Decisions and Verdicts

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      Exxon Suit Over Activist Investor’s Climate Proposal Is Dismissed

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      A federal judge ruled that the case was moot after the investor, Arjuna Capital, withdrew the proposal with a promise not to try again.A federal judge in Texas on Monday dismissed a lawsuit that Exxon Mobil had filed against an activist investor, Arjuna Capital, over a shareholder proposal that called for cuts in the oil giant’s greenhouse gas emissions.Judge Mark T. Pittman of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled that because Arjuna had withdrawn its proposal and had vowed not to submit similar proposals, Exxon’s claim was moot.“The trend of shareholder activism in this country isn’t going anywhere,” Judge Pittman wrote, but he added that “the court cannot advise Exxon of its rights without a live case or controversy to trigger jurisdiction.”Exxon sued Arjuna and another investor, Follow This, in January to stop their nonbinding resolution from going to a vote of shareholders. A month earlier, Arjuna had filed a proposal for the resolution, which called on Exxon to accelerate its plans to reduce its carbon emissions “and to summarize new plans, targets and timetables,” according to Exxon’s complaint. Follow This then joined in support, the complaint said.In its complaint, Exxon said the proposal “does not seek to improve ExxonMobil’s economic performance or create shareholder value.”“Defendants’ overarching objective is to force Exxon Mobil to change the nature of its ordinary business or to go out of business entirely,” the company said.Judge Pittman dismissed Follow This, which is based in the Netherlands, from the lawsuit in May but allowed the case against Arjuna to continue.Arjuna withdrew the proposal and moved for a dismissal of the lawsuit, which the judge denied “because the proposal’s withdrawal didn’t foreclose the same conduct moving forward.” Arjuna then promised not to put forth similar proposals and said its pledge “forecloses even the remotest chance of another proposal” related to Exxon’s carbon emissions.Judge Pittman’s ruling followed a hearing held on Monday to determine whether Arjuna’s promise made Exxon’s complaint moot.Alain Delaquérière More

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      Supreme Court Backs Starbucks Over ‘Memphis 7’ Union Case

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      In a blow to the National Labor Relations Board, the justices cited inconsistent standards for courts to order employers to reinstate fired workers.The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Starbucks on Thursday in a challenge against a labor ruling by a federal judge, making it more difficult for a key federal agency to intervene when a company is accused of illegally suppressing labor organizing.Eight justices backed the majority opinion, which was written by Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate opinion concurring with parts of the majority opinion, dissenting from other portions and agreeing with the overall judgment.The ruling came in a case brought by Starbucks over the firing of seven workers in Memphis who were trying to unionize a store in 2022. The company said it had fired them for allowing a television crew into a closed store, while the workers said that they were fired for their unionization efforts and that the company didn’t typically enforce the rules they were accused of violating.After the firings, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint saying that Starbucks had acted because the workers had “joined or assisted the union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.” Separately, lawyers for the board asked a federal judge in Tennessee for an injunction reinstating the workers, and the judge issued the order in August 2022.The agency asks judges to reinstate workers in such cases because resolving the underlying legal issues can take years, during which time other workers may become discouraged from organizing even if the fired workers ultimately prevail.In its petition to the Supreme Court, the company argued that federal courts had differing standards when deciding whether to grant injunctions that reinstate workers, which the N.L.R.B. has the authority to seek under the National Labor Relations Act.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hunter Biden Is Expected to Appeal Conviction on Gun Charges

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      Lawyers for Mr. Biden are considering a number of challenges to the guilty verdict, including one based on the Second Amendment.Hunter Biden is expected to appeal his felony conviction for falsifying a federal firearms application, likely arguing that the judge in the case violated his constitutional rights in her instructions to the jury, according to people in his orbit and legal experts.Mr. Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell has also signaled that any appeal would be based on the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 2022 that vastly expanded gun rights, a ruling that spawned legal challenges to the part of the federal firearms form at the center of the Biden case. In Mr. Biden’s case, it included a question asking buyers about their drug use.Any appeal would be an uphill climb, and the lawyers representing President Biden’s son cannot officially file one until he is sentenced at the courthouse in Wilmington, Del., within 120 days, or about a month after he is scheduled to go on trial on federal tax charges in Los Angeles.There is still a possibility that David C. Weiss, the special counsel in the case, will seek a plea agreement before the tax trial begins, and would have leverage in negotiations now that Mr. Biden is already a convicted felon, according to former prosecutors. Mr. Biden might have greater incentive to reach a deal to avoid another public airing of his personal ordeal beyond what was presented in Wilmington last week.On Tuesday, after deliberating for a little more than three hours, a jury convicted Mr. Biden of three felony counts related to lying on a federal firearms application and illegally possessing a weapon.Mr. Lowell suggested that he might appeal, vowing to “vigorously pursue all the legal challenges available to Hunter.” President Biden said in a statement that he would “accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hunter Biden’s Conviction, and a Family’s Pain

