Tag: lawsuits

Federal Judge Allows Lawsuit Seeking Home Psilocybin Care To Proceed, Rejecting Oregon Officials’ Motion To Dismiss

More people in Oregon could eventually access legal psilocybin following a new federal court ruling in favor of plaintiffs who argued that the state’s first-in-the nation psilocybin law wrongfully prevents homebound patients from seeking care.

Four care providers—three licensed psilocybin facilitators and a physician specializing in advanced and terminal illnesses—sued the state about year ago, alleging that the state Psilocybin Services Act (PSA) discriminates against disabled individuals who can’t travel to designated service centers where the substance is administered.

The providers said they were told by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) that there was no way to accommodate homebound patients under the state’s psilocybin law.

In an 12-page ruling issued late last month, District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai denied the state’s motion to dismiss the suit, opining that the plaintiffs have standing to bring the challenge and that a modification of the state’s psilocybin law to provide a reasonable accommodation to homebound patients under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) would not violate principles of federalism.

“The Court agrees with Plaintiffs and finds that their requested remedy rests on physical access rather than use or distribution of a controlled substance in violation of state and federal laws,” the ruling says. “Plaintiffs do not ask the Court to order the provision of a controlled substance, as Defendants contend. Instead…Plaintiffs seek compliance with the ADA so that their disabled clients will have the same physical access to a service that is available to nondisabled individuals.”

Reached by email on Tuesday, plaintiffs’ attorney Kathryn Tucker, said she was pleased the court ruled in favor of the providers seeking to offer home psilocybin services.

“We are eager to ensure that homebound disabled and dying Oregonians can access psilocybin services, as they are among those most likely to benefit,” she wrote. “Opening access for these Oregonians will increase demand for psilocybin produced pursuant to the PSA as well as demand for services of facilitators, particularly those with expertise in providing care to disabled persons and those with advanced illness.”

“We hope to move this forward quickly now that the court has rejected the State’s effort to dismiss, recognizing that the ADA does apply to Oregon’s psilocybin program,” she added. “Because people with advancing illness may have little time left, delay in enabling access can mean that patients who might have obtained relief from debilitating anxiety and depression will die in unrelieved suffering.”

Notably, the new opinion, noted earlier by Psychedelic Week, does not order a specific remedy. It simply allows the underlying suit, Cusker v. Oregon Health Authority, to proceed toward a final decision.

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Federal Judge Completely Dismisses Governor Newsom’s Lawsuit Over President Trump’s Tariffs

A federal judge completely dismissed California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit over President Trump’s tariffs.

US District Judge for the Northern District of California, Jacqueline Scott Corley, a Biden appointee, dismissed the case citing a jurisdiction issue.

Rather than punting the case to the US Court of International Trade like another federal judge did last week, Judge Corley completely dismissed the case and allowed California to file an appeal.

California’s far-left Attorney General Rob Bonta has already filed an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Politico reported:

A U.S. District Court judge on Monday dismissed California officials’ lawsuit over President Donald Trump’s tariffs, concluding the case belongs in an out-of-state court that specializes in trade disputes.

The ruling — separate from a pair of high-profile rulings in other courts last week — partially sides with the Trump administration, which argued the case belongs in the New York-based U.S. Court of International Trade rather than the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Bonta earlier filed their case.

But Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley dismissed the case outright rather than immediately transfer it to the trade court, as Trump’s attorneys had requested. By doing so, she granted the state’s request to leave a path open for California to appeal the ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a famously liberal-leaning bench.

A court battle over President Trump’s tariffs is playing out in a district court, a federal appeals court and the Court of International Trade.

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Chinese seller on Amazon sold ‘defective’ tools linked to deaths, life-changing injuries: lawsuits

Allegedly defective tools and hardware from a China-based seller on Amazon have been linked to two deaths and at least one serious injury — the latest in an alarming spike in product liability lawsuits against the Seattle-based e-tailing giant, The Post has learned.

On March 25, 2024, Jacob “Jake” Todd — 30-year-old father of three in Menifee, Calif. — was working under his Toyota Tacoma when a car jack he’d bought on Amazon from Vevor, a Shanghai-based third-party seller, buckled and broke.

The grisly mishap caused fatal “blunt force trauma,” according to a January lawsuit filed on behalf of his sons in California state court in Riverside County.

