Tag: lawsuits

Cops sued for zip tying and arresting 6-year-old girl

The family of a 6-year-old Florida girl who made headlines after she was arrested and had her wrists zip-tied in 2019 has filed a lawsuit, The Sacramento Bee reported.

Video of the incident showed Kaia Rolle sobbing while she was placed in zip ties after hitting and kicking staffers at Lucious and Emma Nixon Academy Charter School.

Her grandmother says the now-10-year-old still has trauma from the incident.

“This is a lifelong mission of recovery for Kaia,” Meralyn Kirkland said. “This should not happen.”

The family is suing over the child’s “cruel, senseless and terrorizing arrest,” which they say was done to “instill fear and humiliation” in her, as well as excessive force, false arrest and malicious prosecution. It’s seeking $50,000 in damages.

In addition to damages, the family is demanding that the minimum arrest age be raised to 14.

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Former Yale student cleared to sue accuser over false allegations

A former Yale student who was kicked out of the school in 2019 after being accused and acquitted of rape in 2018 can now sue his accuser for defamation over statements she made during a school hearing on the matter after a Connecticut Supreme Court ruling over the summer.

According to the New York Post, 30-year-old Saifullah Khan has had a $110 million defamation lawsuit pending against the school since 2019, and has been fighting to bring his accuser into the suit.

In June, the state’s supreme court granted Khan’s request, and ruled that the accuser, a fellow student, shouldn’t receive “qualified immunity” from her testimony in a school hearing that Khan raped her after a 2015 Halloween party.

Qualified immunity protects people from being sued over statements they make in judicial cases, but the court ruled that the university hearing wasn’t a stand-in court proceeding, since Khan wasn’t allowed the chance to cross-examine his accuser.

“For absolute immunity to apply under Connecticut law,” the June decision states, “fundamental fairness requires meaningful cross-examination in proceedings like the one at issue.”

Khan’s team listened during the referenced hearing to the woman’s testimony from a separate room, never being able to cross-examine her. The ruling said Khan’s defense attorney was left to act as a “potted plant.”

The court said that Yale’s hearing couldn’t be considered “quasi-judicial” because the woman wasn’t made to testify under oath, and Khan wasn’t provided with a transcript of the testimony.

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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer received email in Greek from consultant to shield it from the public: lawsuit

Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer received a coded email related to her administration’s response to a local water crisis in an apparent attempt to hide the sensitive communication from the public, a lawsuit alleges. 

The email was disguised in Greek alphabet font and sent by Andrew Leavitt, a consultant to Michigan’s energy department, to Whitmer’s senior energy adviser Kara Cook in September of 2021, according to a class action lawsuit filed.

“Hot off the presses. As I warned there are some major red flags. It seems like we are back at square one having not learned from Flint,” reads Leavitt’s decoded email, which was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon on Wednesday after a June court filing in the case. 

Leavitt served as a consultant for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.

The use of the Greek language and alphabet “appears to be calculated to conceal the statements,” the court filing states, noting that Leavitt “prefaced his grave concerns about the water crises with a reference back to his prior warnings and the State and City Defendants’ failure to learn from the Flint tragedy.“

Since the email was written in Greek, it would not have been included in public records requests for government communications containing words such as “Flint” or “red flags.”

Michigan’s public records department cannot electronically search for material written using the Greek alphabet, the Washington Free Beacon reported. 

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National Archives acknowledges 5,400 Biden pseudonym emails, faces lawsuit for their release

The National Archives and Records Administration acknowledged possessing potentially up to 5,400 emails connected to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s pseudonym accounts that he used to forward government information and discuss business with his son, Hunter Biden, and others, and on Monday the Southeastern Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit to compel the agency to turn over the emails.

The non-profit constitutional legal group that filed the lawsuit said the archives confirmed that Biden used the pseudonyms of Robin Ware, Robert L. Peters, and JRB Ware during his time in the Obama administration. 

The archives’ admissions confirm years of reporting from Just the News about Biden’s use of a personal email as vice president and the pseudonym accounts he used.

The legal foundation first filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the archives for Biden’s emails in 2021 on behalf of Just the News editor-in-chief John Solomon.

The legal foundation renewed its initial request last year with a second FOIA request, but the archives “has failed to produce a single one of these emails,” the group said.

Monday’s lawsuit turns up the pressure on the archives to release the documents.

“All too often, public officials abuse their power by using it for their personal or political benefit. When they do, many seek to hide it,” Southeastern Legal Foundation general counsel Kimberly Hermann said. “The only way to preserve governmental integrity is for NARA to release Biden’s nearly 5,400 emails to SLF and thus the public. The American public deserves to know what is in them.”

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DOJ files lawsuit accusing SpaceX of hiring discrimination against refugees, asylum recipients

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Thursday filed a lawsuit against SpaceX accusing the company of discriminating against asylum recipients and refugees in its hiring decisions.

The DOJ alleges that SpaceX “routinely discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them, because of their citizenship status, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).” According to the suit, SpaceX wrongly claimed that federal regulations related to export controls restricted the company to only hiring U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, also known as green card holders.

“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “Our investigation found that SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged asylees and refugees from seeking work opportunities at the company.”

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Medical Marijuana Company Slams DEA In Lawsuit Alleging Extreme Delays To Cannabis Research Licensing

A company focused on developing marijuana-derived pharmaceuticals is suing the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) over what it calls “exponential delays” in the agency’s process for granting licenses to grow cannabis for medical research.