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      Readers discuss addiction, call for compassion and praise how the president has supported his son.To the Editor:Re “President’s Son Is Found Guilty on Gun Charges” (front page, June 12):President Biden lost his first wife and daughter in a car accident. He lost his son Beau to brain cancer. Hunter Biden, his other son, has just been found guilty of felony charges involving gun possession.We live in a painfully polarized time. But I would argue that, regardless of party affiliation, compassion and empathy are warranted in acknowledging our shared humanity. While pundits will no doubt turn their focus to political fallout, we should not lose sight of the big picture: These are real people, with real lives, and real suffering.Larry S. SandbergNew YorkThe writer is a psychiatrist.To the Editor:Re “One Thing Everyone Has Missed About Hunter Biden’s Case,” by Patti Davis (Opinion guest essay, June 12):Addiction is a disease, and neither intelligence, education or great family support can prevent it. Such things also do not prevent cancer, mental illness, Parkinson’s or any other disease.Hunter Biden fell prey to addiction, and as a result made bad choices that got him into trouble and have troubled his loving family to this day, even though he has been sober for a while, and hopefully will continue to be — although prison is not a good environment for an addict trying to stay sober!If Hunter Biden weren’t the president’s son, he likely would not have even been on trial for something he did that thousands of addicts do in our gun-loving society, and get away with.Can we ever get away from politicizing everything? Not in the current divisive climate.Patti Davis’s article is right on! And beautifully written.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Woes of Donald Trump Will Never Rise to the Level of Public Tragedy

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      When a Manhattan jury found Donald J. Trump guilty, it should have sent shock waves through the nation. Yet, though the trial and conviction of a former president was unprecedented in American history, it seems most people couldn’t have cared less. As Michelle Goldberg recently noted, only 16 percent of respondents to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll said they had followed the first few weeks of the trial very closely, and when asked how they felt, many replied, “bored.”In its way, that must have annoyed Mr. Trump: how insulting, that no one would care. There was media coverage, but no frenzy, no rallies around the world in protest when he was convicted. But to win in the court of public opinion, Mr. Trump must now transform a trial in a run-down Manhattan courtroom from a shoulder shrug into an unforgettable event, with a story powerful enough to keep his supporters energized, if not outraged, and to drum up sympathy from the undecideds.For months, Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork, spinning his tale of tyranny and martyrdom (his own of course) and styling himself as the victim of an administration that has to play dirty to eliminate a rival as formidable as he. That story of persecution has only grown louder in recent days. Moments after hearing the jury pronounce him guilty, he predictably called the trial “rigged,” the judge “conflicted,” and a trial by jury as well as government institutions like the justice system irrelevant compared with the verdict that galvanized voters will presumably hand him in November. Politics, not the law, is his métier, and history is not his concern. His preoccupation, and his talent, is storytelling.Instinctively he grasps the kind of broader stories that break through from the courtroom to the public. These stories fueled what pundits, particularly in the 20th century, frequently dubbed the “trial of the century” — trials that captured the hearts and minds of the public, that sold newspapers, and that would grip the whole nation, if not the world, with their cultural significance. Each of these trials riveted the country by bringing to the foreground moral values and failings that affected all Americans.Take the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee in 1925, about a new law that barred the theory of evolution from being taught in public schools, which became a showdown between a three-time presidential candidate, the eloquent politician William Jennings Bryan, and the famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow. Covered day after day on the front page of newspapers coast to coast, it even found its way into Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises.” The issue here was faith and reason, or what passes for both, and whether government could mandate belief. A young high school teacher, John Scopes, purposefully broke the recently passed law “to show,” as the brilliant attorney Arthur Garfield Hays argued, “that such laws result in hate and intolerance, that they are conceived in bigotry and born in ignorance — ignorance of the Bible, of religion, of history, and of science.”There was the trial of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants accused of robbery and murder in Massachusetts, which caused such international indignation that rallies against their execution were held from London to Johannesburg. Edna St. Vincent Millay published a poem titled “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” in The New York Times to protest the handling of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, and Felix Frankfurter called the misrepresentations, suppressions and misquotations of its presiding judge disgraceful.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chad Daybell Sentenced to Death in ‘Doomsday’ Killings

