CCM Staff

Allergan recalls textured breast implants due to cancer link

July 29, 2019 By CCM Staff

Photo Credit: BROKER, via Alamy, as originally reported by The New York Times on 7/24/19.

Global pharmaceutical company Allergan has announced a voluntary worldwide recall of Biocell textured breast implants and tissue expanders due to links to an unusual form of cancer.

The July 24 recall, made in the United States at the request of the federal Food and Drug Administration, affects implants used for cosmetic breast enlargement and for reconstruction after mastectomy for breast cancer, The New York Times reported.

“Worldwide, 573 cases and 33 deaths from the cancer have been reported, with 481 of the cases clearly attributed to Allergan Biocell implants, the F.D.A. said. Of the 33 deaths, the agency said its data showed that the type of implant was known in 13 cases, and in 12 of those cases the maker was Allergan,” The New York Times reported.

In Europe, the Allergan devices were banned late last year.

Shareholders sued Allergan late last year, as a proposed class action lawsuit in Manhattan federal court accused the company of hiding from investors the link between its textured breast implants and the rare form of cancer, Reuters reported.

The December 2018 lawsuit followed an announcement by Allergan that it would take its textured breast implants off the market in Europe after a Dec. 18 recall order, Reuters reported.

Today, lawyers are advertising for plaintiffs.

Filed Under: Cases Tagged With: Allergan devices, Biocell textured breast implants, Breast implants, cancer link, class action suits, FDA, federal Food and Drug Administration, Manhattan federal court

Equifax to pay up to $650 million in data breach settlement

July 24, 2019 By CCM Staff

Photo credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images file published in a report by NBC news on 7/22/19.

“This company’s ineptitude, negligence, and lax security standards endangered the identities of half the U.S. population,” said the New York Attorney General in a statement reported by NBC news.

Reuters reports, “The largest-ever settlement for a data breach draws to close multiple probes into Equifax by the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and nearly all state attorneys general. It also resolves pending class-action lawsuits against the company. Credit-reporting company Equifax will pay up to a record $650 million to settle federal and state probes into a massive 2017 data breach of personal information…”

Equifax is one of the three largest major credit-reporting companies; the company collects and aggregates information on over 800 million individual consumers and more than 88 million businesses worldwide. In 2017, the company made headlines when it disclosed that a data breach had compromised the personal information, including Social Security numbers, of 143 million Americans.

Filed Under: Cases Tagged With: breach settlement, data breach, data protection, Equifax, New York Attorney General

Court rebukes President Trump for blocking followers on Twitter

July 12, 2019 By CCM Staff

Photo Credit: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times as reported in The New York Times on 7/9/19.

How the First Amendment functions in the social media age gained further clarity this week when a federal appeals court ruled that President Trump violated the Constitution by blocking people from following his Twitter account.

“Because Mr. Trump uses Twitter to conduct government business, he cannot exclude some Americans from reading his posts — and engaging in conversations in the replies to them — because he does not like their views, a three-judge panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled unanimously,” The New York Times reports.

Tuesday’s ruling may be appealed.

“Mr. Trump’s legal team argued, among other things, that he operated the account merely in a personal capacity, and so had the right to block whomever he wanted for any reason — including because users annoyed him by criticizing or mocking him,” The New York Times reports.

“Courts have increasingly been grappling with how to apply the First Amendment, written in the 18th century, to the social-media era,” The Times continues. “In 2017, for example, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a North Carolina law that had made it a crime for registered sex offenders to use websites like Facebook.”

Filed Under: Events, National Tagged With: constitutional rights, federal appeals court, First Amendment, Supreme Court, Trump Administration, Twitter, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

Another judge rebuked for treatment of sexual assault case

July 8, 2019 By CCM Staff

Excerpt from the judge’s statement as reported by the New York Times, 7/2/19.

Judicial treatment of sexual assault cases continues to prompt scrutiny, the latest involving a New Jersey family court judge who argued that prosecutors should have considered the suspect’s college prospects and how charges would affect his life.

The New York Times reports on an appeals court’s rebuke of Monmouth County Judge James Troiano of Superior Court, who denied prosecutors’ motion to try a 16-year-old sexual assault suspect as an adult.

