New Civil Actions Coming For Marijuana Water Use

September 2, 2015 By
As reported 8/29/15 in the Sacromento Bee, "California regulators undertake unique experiment to govern water use for marijuana. Video by Paul Kitagaki Jr."

As reported 8/29/15 in the Sacromento Bee, “California regulators undertake unique experiment to govern water use for marijuana. Video by Paul Kitagaki Jr.”

You probably saw this coming: The state of California is using civil lawsuits to make environmental cases against legal marijuana growers, especially when it come to water use during the state’s history making drought.
 
Many growers claim this is just sour grapes over the legalization of some uses of marijuana, while other growers are embracing the regulation. It makes for interesting cop stories, especially for those trying to understand how police raids are part of civil litigation. And you can catch up on the via The Sacramento Bee story here:California takes new approach on water regulation for pot farms
Filed Under: Cannabis in the Courts, Cases, Community Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

California Drought Brings Water-Rights Lawsuit

July 13, 2015 By
As reported on 6/19 in the Sacramento Bee: "Irrigation water runs along a dried-up ditch in the Sacramento Valley. | Jae C. Hong Associated Press file"

As reported on 6/19 in the Sacramento Bee: “Irrigation water runs along a dried-up ditch in the Sacramento Valley. | Jae C. Hong Associated Press file”

In what’s sure to become a milestone civil case, a group of water districts is suing California regulators over the state’s order prohibiting holders of some of the oldest water rights from pumping water out of rivers and streams. The Sacramento Bee newspaper explains that “… the lawsuit, filed in Stanislaus Superior Court, challenges the State Water Resources Control Board’s decision last week to ban diversions by 114 different rights holders in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river watersheds.”
 
The Bee adds that “… the affected groups are senior water rights holders. That means they’ve held the right to divert water since before 1914, when California established its rights system. Last week’s decision by the water board marked the first time since the drought of 1977 that any senior rights have been curtailed.”
 
Western state’s water laws are the stuff of legend, with some using “use it or lose it” policies that fall a bit short on conversation. Read more about the California situation here: Lawsuits challenge California’s drought plan
Filed Under: Cases, Community Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Immigration Court Backlog Nearly A Half-Million Cases

May 18, 2015 By
The latest update from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, the group most-cited for keeping track of the immigration courts backlog, sets the number of pending cases at a new all-time high of 445,000, with “routine” hearings being delayed for up to four years.
 
The Los Angels Times is among those taking notice, saying that the rising caseload “… is a nearly 30% increase since Oct. 1, 2013, the start of the last fiscal year” and “… immigration courts have been overwhelmed since the influx last fiscal year of more than 68,500 unaccompanied children and about as many family units crossing the southern border, most from Central America.”
 
They also noted a changing trend, because “… most backlogged cases involved Mexican immigrants, their backlog has increased only about 4% since the start of last fiscal year, while the backlog has skyrocketed for Central Americans — up 63% for Guatemalans, 92% for Salvadorans and 143% for Hondurans.”
 
Federal data indicates that California, Texas, and New York led the nation with the largest immigration backlogs, followed by Florida and New Jersey.
 
The nation’s “immigration courts” are actually a division of the Justice Department, not really federal courts at all. The system report that it has 233 judges in 58 courts nationwide and officials say 17 more are expected to start by month’s end with 68 more are in the process of being hired. But Judge Dana Leigh Marks, who’s been on the bench for 28 years and is president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges, told the L.A. Times that some 100 immigration judges were expected to retire this year.
Filed Under: Border Kids, Cases Tagged With: , ,

Attorney-Author Marks BP-Spill Anniversary With Dire Assessment

April 21, 2015 By
An environmental attorney from New Orleans has marked this week’s 5-year anniversary of the huge BP with a truly dire assessment of regulatory inaction, warning in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that the region not only remains at risk, but the “cure” of using dispersant may have been worse than the oil itself.
 
Stuart H. Smith, a high-profile plaintiff’s attorney who turned blogger then author in the wake of the BP disaster, says President Obama said the right things “… but Congress — controlled by Republican lawmakers indebted to their Big Oil campaign contributors — still has not enacted the offshore-drilling safety measures recommended by the president’s Oil Spill Commission. It has not given strong regulatory powers to the agency that replaced the scandal-scarred Minerals Management Service. And it has not raised the ridiculously low cap of $75 million for corporate liability on major spills.”
 
Smith offers this even more unsettling take on the half-decade: “… on the fifth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon accident, workers continue to clean up tar balls and giant tar mats of weathered BP oil along beaches from Louisiana to Florida. Black crude still clogs the edges of our ever-shrinking wetlands. A recent report by the National Wildlife Federation chronicled significant health damage to some 20 species of marine plants and birds, while people who took part in 2010 cleanup efforts struggle with headaches, nausea and other symptoms.”
 
He contends that “lax government standards for highly toxic dispersants are yet another problem” and that a “string of scientific studies has suggested that exposure to Corexit [the dispersant famously used in bulk during the BP spill] may have been more damaging to the health of cleanup workers and marine life than the initial exposure to spilled oil.”
 
Meanwhile, of course, the civil lawsuits continue to have billions of dollars at stake. Check out the excellent Smith blog, with links to his book “Crude Justice” here: http://www.stuarthsmith.com/
 
Filed Under: Cases, National Tagged With: , , , ,

WSJ Story Notes Civil Gideon Trend

April 9, 2015 By
The Wall Street Journal is taking notice of momentum for a “civil Gideon” approach to lawsuits involving life-changing decisions, like foreclosure or family custody. The WSJ reports that the newly approved state budget “… allocated $85 million for indigent civil legal services at the request of the state judiciary, an increase of $15 million from the previous fiscal year.”
 
