The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Tuesday reaffirmed a decision handed down in January (read decision) limiting the ability of police to taser motorists over minor traffic violations. Coronado, California Police Officer Brian McPherson blasted motorist Carl Bryan, then 21, with a 1200-volt taser during a traffic stop over a minor infraction on the Coronado Bridge near San Diego, five years ago. Bryan lost four of his front teeth and was hit with “resisting arrest” charges. He sued, claiming excessive force had been used.
“We concluded that Officer Brian MacPherson used excessive force when, on July 24, 2005, he deployed his X26 taser in dart mode to apprehend Carl Bryan for a seatbelt infraction, where Bryan was obviously and noticeably unarmed, made no threatening statements or gestures, did not resist arrest or attempt to flee, but was standing inert twenty to twenty-five feet away from the officer,” Judge Kim Wardlaw summarized.
Both Toyota and the remains of its joint venture known as NUMMI have sued the remains of “Old GM” for breach of contract according to two separate reports in the Wall Street Journal [sub]. NUMMI is seeking $365m, claiming GM caused the collapse of the joint venture by unilaterally pulling out as it collapsed into bankruptcy, sticking Toyota and NUMMI with the bill.
Those decisions breached … commitments to Nummi and sounded its death knell,” said the lawsuit, filed last week. And unlike Toyota, GM’s bankruptcy estate “has refused to contribute to Nummi’s deficit during the wind down”
Toyota, meanwhile, is suing for some $73m in development costs for the Pontiac Vibe, a vehicle that GM was supposed to sell for another two years.
The Ohio Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that police do not need to obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracking device to anyone’s vehicle. The case arose after paid informants told the Butler County Sheriff’s Office that Sudinia Johnson was involved in selling cocaine. Acting on this information, Detective Mike Hackney attached a pager-sized GPS tracker to the undercarriage of Johnson’s white Chevy van.
The GPS unit uploaded information regarding the van’s location to a website that Hackney regularly checked. This information was used to follow the van from Chicago back to Ohio, with police prepared to make a traffic stop with drug-sniffing canines as soon as Johnson entered Butler County, as long as “they were able to find probable cause to make a stop,” according to Hackney’s testimony.
A federal lawsuit seeks damages against a rental car company for allowing the photo enforcement firm American Traffic Solutions (ATS) to place charges on the credit cars of customers without their consent. North Carolina resident Dwight Simonson filed the case in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey earlier this year and hopes it will be certified as a class action. Simonson had rented a Hertz automobile in Orlando, Florida on June 23, 2009 and was outraged to find himself being billed $10.75 by ATS for a 75 cent toll. Since 2005, the New Jersey-based Hertz Corporation has worked with ATS through a program known as PlatePass through which renters can use toll roads with a built-in payment system. Frequent travelers have expressed outrage over the automatic billing for various forms of traffic fines they consider excessive. Simonson argues that the program is intended to defraud renters.
A federal judge issued an order last Friday blocking the immediate removal of red light cameras from Houston, Texas intersections. On November 2, voters adopted an amendment to the city charter making photo tickets unenforceable, against the wishes of the Houston city council and the private vendor that operates the cameras, American Traffic Solutions (ATS). Over the Thanksgiving holiday, US District Court for the Southern District of Texas Judge Lynn N. Hughes worked out a deal with the city and ATS to preserve the cameras, for now.
A divided federal court last week ruled that police could not use GPS devices to track a suspect without first obtaining a warrant. Nine judges of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit considered the case of Antoine Jones who had been arrested on October 24, 2005 for drug possession after police attached a tracker to Jones’s Jeep — without judicial approval — and used it to follow him for a month.
Xiang Dong “Mike” Yu, 49, of Beijing, pleaded guilty in federal court in Detroit to two counts of theft of trade secrets. He will be sentenced in February 23, 2011. He’s looking at anywhere between 5 and 6 years in the slammer. He will also have to pay a fine of $150,000. After serving his sentence, he will be deported from the United States. That’s a lenient sentence, only reached through a plea bargain.
In case you ever want to spy on your employer, here is what not to do: Read More >
Red light cameras are no longer issuing tickets to motorists in America’s fourth-largest city. The Houston, Texas city council on Monday canvassed the results of the November 2 vote and ordered the cameras unplugged. In the nearby city of Baytown, red light cameras will be disabled at midnight on November 26.
“The voting public has spoken,” Houston City Attorney David M. Feldman wrote Monday in a letter to Jim Tuton, CEO of the camera contractor American Traffic Solutions (ATS). “Houston must follow the mandate of the electorate. Houston hereby terminates its contract with ATS. This termination is effective immediately. ATS is required to turn off all red light cameras installed and/or monitored by reason of the contract and ATS is to do so immediately.”
A motorist filed a federal lawsuit against Chicago, Illinois police officers who issued twenty-four bogus parking tickets against him over the course of fourteen months. The tickets arrived in groups of three and four and were for violations that frequently contradicted one another, requiring the vehicle to be in more than one place at a time. Mark Geinosky suspects they conspired against him to extract revenge on behalf of his ex-wife.
