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Website asks high court to throw out lawsuit
Court Feed News |
2014/10/22 22:09
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A lawyer told the Washington Supreme Court on Tuesday that a lawsuit filed by three young girls who were sold as prostitutes on a website should be thrown out because the website didn't write the ads, so it's not liable.
But the victims' lawyer said the website, Backpage, doesn't have immunity under the federal Communications Decency Act because the website markets itself as a place to sell "escort services" and provides pimps with instructions on how to write an ad that works, making them a participant in the largest human-trafficking website in the U.S.
The justices plan to rule on the case at a later date.
Before the hearing several dozen people stood in the rain on the court steps with signs that read: "People's bodies are not commodities," ''End Child Slavery" and "Stop Buying Our Girls."
"No one has the right to sell a kid for sex," said Jo Lembo, with Shared Hope International. "That's why we're here. Someone has to speak up for them. They're kids."
A similar case was filed last week in federal court in Boston, but a previous case in Missouri was dismissed, said Yiota Souras, a lawyer with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. "The Washington state case has gone further than any previous case," she said. |
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Texas abortion clinics reopen after court reprieve
Court Feed News |
2014/10/20 20:03
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Texas abortion clinics that closed under tough new restrictions began reopening Wednesday after winning a reprieve at the U.S. Supreme Court, but the facilities were scheduling women with uncertainty and skeleton staffs.
A five-sentence ruling late Tuesday blocked parts of a sweeping Texas abortion law that required clinics to meet hospital-level operating standards starting Oct. 3. That had left only eight abortion facilities in the nation's second-most populous state.
Celebration among some abortion providers, however, was muted by logistics and fears that the victory is only temporary. Women seeking abortions kept phone lines busy at the Routh Street Women's Clinic in Dallas, where a former staff of 17 people is down to to single digits after the procedure was halted by the law earlier this month.
The high court only suspended the restrictions for now pending appeals, and offered no explanation for the decision.
"Some of them will come back, and some of them probably aren't," said Ginny Braun, the Dallas clinic director, about former employees that took other jobs in the past two weeks. "As one person eloquently put it this morning, whiplash is no longer a sustainable life choice for her."
Along the Texas-Mexico border, the only abortion clinic in 300 miles will resume abortion services in McAllen starting Friday, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of Whole Woman's Health. But staffing and financial difficulties prevent any immediate reopening of clinics in Austin and Fort Worth, and the prospects of reopening another in Beaumont are even dimmer, she said.
Hagstrom Miller said she has laid off more than 50 employees since last year, and that the on-again, off-again status of her clinics have led to taking on $500,000 in debt over the last six months. |
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Colorado high court considers pot firing case
Court Feed News |
2014/10/03 16:41
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Pot may be legal in Colorado, but you can still be fired for using it.
Brandon Coats, a quadriplegic medical marijuana patient who was fired by the Dish Network after failing a drug test more than four years ago, says he still can't find steady work because employers are wary of his off-duty smoking.
In a case being closely watched around the country, Colorado's Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear arguments in Coats' case, which could have big implications for pot smokers in the first state to legalize recreational sales of the drug. The case highlights the clash between state laws that are increasingly accepting of marijuana use and employers' drug-free policies that won't tolerate it.
"Attitudes are changing toward marijuana. Laws are going to have to change, too," Coats told The Associated Press. "I'd like for this to enable people like me to find employment without being looked down upon."
Coats, 35, was paralyzed in a car crash as a teenager and has been a medical marijuana patient since 2009, when, after a doctor's urging, he discovered that pot helped calm violent muscle spasms that were making it difficult to work.
Coats, who worked for three years as a telephone operator with Dish, was fired in 2010 for failing a random company drug test. He said he told his supervisors in advance that he probably would fail the test.
He said he was never high at work, and Dish did not allege he was ever impaired on the job. But pot's intoxicating chemical, THC, can stay in the system for weeks.
Coats is making his argument under a state law intended to protect cigarette smokers from being fired for legal behavior off the clock.
But the company argues that because pot remains illegal at the federal level, medical marijuana isn't covered by the state law. A trial court judge and Colorado's appeals court agreed.
