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High court asked to throw out oil refinery permit
Law News |
2012/10/08 15:03
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Opponents of a proposed $10 billion oil refinery in southeastern South Dakota on Wednesday asked the state Supreme Court to strike down a state permit that would let a Texas company to begin construction.
Gabrielle Sigel, an attorney for three groups fighting the Hyperion Energy Center, said the Board of Minerals and Environment erred when it approved an air quality permit last year because its study did not include a full-blown environmental impact statement.
Sigel said the refinery would be the largest industrial project in state history and that the preparation of an impact statement should involve other agencies and evaluate a project's broader effect. State officials abused their discretion by bypassing that process, she said.
Attorneys for Hyperion and the board countered that an environmental impact statement is not required by state law that and board members took into account all relevant environmental issues when issuing the air quality permit.
The state Department of Environment and Natural Resources can require an impact statement but decided it wasn't necessary. "The board agreed," said Rick Addison, a Dallas-based attorney representing Hyperion.
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Appeals court reverses ruling on campaign donors
Law News |
2012/09/20 16:08
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An appeals court on Tuesday reversed a lower court ruling that likely would have led to greater disclosure of who is paying for certain election ads.
In March, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the Federal Election Commission overstepped its bounds in allowing groups that fund certain election ads to keep their financiers anonymous.
But Tuesday's unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sent the case back to Jackson, with instructions to refer the matter to the FEC for further consideration.
At issue are electioneering communications — ads that don't expressly advocate voting for or against a candidate running for federal office. In 2007, the FEC ruled that only contributors whose donations were "made for the purpose of furthering electioneering communications" had to be identified; those who gave unrestricted money did not have to be identified. The FEC regulation came in response to a Supreme Court ruling that gave more latitude to nonprofit groups — like the Karl Rove-backed Crossroads GPS and the President Barack Obama-leaning Priorities USA — on pre-election ads.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., sued the FEC over the regulation, which he called a "loophole" that made the disclosure requirements meaningless. He won a summary judgment from Jackson, who was appointed by Obama. The judge ruled that "Congress spoke plainly" in passing the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law — and did not delegate authority to the FEC to narrow the disclosure requirement. |
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Superior court rejects appeal in Pa. double-murder
Law News |
2012/08/29 11:24
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An appeals court has rejected a petition that could have delayed next months' scheduled trial of a man accused of having killed two people and buried them on his northeastern Pennsylvania property a decade ago.
The state Superior Court on Tuesday sided with a Luzerne County judge who said prosecutors were justified in splitting four murder cases linked to 38-year-old Hugo Selenski into two separate trials.
Defense attorneys could appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Selenski is charged in the deaths of Michael Kerkowski and his girlfriend, Tammy Fassett, whose bodies were unearthed in 2003 behind Selenski's Kingston Township home.
Selenski was acquitted in the slayings of two other men whose remains were found there but is serving 32 1/2 to 65 years in a Monroe County home invasion case. |
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New DC drunken driving law to take effect
Law News |
2012/08/02 16:58
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A new law that toughens penalties for drunken driving in the nation's capital takes effect Wednesday, but the city's police department still is not using breath tests on suspected drunken drivers more than a year after the tests were suspended.
The new law, which was approved by the D.C. Council and signed by Mayor Vincent Gray earlier this summer. It doubles mandatory minimum jail terms for people with blood-alcohol concentrations of .20 percent or higher and establishes a blood-alcohol limit of .04 percent for commercial drivers, including taxi drivers.
The law also establishes new oversight for the district's breath-testing program. But there's still no timetable to the resumption of breath tests, which D.C. police stopped using in February 2011 in the wake of revelations that their breath-testing devices had produced inaccurate results. Police have been using urine and blood tests instead.
A year earlier, District of Columbia officials had notified defense lawyers about nearly 400 drunken-driving convictions that relied, at least party, on inaccurately calibrated blood-alcohol tests.
More than two dozen people sued the district over convictions based on those flawed tests, and the district Attorney General's office said Tuesday that all the outstanding lawsuits had been settled. The district paid a total of $136,000 to 17 plaintiffs, with individuals receiving between $2,000 and $42,000, said Jeffrey Rhodes, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
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Wash. Senate hopeful sought to seal court files
Law News |
2012/07/20 11:24
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A couple months before Brad Toft emerged as the only Republican in a crucial state Senate race, he pressed officials to seal records from a past court case.
In a signed letter, Toft seemed to suggest that he wasn't the same person cited in the court files, saying that he shared a name with one of the parties but arguing that "the specific identity of the defendant is unclear." He wanted the records blocked from public inspection, declaring that the files might do damage to his reputation.
Toft, however, acknowledged to The Associated Press that he was the defendant in the case, saying he was simply exploring whether an old judgment could be vacated.
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