out because he was under investigation for DUI. But he objected. After that, the camera footage captured officers reaching in to get him out and a blurry struggle where it is difficult to see who is doing what.
According to the lawsuit, two officers punched him in the face and one of them put his knee into Gadson’s forehead, causing him to fall back into the car.
The body-camera footage shows an officer repeatedly punching Gadson from the passenger side of the car. Another portion of the video footage shows an officer kick Gadson once he is pulled out of the car and placed on the ground.
Gadson was originally charged with two felony assault charges and two misdemeanors, obstructing a peace officer and resisting arrest, but prosecutors soon dismissed the felony charges. The misdemeanors were also later dropped, one of Gadson’s lawyers, Harry Daniels, said. In the end, Gadson only had to pay a $15 fine for not displaying a license plate, he said.
“The city should have received a fine. But instead they had to pay $2.1 million for the actions of their officers,” he said.
The Colorado Springs Police Department declined to comment on the settlement.
The department previously conducted a review that found the officers had followed department policy on the use of force. The officers who were sued are still on the job and in good standing with the department, spokesperson Caitlin Ford said.
Nevada
Former NFL coach loses high court ruling in lawsuit over emails
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Former NFL coach Jon Gruden lost a Nevada Supreme Court ruling Tuesday in a contract interference and conspiracy lawsuit he filed against the league after he resigned from the Las Vegas Raiders in 2021, but his lawyer said he will appeal.
A three-justice panel split 2-1, saying the league can force the civil case out of state court and into private arbitration that might be overseen by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Gruden’s attorney, Adam Hosmer-Henner, said he will appeal to the full seven-member state high court to hear the case.
“The panel’s split decision would leave Nevada an outlier where an employer can unilaterally determine whether an employee’s dispute must go to arbitration and also allow the employer to adjudicate the dispute as the arbitrator,” the attorney said.
Attorney Kannon Shanmugam, representing the NFL, declined to comment on the ruling.
Gruden’s lawsuit, filed in November 2021, alleges the league forced him into resigning from the Raiders by leaking racist, sexist and homophobic emails that he sent many years earlier, when he was at ESPN.
The panel majority, Justices Elissa Cadish and Kristina Pickering, said Gruden “expressly acknowledged” in his contract with the Raiders that he understood the NFL constitution allowed for arbitration to resolve disputes.
They also said it wasn’t clear that Goodell would arbitrate Gruden’s case, citing other cases in which the commissioner designated third-party arbitrators to hear disputes.
“As a former Super Bowl champion coach and long-time media personality signing the most lucrative NFL coaching contract in history, while being represented by an elite agent, Gruden was the very definition of a sophisticated party,” Cadish and Pickering wrote.
In her dissent, Justice Linda Marie Bell said the NFL constitution was a 447-page “take-it-or-leave-it” add-on to Gruden’s seven-page contract with the Raiders that left him with “unequal bargaining power.”
“The majority indicates, and I agree, that the employment agreement is substantively unconscionable because Goodell acting as arbitrator is outrageous,” Bell wrote.
Gruden was the Raiders head coach when the team moved in 2020 from Oakland to Las Vegas. He left the team with more than six seasons remaining on his record 10-year, $100 million contract. Raiders owner Mark Davis later said the team reached a settlement with Gruden over the final years of his contract. The terms were not disclosed.
The league appealed to the state high court after a May 2022 decision by Clark County District Court Judge Nancy Allf, who has since retired from the bench. Allf ruled that Gruden’s claim that the league intentionally leaked only his documents could show evidence of “specific intent” or an act designed to cause a particular result.
Gruden’s emails went to former Washington Commanders executive Bruce Allen from 2011 to 2018, when Gruden was at ESPN. They were found amid some 650,000 emails the league obtained during an investigation into the workplace culture of the Washington team.
Gruden alleges that disclosure of the emails and their publication by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times destroyed his career and scuttled endorsement contracts. He is seeking monetary damages.