In February, an Alabama truck driver, James Ryan Stokes, was using a Vevor “chain load binder” to tie down items on his flatbed truck when the chain broke, sending him violently backwards and fatally breaking his neck, according to William Poole, a lawyer hired by Stokes’ family. 

The 49-year-old trucker left a wife and six children who are preparing a lawsuit against Amazon, Vevor and Austal USA, a ship manufacturer in Mobile, Ala. where the accident happened, according to Poole.

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Top CNN Reporter OUT After Outlet Pays Navy Vet Millions of Dollars in Defamation Settlement

A top CNN reporter announced he is leaving the network after the outlet was forced to pay a Navy vet millions of dollars in a defamation settlement.

“Some personal news: I’m leaving CNN after 8 terrific years. Tough to say goodbye but it’s been an honor to work among the very best in the business. Profound thank you to my comrades on the National Security team & the phenomenal teammates I’ve worked with in the US and abroad,” Alex Marquardt said on Monday.

In January, CNN paid Navy Vet Zachary Young an undisclosed settlement for punitive damages after it was already ordered to pay $5 million in emotional and financial damages.

Zachary Young sued CNN for defamation over a 2021 report on his work helping Afghans during Biden’s botched withdrawal.

The lawsuit against CNN stemmed from their coverage of Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal, which the court previously determined showcased “actual malice, express malice, and a level of conduct outrageous enough” for Plaintiff Zachary Young to seek damages.

Young, who was offering to transport Afghans out of the country to flee the Taliban in 2021, was accused by Tapper and CNN correspondent Alex Marquardt of running a “black market” scheme and exploiting “desperate Afghans” for personal gain while disregarding the dangers and circumstances surrounding the evacuation efforts.

Tapper even maliciously and sarcastically highlighted Young’s use of the word “unfortunately” in a message to the network about the “extremely limited” availability of evacuations and high demand, as if to imply that Young was benefitting from the situation.

Young argued that the network intentionally painted him in a bad light and harmed his security consulting company.

The jury found CNN guilty of defamation earlier this year.

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SCOTUS redux? California courts reject Christian baker punished for lesbian wedding cake refusal

It’s deja vu all over again for makers of custom wedding cakes who seek to operate their bakeries based on their religious beliefs, and possibly for the U.S. Supreme Court as well.

The California Supreme Court has declined to hear a petition for review by Christian baker Cathy Miller, who says her Tastries Bakery is limited to custom wedding cakes and refused to make one for a lesbian wedding in 2017, leading her lawyers to promise to petition SCOTUS. It didn’t give a reason for the denial.

A week-long trial determined Miller engages in “pure speech” and “expressive conduct” protected by the First Amendment, reflecting a SCOTUS precedent for Colorado web designer Lorie Smith, who resisted designing same-sex marriage websites and received a $1.5 million settlement from the state after the SCOTUS ruling.

But a California appeals court overruled the factual findings, deeming the white, three-tiered cake sought by Eileen and Mireya Rodriguez-Del Rio “predesigned” because it appeared as a “display cake” in the shop and allegedly held “no recognizable symbolic meaning.”

That violates a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals precedent upholding the First Amendment rights of tattoo artists, who use similar “sample books” as starting points for original designs, Miller’s petition says.

The couple itself “emphasized the expressive import of the cake,” with Mireya testifying “she wanted a cake inspired by two of Tastries’ display cakes,” and later commissioned “a tiered symbolic Styrofoam cake with a small, edible top layer” from a former Tastries employee who then served it at their wedding. 

That former employee testified that she considers herself a “cake artist” and that the California Civil Rights Department, which sued Miller for declining the lesbian wedding order, “advised her not” to promote the cake she made for the Rodriguez-Del Rios on Instagram, the petition says, implying the department knew that would undermine its case.

The petition asked the California Supreme Court to consider whether the First Amendment’s free speech clause protected her right to refuse creating a lesbian wedding cake, and whether the appeals court’s ruling that the state’s Unruh Act is “neutral” and “generally applicable” conflict with three SCOTUS and one 9th Circuit precedents since 2018.

“As a former teacher, Cathy’s process for designing wedding cakes is unique: she meets with each couple for over an hour, and spends time teaching them the religious and symbolic meaning behind the wedding cake they’re commissioning to celebrate their union,” her lawyers at religious liberty law firm Becket said.

Miller set up “written design standards” early in her business in response to customers asking for designs that “contradict her faith,” such as “gory or pornographic images,” celebrations of drug use or depictions that “demean others” in addition to violations of “the Christian sacrament of marriage,” the firm said.