And in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio recommended in his preliminary budget proposal spending $36 million on free legal services in housing court, which would bring the city’s total spending on civil legal services up to about $50 million.
 
By way of background, the deep-dive WSJ story noted that the trend has a history of success and “… in 2009, California passed the Sargent Shriver Civil Counsel Act, which created several pilot programs, supported by court fees, free legal counsel in civil cases. In its third year, the program has succeeded despite a modest $8 million annual budget, its coordinators say. More than 15,000 people have been served so far, most in eviction cases.
 
“One of the big takeaways is that attorneys help settle cases,” said Bonnie Hough, managing attorney for California’s Judicial Council. Read the story here: New York Officials Push Right to Counsel in Civil Cases
Filed Under: Cases, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: , , , , ,

Buzz Over NY ‘Silver Case’ Political Scandal

April 2, 2015 By
The asbestos litigation industry is buzzing over how the arrest of a major New York politician might – or might not – create a storyline for other high-volume “magnet” communities, says Courts Monitor Publisher Sara Warner in a new Huffington Post column. Her report includes observations from a recent Beverly Hills industry conference on “cutting edge” issues.
 
Filed Under: Cases, National Tagged With: , , ,

Lawyer, Location Not Law, Determine Fate Of Asylum-Seeking Children

March 13, 2015 By
Access to a lawyer and location of their case is very much more likely to determine the fate of “Border Kids” than laws or other factors, according to a POLITICO analysis that found a “very uneven brand of justice” in U.S. immigration courts. The analysis of government data “… shows that fully 88 percent of the removal orders issued since July have gone to children without an attorney. What’s more, a juvenile assigned to judges in Texas, North Carolina and Georgia in the past 16 months was at least three times more likely to receive such an order than a child in California, Florida or New York.”
 
The resulting POLITICO story implies that the Obama Administration’s “hall pass” on the crisis, which exploded into headlines last summer but diminished in the wake of reform promises, is nearly expired. The D.C.-based publication wrote that “… the same humanitarian crisis that gripped the White House and Congress last year is now a less visible one of American justice. And it still poses a major test for the Obama administration, which promised compassion and fairness in the treatment of the child migrants but also contributed to the current problem by expediting deportation proceedings.”
 
The report is likely a game-changer because it documents the range of outcomes under a “single federal system,” which illustrates it’s anything but a single system. The research compares and contrasts outcome, documenting that “… the number of removal and voluntary departure orders in Texas and North Carolina was 3.5 times the level in California and Florida.
Filed Under: Border Kids, Cases, National

Church-Based ‘Guardian Angels” Step Into Help ‘Border Kids’ Facing Deportation

March 3, 2015 By
A Los Angeles Times report highlights efforts of a Lutheran church group becoming de facto court watchers to make sure the “border kids” – those under-18 would-be immigrants from countries other than Mexico who recently flooded into the U.S. – understand their rights under American law. Advocates say the Justice Department courts that review cases are wildly uneven and outcomes depend largely on legal representation. Those charged in the courts do not have a right to an attorney because the cases are considered civil actions.
 
Reports the LAT: “Because the government does not provide lawyers to immigrants facing removal, many of the children have ended up navigating complex deportation proceedings alone. Last fiscal year, 72% of children in deportation hearings were not represented by an attorney, according to federal data analyzed by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.”
 
Leaders of the guardian angels program, notes the Times, include the Lutheran pastor “… who hatched the idea last summer after hearing that children’s deportation hearings were being fast-tracked through the court system. More than three-fourths of children’s court cases closed in the second half of last year resulted in removal orders, according to the federal Executive Office of Immigrant Review. In the vast majority of those cases, the deportation orders were issued in absentia because the children did not show up for their hearings.”
 
Filed Under: Border Kids, Cases, National Tagged With: , , ,

Judges Renew Calls For Immigration Court Reform

February 26, 2015 By
After a period of relative quiet, the immigration judges facing hundreds of thousands of cases are speaking out, calling for help amid a crisis. A new NPR report explains that “… as Congress debates the fate of President Obama’s immigration policies, the nation’s immigration court system is bogged down in delays exacerbated by the flood of unaccompanied minors who crossed the southern border last summer. The administration made it a priority for those cases to be heard immediately. As a result, hundreds of thousands of other cases have been delayed until as late as 2019.”
 
NPR adds that “even before this past summer’s surge of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum, the immigration courts were already clogged, says Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. There were too many cases for too few judges, and adding in the cases of the unaccompanied minors only made matters worse. There are currently more than 429,000 cases pending in the courts with just 223 judges.
 
The “judges” are not part of the usual judicial system, but are actually employees of the Justice Department – that means, for example, that they could not hold government agents – really, their co-workers – in contempt of court during one of the hearings. Read more: Immigration Courts ‘Operating In Crisis Mode,’ Judges Say
Filed Under: Border Kids, Cases, Refugee Children Tagged With: , , , , ,

Bicyclist Hit By Truck Wins $34.5 Million In Jury Trial

February 10, 2015 By
A Los Angeles bicyclist, who suffered injuries including a lower leg amputation when he was hit by a big-rig truck making a right-hand turn, was awarded $34,555,220 after a personal injury trial.
 
His attorneys said that Alan Casillas, was 19 years old on the morning of Dec. 7, 2012 and was riding his bicycle to a friends’  house. They say that’s when a big rig drove over part of the sidewalk while making a right turn from Tweedy Boulevard to Alameda Street. They said the truck struck Casillas, knocking him from the bike and crushing his left leg, among other injuries.  [Read more…]
Filed Under: Cases, National Tagged With: , , , ,
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