Rhode Island-based MMJ BioPharma Cultivation Inc. filed a petition for a writ of mandamus in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday, alleging that DEA’s yearslong licensing application process has hamstrung the company’s business and stymied innovation that could benefit patients. It’s asking the federal court to compel the agency to act.

“Despite beginning this process in November of 2017,” the company says in the lawsuit, “MMJ has been unable to conduct the research that it was created to do.”

MMJ is working to produce a gel capsule containing cannabis extracts, which it says is intended to treat multiple sclerosis and Huntington’s disease. While it previously received DEA authorization to import marijuana into the U.S. from Canada, MMJ later applied for permission to cultivate cannabis in-house for research and development purposes.

“This registration is essential to MMJ’s ability to conduct FDA-sanctioned clinical trials,” the company says, “because without the ability to cultivate their own marijuana, they are unable to produce the proper compound.”

MMJ asserts that DEA’s pre-registration investigation for the license application began in June 2021 and lasted through the following October. “At the end of the visit, the diversion investigator informed MMJ that they would return to the DEA office, ‘write up’ the report, and submit the report to their group supervisor who would then submit those findings to DEA Headquarters for a final determination,” the suit says.

But according to the petition, no final determination ever came. “Despite numerous attempts to follow-up and check the status of the registration approval determinations for manufacturing, DEA personnel have expressed to MMJ that they have not yet made final determinations and they have no idea when that determination will be made,” it says.

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LAWSUIT: FIRE sues to stop California from forcing professors to teach DEI

Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Each of the professors teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching. 

The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints. 

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The family of a pregnant Colorado woman fatally shot by police sues the officers

The family of a pregnant Colorado woman fatally shot by an Arvada police officer after she was mistaken for a shoplifter said in a lawsuit that the killing was “patently unreasonable.”

The family of Destinee Thompson, 27, of Denver, is seeking unspecified damages in the suit filed against four officers and a sergeant Tuesday, two years after Thompson was killed as she tried to drive away from officers who had surrounded her car.

She was leaving an Arvada motel on Aug. 17, 2021, when several officers approached her, saying they were looking for a Latina who had brandished a knife as she was stealing a cart full of merchandise from a Target store, according to the suit, filed in District Court in Denver County.

The actual suspect, who also had stolen items from the store two days previously, had a chest tattoo, she was wearing a white tank top, and she allegedly had gone to the motel, the suit says.

Thompson, who was wearing a white tank top but did not have a chest tattoo, was leaving the motel to eat lunch as officers arrived, the document says.

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New York Judge Halts Marijuana Business License Approvals Following Military Veteran-Led Lawsuit

A New York judge has halted new cannabis licenses under a program that favors people with previous drug conviction charges following a legal challenge by a group of veterans.

The ruling by Supreme Court Justice Kevin Bryant blocks the Office of Cannabis Management from granting new conditional adult-use recreational dispensary licenses, or processing existing ones, while the legal challenge plays out.

It comes in response to a lawsuit filed by a group of disabled military veterans who argue the system of awarding and issuing licenses to certain social equity applicants violates the state Constitution.

Under the state’s cannabis licensing program, entrepreneurs with past cannabis convictions or immediate family members with past convictions are prioritized for the first dispensary licenses. Nonprofit groups that work with former prisoners are also eligible to apply for cannabis licenses.

But the veterans argue in court filings that regulators are usurping the state legislature’s authority by changing the rules that required “the initial adult-use cannabis retail dispensary license application period shall be opened for all applicants at the same time.”

They say regulators failed to adhere to New York’s Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act by not issuing licenses to disabled service veterans and other minority groups, whom they argue should qualify.

“Individuals like service-disabled veterans, who are also social equity applicants, who should be prioritized under the MRTA—the marijuana regulation taxation act—the plaintiffs are arguing that they’ve been harmed by being left out of this first mover’s advantage,” said Fatima Afia, an attorney at Rudick Law Group.

The lawsuit is the latest blow to the state’s rollout of a recreational cannabis market, which has been delayed, in part, by a lawsuit alleging that state regulations illegally gave preference to New York residents for pot licenses.

A ruling by the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in May allowed New York to begin issuing operating licenses to qualifying pot businesses in most regions of the state.

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Arkansas deputy shoots at Pomeranian but hits woman standing on porch instead

A lawsuit has been filed against a Columbia County deputy, the sheriff, and the sheriff’s office after the deputy shoots at a dog, but strikes a woman standing on her front porch instead.

Tina Hight, the woman who was shot in August 2022, still has the bullet lodged in her shin. She’s now not only dealing with anxiety but also continuous doctor’s appointments.

She initially called 911 for help, but instead was shot on her own front porch she told Seven On Your Side.

In the video, Columbia County Deputy Brian Williams is heard shouting at the dog: “Get back, get your dog, I’ll kill this ************. Get your God**** dog.”

Williams then fires a warning shot, but that quickly escalates.

“You better get back. I’ll kill this” and then he shoots at the dog.

You just shot me,” Hight screams.

“I shot who?” the deputy asked.

Williams appeared to aim at a Pomeranian, but instead hit Hight who is standing right next to another deputy.

You shot my aunt,” said another woman.

“I didn’t shoot her,” Williams responds.

Yes, you did,” Hight responds. “You shot me.”

Later in the video, Williams claims one of Hight’s dogs scratched her – instead of her being shot.

“Very scary, I have never been shot before… I didn’t know… I knew I was hit, I didn’t know how bad, I didn’t understand,” Hight told 7OYS.

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