Those resemble the standards observed by Colorado custom cake baker Jack Phillips, who has spent a decade in state and federal court for his Masterpiece Cakeshop’s right to resist making cakes that celebrate same-sex marriage or gender transitions. 

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Anti-Christian agenda now costing Hawaiian taxpayers $100,000

An agenda to deprive after-school Bible clubs of the same access to schools that other clubs were granted routinely now is costing the taxpayers in the state of Hawaii.

A report from Liberty Counsel, which fought the state on behalf of Child Evangelism Fellowship and its Good News Clubs, revealed that the state appropriations bill, just signed by Gov. Josh Green, provides $100,000 to CEF following a court ruling.

It was last December that a federal judge granted Liberty Counsel a permanent injunction on behalf of CEF against the state that provided equal access to school facilities.

That access had been “unlawfully denied” by the state Department of Education and six different elementary schools, the report said.

The injunction granted CEF Hawaii “prevailing party” status in the dispute, a move that now protects the Good News Clubs from the previous viewpoint discrimination, but also calls for the state to cover litigation costs.

The result now is that the state will give CEF’s clubs access to schools equal to other similarly situated organizations across the state.

Liberty Counsel reported, “During the lawsuit, Hawaii’s Department of Education conceded that one school denied CEF Hawaii use of its facilities based on religion, while another school’s denial was due to a ‘misapplication’ of school policies. CEF Hawaii contended that after it appealed the ‘blatant religious discrimination’ of these denials to the Hawaii State Department of Education, it never received any response, nor did school officials take any corrective actions.”

Other organizations that had been granted access included the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, Girls on the Run, A+ After School Programs, and YMCA.

The state had allowed CEF’s Good News Clubs in more than a dozen schools on Oahu and other islands before COVID-19.

“Then, after restricting after-school programs due to COVID-19, schools fully restored after-school programs in 2022. However, the Hawaii State Department of Education, through four of its superintendents and other officials, had denied every request submitted by CEF to restart its programs and either expressly or effectively denied every appeal, while allowing access for other similar groups to meet after school on campus,” Liberty Counsel explained.

There are more than 3,000 Good News Clubs in elementary schools across the nation.

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NPR Is Under The Delusion It Has A Constitutional Right To Your Money

NPR filed a delusional lawsuit on Tuesday against the Trump administration, arguing that it has a constitutional right to your hard-earned money.

The suit, brought by NPR and three Colorado-based public radio stations, alleges that Trump’s executive order cutting federal funding to the left-wing NPR and PBS violates their right to free speech, as well as provisions of the Public Broadcasting Act.

“The [Executive] Order’s objectives could not be clearer: the Order aims to punish NPR for the content of news and other programming the President dislikes and chill the free exercise of First Amendment rights by NPR and individual public radios across the country,” the suit states.

But as Texas Rep. Brandon Gill countered in a post on X: “NPR has a right to free speech. It doesn’t have a right to our tax dollars.”

Trump issued an executive order earlier this month directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to “cease federal funding” to NPR and PBS.

“Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” the order stated, with the White House adding that PBS and NPR “receive millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”

“No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize,” the order continues.

But NPR argues that it does have a right to your hard-earned dollars.

The suit argues the order is unconstitutional and violates the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. That law established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to “‘facilitate the full development of public telecommunications in which programs of high quality’ and ‘creativity’ will be ‘obtained by diverse sources’” among other things. As stated in NPR’s lawsuit, the act explains “how the Corporation must allocate its general appropriation from Congress.” Twenty-five percent of the appropriation goes toward public radio, while 75 percent goes to public television.

According to the suit, “Congress has appropriated $535 million in general funding for the Corporation for Fiscal Years 2025, 2026, and 2027,” while NPR, in fiscal year 2024, spent roughly $11.1 million in total in grants from the CBP.

Trump “is exercising his lawful authority to limit funding to NPR and PBS,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement. “The President was elected with a mandate to ensure efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and he will continue to use his lawful authority to achieve that objective.”

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Judge Rules in Favor of New Hampshire Bakery in Fight Over Donut Mural

A New Hampshire bakery has won a crucial victory in its fight to preserve a mural of donuts and other baked goods above its storefront. While town officials have attempted to force the bakery to remove the mural, citing zoning regulations, a federal court ruled on Monday that the city cannot enforce its sign rules against the bakery.

