Free Republic

Before Officer Michael Griffin was indicted on federal charges for using excessive force and lying under oath, he cost the city of Minneapolis $411,864.78. The city paid $140,000 in 2014 to settle a lawsuit filed by Ibrahim Regai, who Griffin allegedly knocked unconscious at a Minneapolis night club in 2010, while he was off duty. That same year, a federal jury in a civil trial ruled the city must pay Jeremy Axel, Michael Mitchell and their attorneys $271,864.78. Griffin allegedly kicked Mitchell in the chest and punched Axel in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious outside a club...

The hullabaloo over false information being propagated about Indiana’s Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA) reveals a much more serious underlying problem in America. Morality according to the 3 Percent (the gay community in America) is defined by imposing conformity, control, coercion, and oppression over those who disagree with their definition of equality, fairness, tolerance, or even love. The 3 Percent’s “outrage” cannot be about equal rights, as same-sex couples already benefit from civil unions, domestic partnerships, marriage, adoption and fostering children, in addition to receiving health benefits and other legal rights. Nor can it be about fairness. I recently...

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is busy making good on its promise to fight for students’ free speech rights through a massive litigation campaign. Since last year, FIRE’s Stand Up For Free Speech effort has filed nine First Amendment lawsuits against campuses that quash the First Amendment, according to its website. Four of the cases have already enjoyed successes in FIRE’s favor, and the others continue to wind their way through the court system. FIRE’s early victories in its litigation campaign illustrate that colleges’ limits on free speech are onerous and unconstitutional. But the battle continues.

The federal government passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993. It was authored by Chuck Schumer, passed with nearly unanimous support from both parties, and signed by President Bill Clinton. The legislation was needed after a bad Supreme Court ruling delivered by Antonin Scalia that limited religious freedom for Native Americans who smoke peyote as part of their religion. A later Supreme Court ruling ruled that the RFRA didn’t apply to state or local governments. Twenty states passed RFRAs and another 13 have protections like the ones in RFRA. And yet when Indiana passed the legislation last week,...

Manufacturers of consumer goods in the United States have a lot to fear from the government, and becoming the target of a class action lawsuit is right up there in the first tier of those concerns. An astounding 52 percent of major corporations are engaged in class action litigation right now. Federal judges have complete discretion about whether to certify a class action lawsuit, and then whether to approve large attorney fee requests. Once certified as a federal class action, an otherwise small lawsuit turns into a massive cash drain for the target company and a money machine for the...

Depositions for General Motors’ executives, including CEO Mary Barra, will begin in May, according to the Detroit News. The testimonies will be at the center of class-action lawsuits (set for trial in January, 2016) against GM for its ignition switch defect cover-up and are slated to conclude in early October of this year. It will not be the first time Barra has testified under oath about the recall debacle which is now blamed for having caused 74 deaths. Attorneys for plaintiffs now claim they have evidence that GM executives knew about (and covered-up) the defects long before they admitted...

With the Supreme Court potentially dealing a blow to Obamacare, why isn't the Congress considering a Plan B to make health care more affordable, and health insurance less expensive?

DETROIT — In a notable victory for General Motors, a lawsuit that helped spur the biggest safety crisis in the company’s history has been withdrawn in exchange for a settlement from its compensation program, according to two people briefed on the agreement. The lawsuit was the second brought by the family of a Georgia woman, Brooke Melton, who died in 2010 in a car with a faulty ignition switch that has now been linked to at least 64 deaths. For G.M., the agreement removes the significant legal threat of senior officials, including Mary T. Barra, the automaker’s chief executive, being...

DENVER — Colorado already is being sued by two neighboring states for legalizing marijuana. Now, the state faces groundbreaking lawsuits from its own residents, who are asking a federal judge to order the new recreational industry to close. The owners of a mountain hotel and a southern Colorado horse farm argue in a pair of lawsuits filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Denver that the 2012 marijuana-legalization measure has hurt their property and that the marijuana industry is stinky and attracts unsavory visitors.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has spun the 9/11 lawsuits into gold. Ground Zero workers are on the hook to pay steep interest on money their lawyers borrowed from a group of investors that include Silver and his law partners, The Post has learned. Silver's partners at the Weitz & Luxenberg law firm are top board members of a business that quietly loaned money at 18 percent a year to the law firm representing some 9,800 Ground Zero workers with toxic-illness suits against the city. Silver personally invested an undisclosed sum -- but at least $50,000 -- in Counsel Financial Services,...