A patchwork of laws across the country and the conflict between state and federal laws has left the issue unclear. Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., allow medical marijuana, but courts have ruled against employees who say their pot use is protected. Colorado and Washington state also now allow recreational sales, though court cases so far have involved medical patients.
Colorado's constitution specifically says that employers don't have to amend their policies to accommodate employees' marijuana use. But Arizona law, for example, says workers can't be punished for lawfully using medical marijuana unless it would jeopardize an employer's federal contract. |
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Kentucky leader pleads guilty in kickbacks scheme
Court Feed News |
2014/08/28 19:00
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Circular saws squealed and construction workers hammered away on buildings, part of this Appalachian area's painstaking recovery from a deadly 2012 tornado.
About 60 miles away, inside in a federal courtroom Tuesday in Lexington, the elected official who led the reconstruction in Morgan County sobbed as he pleaded guilty to a fraud charge stemming from a kickback scheme.
Judge-Executive Tim Conley, the county's top official, received $120,000 to $200,000 to steer work to a contractor in a scheme that started three years before the tornado and continued while the town struggled to rebuild, prosecutors said. Conley could spend years in prison.
His supporters had a hard time believing the three-term Republican had gone astray.
"Everybody respected Tim Conley," said Morgan County resident Steve Gullett. "I just didn't think that he'd be caught up in something like this. It's heartbreaking."
The recovery has been slow in West Liberty, the county seat ravaged by a tornado on March 2, 2012. The new judicial center has opened, and a few businesses have sprung up downtown. A bank that anchored downtown is being rebuilt, but construction is in its early phases, leaving a massive gap in the tiny downtown. |
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Canadian court: US can extradite terror suspect
Court Feed News |
2014/08/13 22:18
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An appeals court ruled Monday an Iraqi-born man should be extradited to the United States to face charges that he helped coordinate Tunisian jihadists believed responsible for a suicide attack in Iraq in 2009 that killed five American soldiers outside a U.S. base.
Sayfildin Tahir Sharif, who holds dual Canadian-Iraqi citizenship, was arrested in 2011 on a U.S. warrant and has been fighting extradition to New York.
The prosecution alleges Sharif worked from Edmonton, Alberta, to help a Tunisian man enter Iraq in 2009 and detonate a truck filled with explosives at a military checkpoint, killing five U.S. soldiers. Prosecutors contend that evidence from intercepted Internet and phone conversations shows that Sharif was directly involved in supporting Tunisian terrorists. Sharif never left Canada as part of the alleged conspiracy.
The terror network is also accused of blowing up an Iraqi police station, killing seven Iraqi officers.
Canada's justice minister granted extradition last summer after receiving assurances from the U.S. that Sharif wouldn't face the death penalty. Defense lawyers also received a letter from U.S. authorities promising the man wouldn't be held indefinitely in pre-trial detention.
Sharif was appealing the justice minister's decision as well as a judge's original ruling in 2012 that there was enough evidence to extradite Sharif on two charges.
Sharif is an ethnic Kurd who was born in Iraq but moved to Toronto as a refugee in 1993. Four years later, he became a Canadian citizen. |
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Teen suspect in 6-year-old's death due in court
Court Feed News |
2014/08/13 22:18
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A 17-year-old boy arrested in the death and sexual assault of a 6-year-old Washington state girl is due in court Monday.
Authorities still haven't released the name of the suspect, who was arrested Saturday in the Bremerton-area mobile home park from which Jenise Wright had disappeared a week earlier.
He was booked for investigation of second-degree murder, manslaughter and rape, and was scheduled to make an initial appearance at 3 p.m. in Kitsap County District Court.
Authorities said forensic evidence analyzed by the Washington state crime lab linked him to the crime. Earlier in the week, the sheriff's office collected DNA cheek swabs from dozens of nearby residents.
The Seattle Times reported Sunday that Kitsap County sheriff's detectives seized three vehicles from the suspect's home and completed final interviews of residents at the Steele Creek Mobile Home Park, the community where Wright went missing eight days earlier.
The statements and evidence collected Sunday will help authorities in "trying to put together a composite of the suspect for painting a picture for the court," Kitsap County Sheriff's spokesman Scott Wilson told the Times.
A growing memorial at the entrance to the neighborhood includes silver balloons, stuffed animals, lit candles and flowers. |
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