Gruden previously coached in the NFL from 1990 to 2008, including head coaching stints in Oakland and with the 2003 Super Bowl-winning Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He spent several years as a TV analyst for ESPN before being hired by the Raiders again in 2018.
Colorado
Appeal judges voice doubts about ruling on transgender woman’s admission into sorority
DENVER (AP) — Federal appellate court judges expressed doubt Tuesday about whether they could rule on a transgender woman’s admission into a University of Wyoming sorority or if a lower court should continue to hear the case.
The admission of Artemis Langford into the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority prompted a lawsuit from six other sorority members last year. After hearing from both sides in the case, the three-judge U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals took the arguments under advisement without ruling.
The case at Wyoming’s only four-year public university has drawn widespread attention as transgender people fight for more acceptance in schools, athletics, workplaces and elsewhere, while others push back.
In their lawsuit, the six current and former members of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority chapter in Laramie, Wyoming, challenge Langford’s admission by casting doubt on whether sorority rules allowed a transgender woman.
An attorney for the sorority sisters told the judges Tuesday the national sorority council was unfair to sorority members by changing who could belong. However, the bulk of the judges’ questions and remarks to attorneys focused on whether the case was even ripe for appeal.
Last summer, U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson in Cheyenne dismissed the case without prejudice in a ruling that suggested the lawsuit could be refiled in his court. That alone should forestall appeal, attorneys for the Ohio-based sorority argue in court documents.
Appellate Judge Carolyn McHugh expressed openness to that argument.
“It seems to me it’s not final,” McHugh told the sorority sisters’ attorney, May Mailman, at the outset of Tuesday’s oral arguments.
Mailman told the judges the case was sufficiently resolved in district court to allow appeal. But appellate Judge Richard Federico voiced similar doubts.
“The district court is offering you a lifeline,” he told Mailman.
Mailman argued that by allowing transgender women into the chapter at the university, the national sorority council and president violated their obligation to sorority members to faithfully follow sorority bylaws. State law in Ohio, however, gives the volunteer board for the private, Ohio-based organization wide leeway to define terms in those bylaws, including who’s a woman, argued Kappa Kappa Gamma attorney Natalie McLaughlin.
A court may get involved only if such an interpretation is unreasonable or arbitrary but that wasn’t the case, McLaughlin added.
The arguments drew a handful of demonstrators outside the federal courthouse holding signs that read “Save Sisterhood” and “Women have the right to women’s only spaces.”
“We shouldn’t have to say ‘Here’s why I need my women’s space.’ Women’s spaces should be protected, period,” Mailman said at a news conference after the arguments.
The argument that a court should be able to tell a private organization how to define a woman flies in the face of conservative skepticism about big government, the Wyoming LGBTQ+ advocacy group Wyoming Equality said in a statement.
“They are arguing against the right of organizations to determine their own membership,” Director Sara Burlingame said. “I am optimistic that the 10th Circuit will agree with Judge Johnson.”
The sorority sisters’ lawsuit against Kappa Kappa Gamma and its president, Mary Pat Rooney, claimed Langford made them feel uncomfortable in the sorority house. Langford has been dropped from the lawsuit on appeal.
Judge tosses Republican lawsuit that sought to declare state’s elections manual invalid
A judge has dismissed a lawsuit by Republicans who sought to have Arizona’s election procedures manual declared invalid, marking the defeat of one of three challenges seeking to throw out parts of the state’s guide for conducting elections.
In a ruling released Tuesday, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge threw out a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee, the Republican Party of Arizona and the Yavapai County Republican Party that alleged the period for public comment on the manual was too short. The challenge also asked the court to block enforcement of certain portions of the manual.
The court concluded that Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who had created the manual as the state’s chief election officer and who was targeted in the lawsuit, had complied with Arizona’s notice-and-comment requirements.
The Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Arizona didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the dismissal.
Fontes’ office stood by the manual in a statement.
“We used this manual to effectively run the presidential preference election in March and will continue using the EPM to ensure fair elections in the upcoming primary and general” elections, the statement said.
Two other lawsuits challenging the manual remain alive in Maricopa County Superior Court.