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      Chad Daybell was convicted on Thursday in the murders of his first wife and two children of his current spouse, Lori Vallow Daybell. The couple’s extreme beliefs drew attention to the case.An Idaho judge on Saturday sentenced a man to death, two days after he was found guilty of first-degree murder and other charges in the 2019 killings of his first wife and two of his current wife’s children, capping a case that drew scrutiny because of the couple’s “doomsday” religious beliefs.The decision came after jurors took more than a day to deliberate during the special sentencing proceeding in the case against the man, Chad Daybell, 55, in Ada County District Court in Boise, Idaho.Earlier on Saturday, the jury had recommended the death penalty before the judge ordered a short recess to make a final sentencing decision.As the judge, Steven W. Boyce of the Seventh Judicial District, read his decision, Mr. Daybell sat with his hands in his lap, expressionless at the defense table. Defense lawyers did not have any questions when asked by the judge.“The court typically would address the defendant further,” Judge Boyce said. “But in this special sentencing proceeding, the victim-impact statements and the evidence has already demonstrated on the record, I think, the seriousness of what’s occurred.”“I don’t find any reason to further delve into the court’s rationale, other than what was listed in the statute,” he added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump and Allies Assail Conviction With Faulty Claims

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      After former President Donald J. Trump was found guilty, he and a number of conservative figures in the news media and lawmakers on the right have spread false and misleading claims about the Manhattan case.After former President Donald J. Trump was found guilty of all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, he instantly rejected the verdict and assailed the judge and criminal justice system.His loyalists in the conservative news media and Congress quickly followed suit, echoing his baseless assertions that he had fallen victim to a politically motivated sham trial.The display of unity reflected the extent of Mr. Trump’s hold over his base.The former president and his supporters have singled out the judge who presided over the case, denigrated the judicial system and distorted the circumstances of the charges against him and his subsequent conviction.Here’s a fact check of some of their claims.What Was Said“We had a conflicted judge, highly conflicted. There’s never been a more conflicted judge.”— Mr. Trump in a news conference on Friday at Trump Tower in ManhattanThis is exaggerated. For over a year, Mr. Trump and his allies have said Justice Juan M. Merchan should not preside over the case because of his daughter’s line of work. Loren Merchan, the daughter, served as the president of a digital campaign strategy agency that has done work for many prominent Democrats, including Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign.Experts in judicial ethics have said Ms. Merchan’s work is not sufficient grounds for recusal. When Mr. Trump’s legal team sought his recusal because of his daughter, Justice Merchan sought counsel from the New York State Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics, which said it did not see any conflict of interest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Trump’s Most Loyal Supporters Are Responding to the Verdict

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      Many saw in the jury’s finding a rejection of themselves, of their values and even of democracy itself. The sense of grievance erupted as powerfully as the verdict itself.From the low hills of northwest Georgia to a veterans’ retreat in Alaska to suburban New Hampshire, the corners of conservative America resounded with anger over the New York jury’s declaration that former President Donald J. Trump was guilty.But their discontent was about more than the 34 felony counts that Mr. Trump was convicted on, which his supporters quickly dismissed as politically motivated.They saw in the jury’s finding a rejection of themselves, and the values they believed their nation should uphold. Broad swaths of liberal America may have found long-awaited justice in the trial’s outcome. But for many staunch Trump loyalists — people who for years have listened to and believed Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the system is rigged against him, and them — the verdict on Thursday threatened to shatter their faith in democracy itself.“We are at that crossroads. The democracy that we have known and cherished in this nation is now threatened,” Franklin Graham, the evangelist, said in an interview from Alaska. “I’ve got 13 grandchildren. What kind of nation are we leaving them?”Echoing him was Marie Vast, 72, of West Palm Beach, Fla., near Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. “I know a lot of people who say they still believe in our government,” she said, “but when the Democrats can manipulate things this grossly, and use the legal system as a tool to get the outcome they want, the system isn’t working.”Among more than two dozen people interviewed across 10 states on Friday, the sentiments among conservatives were so strong that they echoed the worry and fear that many progressives described feeling after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade almost two years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More