Adults are awful. Is there anything adults don’t eventually ruin? The economy was ruined by adults, the national debt was rung up by adults. Wars, famine, you name anything and somewhere there’s an adult somewhere on the verge of ruining it. The ruining of things was generally reserved for adulthood, making things more expensive or illegal for adults to engage in. But kids, well, they’d been left largely alone to be kids. Over the last few decades the line of fun ruining has been creeping down, younger and younger, to the point now that kids have gone from being kids...

As the ACA (Obamacare) enters its comic relief phase, with the Jon Gruber videos; the “now you tell me” confessions of Democratic lawmakers who say that the bill should not have been passed; and the truly unwanted resurrection of Kathy Sebelius, maybe it’s time to get serious once again. In health care, it can’t get any more serious than physician suicide. Official estimates put the annual toll of American physicians who die at their own hand as high as 400. But, given the stigma of suicide—especially among doctors—this figure is probably low. Indeed, what are the chances that a physician,...

(CNSNews.com) – The 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) allowed corporations to reduce their health care costs by rewarding employees for voluntarily participating in workplace “wellness” programs to help them lose weight or stop smoking. But now three of those programs are the target of discrimination lawsuits by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which says they are neither voluntary nor legal. EEOC recently filed its third wellness lawsuit, claiming that Honeywell International, Inc.’s ACA-approved wellness program violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Honeywell recently informed employees and their spouses who were enrolled in the company’s health benefits plan that...

The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis reported a $9.1 million operating deficit for fiscal year 2014 and reiterated Thursday that it's considering filing for bankruptcy because of the potential for more lawsuits by victims of clergy sexual abuse. The archdiocese released its financial information in its newspaper, the Catholic Spirit, more than a week after it said it was cutting its central office budget by 20 percent, including 11 jobs. Archbishop John Nienstedt called the situation "disheartening" but wrote that the chancery's finances won't directly affect parishes, schools or other Catholic institutions. "I am determined to see that the...

The evidence continues to mount that General Motors has been less than transparent, if not outright culpable, regarding its ignition switch recall fiasco. As the death toll mounts (from the original 13 casualties reported by GM to the just revised 32 deaths) for victims involved in crashes of GM vehicles with defective ignition switches, new evidence has emerged that GM actually ordered replacement parts for the defective switches a full two months before they even reported a problem. A Wall Street Journal article published on Sunday unveiled the damning evidence that GM placed an order for half a million replacement...

Potential suits against the Dallas, Texas hospital that sent home a patient later diagnosed with Ebola face long odds in the face of state medical malpractice laws. Texas tort-reform measures have made it one of the hardest places in the United States to sue over medical errors, especially those that occurred in the emergency room, according to plaintiffs’ lawyers and legal experts. “It’s one of the highest legal burdens of any state in the country,” said Joanne Doroshow, executive director of New York Law School’s Center for Justice and Democracy, who studies U.S. tort law....

From Zherka v. Ryan, 2014 WL 4928956 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 30, 2014): Plaintiff Selim Zherka filed this … action claiming that employees of the Internal Revenue Service hindered his application for tax exempt status and initiated an investigation against him as part of a broader effort to penalize members of the Tea Party for their political activities…. Beginning in 2009, plaintiff published newspaper articles and held rallies criticizing government officials for political corruption and “confiscatory tax policies.” Plaintiff organized and supported the creation of the Tea Party, a political party that received extensive publicity in the news media. At some point,...

--snip-- Some eager, inexperienced consumers have overindulged on the pot-infused food and then shown up in emergency rooms sweating and paranoid. Edibles were linked to the death of a Wyoming college student in Denver. "There's been anecdotal evidence that some of the new consumers in the legalized market were not very well informed in terms of how to safely take that product," said Lewis Koski, Colorado's marijuana enforcement director.

"You can make money without doing evil" is No. 6 on the list of 10 things Google (the corporation) knows to be true. The Google list leaves out a few caveats. Like: You can make more money flouting antitrust laws. You can pay your brainiacs less if they believe you will retaliate if they try to go to work for someone else. U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh ruled Friday that there was so much evidence in a class action suit against Apple, Google and other big byte corporations that she felt compelled to scotch a $324 million settlement, which...

General Motors Co (GM.N) on Wednesday announced six recalls covering 717,950 vehicles in the United States for varying reasons. None of the recalls were related to the ignition switch issues that have caused nearly 15 million recalls of GM vehicles worldwide this year. The new set of recalls brings GM's recalls worldwide this year to nearly 30 million. The largest recall is for a potentially loose bolt in power adjustable front seats for several cars from model years 2010 and 2012.