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club had filed a lawsuit that zeroed in on the manual’s instructions on operating ballot drop-off locations and preventing voter intimidation.
Another lawsuit by Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Ben Toma, both Republicans, alleged that parts of the manual conflicted with state law.
Colorado
City agrees to settle police beating lawsuit for $2.1 million
DENVER (AP) — Colorado Springs leaders agreed Tuesday to pay $2.1 million to settle a federal lawsuit brought by a Black man who was punched and kicked by police during a traffic stop in 2022.
City councilors voted to back the agreement to settle Dalvin Gadson’s lawsuit, which still needs to be formally signed, city spokesperson Max D’Onofrio said.
Gadson was stopped on Oct. 9, 2022, after police said they saw him driving slowly in a car without a license plate. His lawsuit alleged three officers beat him “beyond recognition” and left him with significant PTSD-like symptoms.
After an officer told Gadson to get out of the car, police body camera footage showed him open the driver’s side door, turn his body to face toward them and ask to remain seated inside.
Officers told him to get out because he was under investigation for DUI. But he objected. After that, the camera footage captured officers reaching in to get him out and a blurry struggle where it is difficult to see who is doing what.
According to the lawsuit, two officers punched him in the face and one of them put his knee into Gadson’s forehead, causing him to fall back into the car.
The body-camera footage shows an officer repeatedly punching Gadson from the passenger side of the car. Another portion of the video footage shows an officer kick Gadson once he is pulled out of the car and placed on the ground.
Gadson was originally charged with two felony assault charges and two misdemeanors, obstructing a peace officer and resisting arrest, but prosecutors soon dismissed the felony charges. The misdemeanors were also later dropped, one of Gadson’s lawyers, Harry Daniels, said. In the end, Gadson only had to pay a $15 fine for not displaying a license plate, he said.
“The city should have received a fine. But instead they had to pay $2.1 million for the actions of their officers,” he said.
The Colorado Springs Police Department declined to comment on the settlement.
The department previously conducted a review that found the officers had followed department policy on the use of force. The officers who were sued are still on the job and in good standing with the department, spokesperson Caitlin Ford said.
Nevada
Former NFL coach loses high court ruling in lawsuit over emails
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Former NFL coach Jon Gruden lost a Nevada Supreme Court ruling Tuesday in a contract interference and conspiracy lawsuit he filed against the league after he resigned from the Las Vegas Raiders in 2021, but his lawyer said he will appeal.
A three-justice panel split 2-1, saying the league can force the civil case out of state court and into private arbitration that might be overseen by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Gruden’s attorney, Adam Hosmer-Henner, said he will appeal to the full seven-member state high court to hear the case.
“The panel’s split decision would leave Nevada an outlier where an employer can unilaterally determine whether an employee’s dispute must go to arbitration and also allow the employer to adjudicate the dispute as the arbitrator,” the attorney said.
Attorney Kannon Shanmugam, representing the NFL, declined to comment on the ruling.
Gruden’s lawsuit, filed in November 2021, alleges the league forced him into resigning from the Raiders by leaking racist, sexist and homophobic emails that he sent many years earlier, when he was at ESPN.
The panel majority, Justices Elissa Cadish and Kristina Pickering, said Gruden “expressly acknowledged” in his contract with the Raiders that he understood the NFL constitution allowed for arbitration to resolve disputes.
They also said it wasn’t clear that Goodell would arbitrate Gruden’s case, citing other cases in which the commissioner designated third-party arbitrators to hear disputes.
“As a former Super Bowl champion coach and long-time media personality signing the most lucrative NFL coaching contract in history, while being represented by an elite agent, Gruden was the very definition of a sophisticated party,” Cadish and Pickering wrote.
In her dissent, Justice Linda Marie Bell said the NFL constitution was a 447-page “take-it-or-leave-it” add-on to Gruden’s seven-page contract with the Raiders that left him with “unequal bargaining power.”
“The majority indicates, and I agree, that the employment agreement is substantively unconscionable because Goodell acting as arbitrator is outrageous,” Bell wrote.