“Plaintiff alleges that he received tickets for violations which never occurred, and which the defendant officers knew had not occurred, as part of a deliberate campaign by officers in Unit 253 to harass him,” Geinosky’s lawyer wrote in a brief to the court. “Plaintiff was forced, over and over again, to respond to bogus parking tickets which the defendant officers gave him for malicious reasons.”
A veteran district court judge in Herford, Germany earlier this month dismissed 42 speed camera citations on the grounds that they were not issued for any legitimate safety purpose. Judge Helmut Knoner blasted the use of cameras that has turned into a multi-billion-dollar worldwide industry.
“Speed cameras are often a big rip-off,” Knoner said. “There is no law that regulates when, where and how measurements are made. For me, the reasonable suspicion is that cities, counties and police authorities only want to make money.”
A federal appellate court ruled Tuesday that a portion of a lawsuit against the red light camera and speed camera program in Cleveland, Ohio could proceed. Daniel McCarthy and Colleen Carroll argued that the city had unconstitutionally deprived them of their property after the Parking Violations Bureau fined them $100 when the municipal traffic camera ordinance did not give the city any authority to impose a fine on someone who leases his vehicle. A district court judge threw out the case, but the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found merit in the state law aspects of their argument.
Another state court of appeals on Friday saw no problem with police attaching a GPS tracking device to an automobile without first obtaining a warrant from a judge. Idaho’s second highest court denied the appeal of Filip Danney who was convicted on marijuana charges based on evidence gained from the spying device.
In March 2007, Ada County Detective Matt Taddicken received an anonymous tip about Danney and decided to investigate. Two months later, he went to Danney’s work and placed a GPS tracker on Danney’s parked car. Within a few days, the device showed Danney was returning to Boise from a trip to Arcata, California. This was enough to have Taddicken order Danney stopped and searched. Ada County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Matthew Clifford claimed that Danney failed to “signal for five seconds prior to changing lanes,” and used this as a reason to pull him over. While Danney was detained, a drug dog was brought in to search the vehicle. The dog found the marijuana.
We’ve been tracking mountingopposition to E15 ethanol for some time now, and when the EPA approved the 15-percent corn juice blend for vehicles made in 2007 or later, we saw the opposition begin to crystalize. Now, the Detroit News reports that a number of oil, food and other interest groups have filed suit in a D.C. Circuit appeals court, seeking to halt the EPA’s approval of E15. According to the DetN
The petitioners argue that under the Clean Air Act, the EPA administrator may only grant a waiver for a new fuel additive if it “will not cause or contribute to a failure of any emission control device or system.”
They believe the “EPA has unlawfully interpreted the statute to achieve a particular outcome,” but EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said it was based on “sound science.”
Considering the approval was apparently based on study results from a mere 14 vehicles, it sounds like the industry groups might have a solid point here. Especially when you realize that a major motivation for E15 approval is from the fact that blenders couldn’t sell enough E10 to meet government mandates. As the video above (from June of this year) proves, the political tail has wagged the scientific dog on ethanol ever since the farm lobby realized that ethanol could be the next corn syrup. With any luck, this lawsuit could just be the point at which science re-asserts itself.
A federal class action lawsuit seeks to take advantage of last month’s California Supreme Court’s red light camera decision. The high court let stand a lower court ruling that invalidated citations on the ground that the city of Santa Ana’s failed to provide the legally required warning periods before activating the automated ticketing machines (view ruling). Motorist Robert Plumleigh was forced to pay $480 on March 17, 2008 after a camera accused him of turning right at a red light at one of the sixteen intersections where the city failed to provide the required thirty-day warning period. He wants Santa Ana to refund all illegally issued tickets. US District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney on Wednesday gave Plumleigh’s lawyers an extra thirty days to file for class certification.
It is one thing to recognize the legendary status of Mr. Shelby and the original Cobras, including the 427 S/C, and quite another to assert that purchasers and potential
purchasers view Cobra continuations or replicas, sold primarily as kits, which employ the Cobra 427 S/C Design as coming from a single source. The fact that Cobra replicas, sold primarily as kits, which employ the 427 S/C Design, have been sold by numerous third parties for more than three decades, including between 2002 and 2009, precludes us from drawing that conclusion. Accordingly, we find applicant’s evidence based on media coverage of Mr. Shelby and all of the Cobras not probative of the issue of acquired distinctiveness.
That’s right, the Shelby Cobra has been officially copied to death, according to a recent ruling by the US Patent Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board [in PDF here]. The board’s finding was complex, as proving “distinctiveness” takes a lot of doing, but the upshot is that so many Cobra replicas have been built, consumers don’t actually think of the original (Shelby-designed) Cobras when they see one. Had Shelby sued every single kit car maker since day one, he’d have the legal rights to his design, but in the years since 1968, the term “Cobra” has come to mean more than the specific Shelby Cobra 289 or Shelby Cobra 427 S/C. In fact, a survey used to try to prove the distinctiveness of the Shelby designs in the eyes of consumers may have even used a photo of a 289 to illustrate a 427 S/C… even the guy running the survey wasn’t sure. The moral of Caroll Shelby’s legal battle to own the rights to anything resembling an original Cobra: never stop suing the kit car makers. Or, just be happy with the millions of dollars and legend status you’ve already accumulated.
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