In 2022, Sean Young, the owner of Leavitt’s Country Bakery, a popular bakery in Conway, New Hampshire, collaborated with a local high school art class to paint a mural for the bakery’s storefront. The students’ mural depicted baked goods forming the shape of a mountain range, with a multicolored sunrise in the background. Initially, the mural didn’t cause any controversy—and it was even covered positively by local media. However, about a week after being installed, Conway’s Code Enforcement Officer Jeremy Gibbs told Young that the mural violated town zoning rules.

According to the town, the mural violated local laws that regulate signs. Because the mural depicted baked goods—which the bakery obviously sells—it was deemed a “sign,” not a mural, and signs are subject to rules limiting their size. While the town’s rules define a sign incredibly broadly, in practice, the town only enforces its sign regulations on speech it perceives as commercial in nature. If Leavitt’s Country Bakery had erected a mural of just a sunrise, for example, the town would have no problem with it, even though the rules on the books would apply to both. “Imposing different burdens on speech depending on who is speaking and what is being said is content based and speaker based restriction on free speech,” reads a 2023 complaint from the Institute for Justice, a public interest law group, which represented the bakery in its lawsuit against Conway.

On Monday, a judge agreed. While the judge noted that the town’s sign rules, as written, don’t necessarily violate the Constitution, the selective nature of the town’s enforcement does. “The court rules only that Conway’s application of its sign code, and specifically its enforcement of the sign code to the Leavitt’s sign in the particular manner it employed in this case, does not withstand any level of constitutional scrutiny,” reads a ruling from District Judge Joseph N. Laplante enjoining the town from forcing Young to remove the mural. “Although the display may have violated the sign code because of its size, Gibbs’ determination was based on a rationale with no textual basis in the sign code, which does not distinguish between displays based on content.”

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EU Commission Sues Five Member States Over Censorship Law Non-Compliance

Five EU member countries are being taken to court by the EU Commission for failure to “effectively” comply with the bloc’s online censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA).

DSA, and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), are EU’s key regulations often criticized for centralizing the bloc’s power in the digital sphere at the expense of free speech, and tech companies’ business interests – but also, it appears, the sovereignty of member countries.

Among the “May infringements package” covering various areas regulated by the EU is the section dedicated to the digital economy. It is here that the Commission announced legal action against Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Poland, Portugal, and Spain.

These countries have been referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union; Bulgaria, meanwhile, has been put on notice and may eventually also find itself in court, unless it empowers a national digital services coordinator (DSC, a role established under DSA) and “lay down the rules on penalties applicable to infringements (of DSA).”

The EU Commission said that designating and empowering DSCs is an essential step in enforcing the DSA rules and “in ensuring the uniform application” of the regulation across the bloc.

Of the five EU members that are already in court, Poland has not designated or empowered a DSC at all, while the other four have done that – but failed to “entrust them with the necessary powers to carry out their tasks under the DSA.”

All five countries have yet to come up with rules regarding penalties for DSA infringement.

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Victory for mom who claims child was sexually abused by AI chatbot that drove him to suicide

A Florida mother who claims her 14-year-old son was sexually abused and driven to suicide by an AI chatbot has secured a major victory in her ongoing legal case. 

Sewell Setzer III fatally shot himself in February 2024 after a chatbot sent him sexual messages telling him to ‘please come home.’ 

According to a lawsuit filed by his heartbroken mother Megan Garcia, Setzer spent the last weeks of his life texting an AI character named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character on ‘Game of Thrones,’ on the role-playing app Character.AI.

Garcia, who herself works as a lawyer, has blamed Character.AI for her son’s death and accused the founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, of knowing that their product could be dangerous for underage customers. 

On Wednesday, U.S. Senior District Judge Anne Conway rejected arguments made by the AI company, who claimed its chatbots were protected under the First Amendment. 

The developers behind Charcter.AI, Character Technologies and Google are named as defendants in the legal filing. They are pushing to have the case dismissed. 

The teen’s chats ranged from romantic to sexually charged and also resembled two friends chatting about life.

The chatbot, which was created on role-playing app Character.AI, was designed to always text back and always answer in character.

It’s not known whether Sewell knew ‘Dany,’ as he called the chatbot, wasn’t a real person – despite the app having a disclaimer at the bottom of all the chats that reads, ‘Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!’

But he did tell Dany how he ‘hated’ himself and how he felt empty and exhausted.

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