Gruden was the Raiders head coach when the team moved in 2020 from Oakland to Las Vegas. He left the team with more than six seasons remaining on his record 10-year, $100 million contract. Raiders owner Mark Davis later said the team reached a settlement with Gruden over the final years of his contract. The terms were not disclosed.
The league appealed to the state high court after a May 2022 decision by Clark County District Court Judge Nancy Allf, who has since retired from the bench. Allf ruled that Gruden’s claim that the league intentionally leaked only his documents could show evidence of “specific intent” or an act designed to cause a particular result.
Gruden’s emails went to former Washington Commanders executive Bruce Allen from 2011 to 2018, when Gruden was at ESPN. They were found amid some 650,000 emails the league obtained during an investigation into the workplace culture of the Washington team.
Gruden alleges that disclosure of the emails and their publication by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times destroyed his career and scuttled endorsement contracts. He is seeking monetary damages.
Gruden previously coached in the NFL from 1990 to 2008, including head coaching stints in Oakland and with the 2003 Super Bowl-winning Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He spent several years as a TV analyst for ESPN before being hired by the Raiders again in 2018.
Colorado
Appeal judges voice doubts about ruling on transgender woman’s admission into sorority
DENVER (AP) — Federal appellate court judges expressed doubt Tuesday about whether they could rule on a transgender woman’s admission into a University of Wyoming sorority or if a lower court should continue to hear the case.
The admission of Artemis Langford into the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority prompted a lawsuit from six other sorority members last year. After hearing from both sides in the case, the three-judge U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals took the arguments under advisement without ruling.
The case at Wyoming’s only four-year public university has drawn widespread attention as transgender people fight for more acceptance in schools, athletics, workplaces and elsewhere, while others push back.
In their lawsuit, the six current and former members of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority chapter in Laramie, Wyoming, challenge Langford’s admission by casting doubt on whether sorority rules allowed a transgender woman.
An attorney for the sorority sisters told the judges Tuesday the national sorority council was unfair to sorority members by changing who could belong. However, the bulk of the judges’ questions and remarks to attorneys focused on whether the case was even ripe for appeal.
Last summer, U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson in Cheyenne dismissed the case without prejudice in a ruling that suggested the lawsuit could be refiled in his court. That alone should forestall appeal, attorneys for the Ohio-based sorority argue in court documents.
Appellate Judge Carolyn McHugh expressed openness to that argument.
“It seems to me it’s not final,” McHugh told the sorority sisters’ attorney, May Mailman, at the outset of Tuesday’s oral arguments.
Mailman told the judges the case was sufficiently resolved in district court to allow appeal. But appellate Judge Richard Federico voiced similar doubts.
“The district court is offering you a lifeline,” he told Mailman.
Mailman argued that by allowing transgender women into the chapter at the university, the national sorority council and president violated their obligation to sorority members to faithfully follow sorority bylaws. State law in Ohio, however, gives the volunteer board for the private, Ohio-based organization wide leeway to define terms in those bylaws, including who’s a woman, argued Kappa Kappa Gamma attorney Natalie McLaughlin.
A court may get involved only if such an interpretation is unreasonable or arbitrary but that wasn’t the case, McLaughlin added.
The arguments drew a handful of demonstrators outside the federal courthouse holding signs that read “Save Sisterhood” and “Women have the right to women’s only spaces.”
“We shouldn’t have to say ‘Here’s why I need my women’s space.’ Women’s spaces should be protected, period,” Mailman said at a news conference after the arguments.
The argument that a court should be able to tell a private organization how to define a woman flies in the face of conservative skepticism about big government, the Wyoming LGBTQ+ advocacy group Wyoming Equality said in a statement.
“They are arguing against the right of organizations to determine their own membership,” Director Sara Burlingame said. “I am optimistic that the 10th Circuit will agree with Judge Johnson.”
The sorority sisters’ lawsuit against Kappa Kappa Gamma and its president, Mary Pat Rooney, claimed Langford made them feel uncomfortable in the sorority house. Langford has been dropped from the lawsuit on appeal.
