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Chicago, surfer group oppose US Steel settlement in court
Lawyer News |
2018/09/12 10:54
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The city of Chicago and a surfing organization have told a judge that a proposed federal settlement over U.S. Steel's repeated chemical spills into Lake Michigan is inadequate.
The Chicago Law Department and the Surfrider Foundation urged the federal judge Thursday to impose tougher penalties on the steelmaker for last year's hexavalent chromium discharges from its Midwest Plant in Portage, Indiana, into the region's primary source of drinking water, the Chicago Tribune reported.
The nearly $900,000 in fines and penalties proposed by the federal government fall short when compared with the ecological damage caused by the carcinogenic discharges, according to court documents filed by the city of Chicago and the nonprofit foundation. The settlement also requires the steelmaker to test for hexavalent chromium daily, create a preventative maintenance program and upgrade all pollution monitoring.
"The government's inadequate oversight ... demonstrates the need for Surfrider to remain vigilant," said Mark Templeton, the group's attorney.
The University of Chicago's Abrams Environmental Law Clinic discovered last year that the manufacturing and finishing plant had violated chromium limits in its federal water pollution permit at least four times since 2013. The plant's chromium discharges are limited to 30 pounds a day, while hexavalent chromium is limited to about half a pound a day. Marking Solutions For Lawyers and Law Firms |
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Court: Cities can't prosecute people for sleeping on streets
Lawyer News |
2018/09/06 00:31
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Cities can't prosecute people for sleeping on the streets if they have nowhere else to go because it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, which is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court said Tuesday.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with six homeless people from Boise, Idaho, who sued the city in 2009 over a local ordinance that banned sleeping in public spaces. The ruling could affect several other cities across the U.S. West that have similar laws.
It comes as many places across the West Coast are struggling with homelessness brought on by rising housing costs and income inequality.
When the Boise lawsuit was filed, attorneys for the homeless residents said as many as 4,500 people didn't have a place to sleep in Idaho's capital city and homeless shelters only had about 700 available beds or mats. The case bounced back and forth in the courts for years, and Boise modified its rules in 2014 to say homeless people couldn't be prosecuted for sleeping outside when shelters were full.
But that didn't solve the problem, the attorneys said, because Boise's shelters limit the number of days that homeless residents can stay. Two of the city's three shelters also require some form of religious participation for some programs, making those shelters unsuitable for people with different beliefs, the homeless residents said.
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Austrian court's approval for spy agency raid was illegal
Lawyer News |
2018/08/28 10:13
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Judges in Austria say a lower court's authorization for police to raid the offices of the country's domestic intelligence agency was illegal.
The regional court in Vienna said Tuesday that the search of the BVT spy agency on Feb. 28 wasn't justified because the necessary information could have been obtained if police had simply asked for it. It also ruled that the search of three BVT employees' homes wasn't warranted, though a fourth was.
The raid, which was part of a probe into alleged misconduct by BVT staff, sparked a political storm earlier this year.
Opposition parties accused the government of attempting to purge political enemies. The Vienna court ruling didn't rule on whether evidence seized in the raid should be destroyed. |
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EU steps up action against Poland over supreme court law
Lawyer News |
2018/08/16 17:59
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The European Union is increasing pressure on Poland over what it sees as flaws in the country's Supreme Court law, and has given Warsaw a month to act before facing possible court action.
Tuesday's move centers on Polish legislation that forces the early retirement of over a third of the Supreme Court justices. The law is the culmination of the ruling populist Law and Justice party's efforts to put Poland's entire court system under its control, a plan it began nearly three years ago.
The EU Commission objected to the law, saying it falls short of the values guiding the 28-nation bloc, and said that Poland's explanation "does not alleviate the Commission's legal concerns." It said a case could be opened at the EU's highest court in a month.
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Court document details moments before fatal police shooting
Lawyer News |
2018/08/16 17:59
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Investigators say a man fired gunshots into a bedroom wall and pointed a gun at his roommate before he was fatally shot by St. Paul police.
A search warrant filed Tuesday by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension contains details about the moments leading up to the fatal police shooting on Aug. 5.
The document says William "Billy" Hughes became angry and fired two or three gunshots into a wall in his apartment before pointing a gun at his roommate's head. The Star Tribune says the roommate fled and called police.
The warrant says relatives told investigators Hughes had been suicidal over a terminal illness that limited his quality of life.
The bureau has said Hughes was shot after police knocked on one of the apartment's doors and he came out another. The agency continues its investigation. |
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Tennessee high court refuses to block looming execution
Lawyer News |
2018/08/13 23:14
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The Tennessee Supreme Court has refused to stay Thursday's scheduled execution of a convicted child killer while the state's new lethal injection protocol continues to be challenged on appeal.
The order brings Tennessee within days of killing Billy Ray Irick with a three-drug mixture, barring some last-minute change. Irick, 59, would be the first inmate Tennessee has executed since 2009. He was convicted of the 1985 rape and killing of a 7-year-old Knoxville girl.
Federal public defender Kelley Henry said she will request a stay with the U.S. Supreme Court. She had asked Gov. Bill Haslam to issue a temporary reprieve while the drugs are studied further. But the governor quickly ruled it out, saying he would not intervene.
"My role is not to be the 13th juror or the judge or to impose my personal views, but to carefully review the judicial process to make sure it was full and fair," Haslam said in a statement Monday. "Because of the extremely thorough judicial review of all of the evidence and arguments at every stage in this case, clemency is not appropriate."
The Tennessee Supreme Court's majority wrote that its rules require proving that the lawsuit challenging the lethal injection drugs is likely to succeed on appeal, but Irick's attorney has failed to do so.
In a ruling late last month, Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle wrote that attorneys for 33 death row inmates, including Irick, didn't prove that there is a substantially less painful means to carry out the execution or that the drugs the state plans to use would cause the inmate to be tortured to death. |
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