The judge questioned whether the incident was rape, although investigators said the boy shared a cellphone video among friends and sent a text that said, “When your first time having sex was rape.”

“The boy filmed himself penetrating her from behind, her torso exposed, her head hanging down, prosecutors said,” The New York Times reported.

The judge said “the young man came from a good family, attended an excellent school, had terrific grades and was an Eagle Scout,” according to the article.

The appeals court “cleared the way for the case to be moved from family court to a grand jury, where the teenager, identified only as G.M.C. in court documents, will be treated as an adult,” the article explained.

“In recent years, judges across the country have come under fire for the way they have handled sexual abuse cases,” The New York Times reported. “One of the most notorious was in 2016 when a judge in California sentenced a Stanford University student to six months in jail after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. After an intense public backlash, California voters recalled the judge. Judge Troiano, who is roughly 70, was one of two family court judges whom appeals courts in New Jersey have criticized in recent weeks over relatively similar issues.”

Filed Under: Cases Tagged With: court judge, family court, Judge James Troiano of Superior Court, judicial system, sexual assault

Alabama case stirs debate about the rights of fetuses over those of mothers

July 1, 2019 By CCM Staff

Marshae Jones was charged with manslaughter when she was shot and her fetus died. Photo Credit: Jefferson County Jail as reported by The New York Times.

According to the New York Times, “Marshae Jones was five months pregnant when she was shot in the stomach. Her fetus did not survive the shooting… But on Wednesday, it was Ms. Jones who was charged in the death.”

“The police have said she was culpable because she started the fight that led to the shooting and failed to remove herself from harm’s way,” explains the report.

Since Jones was arrested and charged with manslaughter in Alabama last month, there has been “heated debate over the rights of pregnant women and fetuses nationwide, and Alabama is ground zero for the issue.”

From another New York Times report: “Activists have also cited it as a demonstration of the dangers of the “personhood” movement, which pushes for the rights of fetuses to be recognized as equal to — or even more important than — the rights of the mothers who carry them. And many are now watching as the movement gains momentum in Alabama, which already has some of the most restrictive reproductive rights laws in the country.”

The Times explains that last November, Alabama voters approved a ballot measure that amended the state’s constitution to recognize the “sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.” This has resulted in a number of court cases aimed to protect the rights of unborn children, including a wrongful-death lawsuit by a 19-year-old man against a clinic and a pharmaceutical company that provided an abortion pill to his girlfriend.

“Under Alabama law, life begins at conception,” said Bryan Fair, professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Alabama School of Law as reported in The New York Times. “The question is whether that is consistent with federal constitutional law.”

Filed Under: Cases, Events Tagged With: Alabama Court, fetus rights, manslaughter, personhood movement, reproductive rights

New courthouse in Placerville – unsought by judiciary – funded in California budget

June 17, 2019 By CCM Staff

A controversial effort to build a new courthouse in Placerville received a boost in California’s $215 billion budget.

The Recorder by law.com reported on June 13 about the $2.8 million allocation, which will pay for about 5 acres of vacant land, the prospective site of a new courthouse.

The land is owned by El Dorado County, “acquired by the county in a 2014 land swap with John V. Briggs, a former Republican assemblyman and state senator.” Described as an example of pork-barrel politics, the allocation was not requested by the judiciary.

“The judicial branch has no immediate plans to build the courthouse,” The Recorder reported. “The Judicial Council hasn’t secured the funding for a project with an estimated price tag of $82 million.”

California legislators approved the budget on June 13. The $2.8 million allocation for courthouse land “was not vetted in months of budget committee hearings this spring. It appeared for the first time Sunday night as a line item in the budget deal reached between Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers,” The Recorder reported.

“The current three-story, four-courtroom building in Placerville is postcard pretty, but at 106 years old it lacks modern-day features. It is crowded and has no holding cells for in-custody defendants, no dedicated jury assembly room and limited public parking. The idea of building a new courthouse instead of renovating and expanding the existing one has been a contentious one for decades. A 1965 grand jury report recommended relocating the court. Local residents balked and the existing courthouse was remodeled instead,” the article noted.

Filed Under: Cases Tagged With: California, Courthouse News, Gavin Newsom, judicial branch

‘Stairway to Heaven’ gets second chance

June 12, 2019 By CCM Staff

Photo credit: Michael Ochs Archives 1973, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on 6/10/19.

