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Coast Guardsman guilty in sexual misconduct case
Court Feed News |
2014/03/10 22:31
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Coast Guard officials in New Orleans say a petty officer has been convicted and sentenced on charges involving sexual assault and possession of child pornography.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Christopher C. Bush's court martial was held in Norfolk, Va.
A Coast Guard news release said the 28-year-old Bush was convicted Friday on four violations of a Uniform Code of Military Justice article dealing with rape and sexual assault and one involving child pornography.
The crimes involved a junior Coast Guard woman and a civilian woman. They happened between January 2010 and May 2013 while Bush was stationed at a unit in New Orleans. The Coast Guard said it was not releasing the name of the unit to protect the privacy of the victims. |
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Two men found guilty for selling U.S. company’s technology
U.S. Legal News |
2014/03/07 23:44
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A federal jury found two men guilty Wednesday of economic espionage involving the theft and sale of a U.S. company’s technology to a competitor controlled by the Chinese government.
The jury returned the verdicts against Robert Maegerle and Walter Liew.
They were accused of stealing Delaware-based DuPont Co.’s method for making titanium oxide, a chemical that fetches $17 billion a year in sales worldwide and is used to whiten everything from cars to the middle of Oreo cookies.
A federal jury found two men guilty Wednesday of economic espionage involving the theft and sale of a U.S. company’s technology to a competitor controlled by the Chinese government.
Prosecutors said DuPont was unwilling to sell its method to China, so it was stolen and sent to a company called Pangang Group Co. Ltd., according to testimony during the diplomatically dicey proceedings. The jury heard six weeks of testimony.
Prosecutors alleged that Pangang’s factory is the only facility inside China known to be producing titanium oxide the DuPont way, which uses chlorination. |
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Fla. high court: Immigrant can't get law license
Court Feed News |
2014/03/07 23:44
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The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that immigrants in the country illegally can't be given a license to practice law.
The question was raised when a man who moved here from Mexico when he was 9 years old sought a license in Florida. The court said Thursday that federal law prohibits people who are unlawfully in the country from obtaining professional licenses. The justices said state law can override the federal ban, but Florida has taken no action to do so.
Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court granted a law license to Sergio Garcia, who arrived in the U.S. from Mexico as a teenager with his father. But that ruling was only after the state approved a law that allows immigrants in the country illegally to obtain the license. |
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Court: Broad protection for whistleblowers
Legal Career News |
2014/03/05 23:03
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The Supreme Court says whistleblower protections in a federal law passed in response to the Enron financial scandal apply broadly to employees of publicly traded companies and contractors hired by the companies.
The justices ruled 6-3 Tuesday in favor of two former employees of companies that administer the Fidelity family of mutual funds. The workers claimed they faced retaliation after they reported allegations of fraud affecting Fidelity funds.
The case involved the reach of a provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in 2002 in response to the Enron scandal, that protects whistleblower activity. The measure was intended to protect people who expose the kind of corporate misdeeds that arose at Enron. |
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Court weighs securities fraud class-action cases
Headline News |
2014/03/05 23:03
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The Supreme Court is considering whether to abandon a quarter-century of precedent and make it tougher for investors to band together to sue corporations for securities fraud.
The justices hear arguments Wednesday in an appeal by Halliburton Co. that seeks to block a class-action lawsuit claiming the energy services company inflated its stock price.
A group of investors says it lost money when Halliburton's stock price dropped after revelations the company misrepresented revenues, understated its liability in asbestos litigation and overstated the benefits of a merger.
Justices threw out the company's first attempt to block the lawsuit in 2011. But Halliburton is now urging the court to overturn a 25-year-old decision that sparked a tidal wave of securities-related, class-action lawsuits against publicly traded companies and has led to billions in settlements.
The court's 1988 decision in Basic v. Levinson says shareholders who claim they were defrauded by false statements in securities filings don't have to prove they actually relied on the statements. Rather, the court reasoned that any misrepresentation would be reflected in the current stock price. Even if investors are not aware of the misstatements, they are presumed to be aware of them because they affect the stock price.
This presumption, known as the "fraud-on-the-market theory," has become the driving force for modern class-action securities cases. But some economists have questioned whether this theory makes sense anymore, saying it doesn't account for the sometimes random and arbitrary nature of stock trading. |
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CA man sentenced on drug charge in fed court in SD
U.S. Legal News |
2014/03/01 00:07
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A California man has been sentenced in federal court in South Dakota for his role in a conspiracy to distribute marijuana.
U.S. Attorney Brendan Johnson says 29-year-old Brett McFarland, of Korbel, Calif., was sentenced to five years in prison to be followed by four years of supervised release.
McFarland pleaded guilty last November to a drug distribution conspiracy charge. A money laundering conspiracy charge was dropped.
Johnson says McFarland has agreed to forfeit to the government his interest in proceeds from the sale of property in Petrolia, Calif., that was bought with drug proceeds. |
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