The U.S. federal court of appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco agreed Monday to give Led Zeppelin a new hearing to defend a jury’s favorable verdict in a suit that claimed the opening lines of the 1972 hit, “Stairway to Heaven,” had been plagiarized from a 1968 song by the California band Spirit, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The 1968 Spirit instrumental ‘Taurus’ opens with a rising and falling guitar melody somewhat similar to the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ opening,” notes the report.

A Los Angles jury heard “conflicting testimony from musicology experts about whether the passages were similar enough for a copyright violation” during the trial in 2016.

“Led Zeppelin’s request for a rehearing, supported by other songwriters and music publishers, argued that allowing copyright protection for ‘commonplace elements’ in composition would cause ‘widespread confusion’ in the music business,” explains the report.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: copyright law, copyright violation, Led Zeppelin, plagiarism, San Francisco courts, U.S. federal court of appeals for the Ninth Circuit

Multibillion-dollar insurance corporation sued for data breach

June 3, 2019 By CCM Staff

Insurance giant First American Financial faces a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, claiming the company “left more than 885 million sensitive documents dating as far back as 2003 exposed online,” Forbes.com reported on May 28.

“Now the company is facing a class action lawsuit for its apparent negligence. Gibbs Law Group LLP announced today that it is bringing the first nationwide class action lawsuit against the multibillion-dollar corporation,” the article reported.

The lawsuit was filed with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California by David Gritz, a house flipper from Pennsylvania.

“First American was the title insurer for at least 11 of his housing transactions, according to the lawsuit,” Forbes.com reported. “The complaint suggests the members of the class affected by First American’s data exposure could be in the millions, and the lawsuit is seeking over $5 million.”

Filed Under: Cases, National Tagged With: class action lawsuit, data breach, data protection, First American Financial, housing, U.S. District Court for the Central District of California

Class action lawsuit, investigation follow infant deaths in Fisher-Price’s Rock ‘n Play Sleeper

May 30, 2019 By CCM Staff

Photo credit: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post, as reported on 5/30/19.

A few weeks ago, a press release Wolf Haldensteinand Connors LLP announce that on April 19, 2019, that firm had filed “a consumer class action lawsuitagainst Fisher-Price, Inc. and its corporate parent Mattel Inc. (“Defendants”) on behalf of Cassandra Mulvey and all other owners of Fisher-Price’s Rock ‘n Play Sleeper since 2009, alleging violations of consumer protection laws, breach of warranty, unjust enrichment and other claims. The case, Mulvey v. Fisher–Price, Inc. and Mattel, Inc.,Case No. 1:19-cv-00518 (W.D.N.Y.), is pending in United States District Court for the Western District of New York in Buffalo, New York, where Fisher-Price, Inc. is located.”

You can read the full complaint here.

The Washington Post did an in-depth investigation on the case about how “Fisher-Price developed its revolutionary Rock ‘n Play sleeper based on faulty beliefs about infant sleep, without safety testing and without consulting a pediatrician.”

According to WaPo, “last month, the Rock ‘n Play was recalledby Fisher-Price after a series of infant deaths. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which helped coordinate the recall, said more than 30 babies died in the product after they turned over while unrestrained or ‘under other circumstances.'”

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The bleak state of the immigration court system

May 21, 2019 By CCM Staff

A recent article by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) outlines the current state of the immigration court system and it is bleak: “In a report released earlier this year, the American Bar Association described the U.S. immigration court system as facing an ‘existential crisis,’ an ‘irredeemably dysfunctional’ system ‘on the brink of collapse.'”

The report notes a backlog of 900,000 cases quoting The Economist: “People will die of old age in America before they ever acquire the legal right to live in America. This is an extraordinary failure to govern.”

According to the article, Trump’s new regulations have just exacerbated the problem, comparing the complexity of the immigration courts system to the tax code. They also note that the massive backlog of cases “have led to judges rushing to complete cases, compromising their ethical obligations and violating immigrants’ due process rights…”

Filed Under: Border Kids Tagged With: American Bar Association, court backlog, due process, immigration, immigration court system, immigration rights, Southern Poverty Law Center, Trump Administration, U.S. Immigration