Suits and Litigation (Civil)

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      Correction Officers Who Failed to Aid Dying Inmate Won’t Be Charged

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      Correction Department rules “do not clearly require officers to provide immediate care to people with severely bleeding wounds,” the New York attorney general’s office said.Michael Nieves sliced his throat with a razor around 11:40 a.m. on Aug. 25, 2022. For the next 10 minutes, correction workers at the Rikers Island jail complex stood by his cell and watched him bleed without providing medical care.Mr. Nieves later died.The failure by three correction workers to offer aid was “an omission” that contributed to Mr. Nieves’s death, the New York attorney general’s office of special investigation found in a report published on Tuesday. But because Mr. Nieves might have died even had he received immediate medical help, the attorney general, Letitia James, said her office would not charge the workers criminally.In a surprising finding, the report also said that the workers had followed correction department rules by deciding not to render help.“The D.O.C.’s rules and regulations do not clearly require officers to provide immediate care to people with severely bleeding wounds,” the attorney general’s office said in a news release.The decision not to charge the corrections workers “is incredibly disappointing,” said Samuel Shapiro, a lawyer hired by members of Mr. Nieves’s family, who have filed a lawsuit against the city in federal court. Describing surveillance footage that captures Mr. Nieves’s suicide attempt and the workers’ response, Mr. Shapiro said, “It is incredibly disturbing to watch city employees stand there as Mr. Nieves is slowly bleeding to death from his neck and do nothing to help him.”The Department of Correction suspended all three workers for 30 days. When they returned to work, they were prohibited from having contact with detainees. In May 2023, two officers, Beethoven Joseph and Jeron Smith, were accused by the department of violating rules and a directive on suicide prevention and intervention. The disciplinary proceedings are still pending, the attorney general’s office said.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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      Judge Rejects Key Part of N.C.A.A. Settlement of Antitrust Suit With Athletes

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      The concern over restrictions on some payments raises uncertainty on whether a landmark agreement on compensating athletes can be reached and approved.A federal judge on Thursday rejected a key element of a proposed $2.8 billion settlement of an antitrust lawsuit against the N.C.A.A. and the major athletic conferences, throwing into uncertainty an agreement that had been largely seen as ushering in a new era in college sports.The judge, Claudia A. Wilken, said in a hearing that she was troubled by a provision that would restrict payments to athletes from booster-run collectives, groups of donors that funnel millions of dollars to athletes at schools they support. Although the proposed agreement would allow schools to pay their athletes up to about $20 million per year, she thought some athletes would make less money under the new deal.“Some people getting large amounts will no longer be able to get them,” she told lawyers for the N.C.A.A. and the plaintiffs, essentially a group of thousands of athletes, who had come to an agreement in the lawsuit House v. N.C.A.A. “That’s my concern.”But Rakesh Kilaru, the N.C.A.A. lawyer, said there would be no deal without a provision that allowed the N.C.A.A. to prohibit third-party payments that they saw as pay-for-play compensation under the guise of fair-market endorsement deals.“For us, it’s an essential part of the deal,” he said.Judge Wilken also expressed reservations about another key component of the deal: capping the amount that schools could pay athletes. She also told Mr. Kilaru and the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Jeffrey Kessler and Steve Berman, to report back to her in three weeks with a revised agreement. If they could not, she would be prepared to set a trial date in the case, which charges that the N.C.A.A. and the five major conferences withheld name, image and license revenue.This is a developing story. Check back for updates. More

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      Farm Workers Union Battles With California Grower, Wonderful Nurseries

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      Wonderful Nurseries, owned by Stewart and Lynda Resnick, has sued the state to overturn a labor organizing law championed by the United Farm Workers.The allegations ricocheted through the agricultural fields and into a Central Valley courthouse, where one of California’s most powerful companies and an iconic union were trading charges of deception and coercion in a fight over worker representation.Some farmworkers at Wonderful Nurseries — part of the Wonderful Company, the conglomerate behind famous brands of pomegranate juice and pistachios, as well as Fiji Water — said they had been duped into signing cards to join a union. On the other side, the United Farm Workers, the union formed in the 1960s by labor figures including Cesar Chavez, contends that the influential company, owned by the Los Angeles billionaires and powerhouse Democratic donors Stewart and Lynda Resnick, is trying to thwart the will of workers through intimidation and coercion.For months, the back and forth has played out before the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which arbitrates labor fights between workers and growers, and in a courthouse not far from Wonderful’s sprawling fields.In May, the company filed a legal challenge against the state that could overturn a 2022 law that made it easier for farmworkers to take part in unionization votes.After vetoing a previous version over procedural concerns, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure following public pressure from President Biden and Representative Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker. The U.F.W. heralded the bill’s enactment as a critical victory, but several big growers said that it would allow union organizers to unfairly influence the process.The law paved the way for farmworkers to vote for union representation by signing union authorization cards, a process known simply as card check. Its passage coincided with an era of greater mobilization to unionize workers during the pandemic and a willingness to press demands for better working conditions and respect from employers, said Victor Narro, project director and labor studies professor at the U.C.L.A. Labor Center.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 Section 230 Is Being Used Against Tech Giants Like Meta

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      A Massachusetts professor has filed a lawsuit against Meta using a novel interpretation of Section 230, a law known primarily for shielding social media companies from liability.Facebook, X, YouTube and other social media platforms rely on a 1996 law to insulate themselves from legal liability for user posts. The protection from this law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is so significant that it has allowed tech companies to flourish.But what if the same law could be used to rein in the power of those social media giants?That idea is at the heart of a lawsuit filed in May against Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The plaintiff in the suit has asked a federal court to declare that a little-used part of Section 230 makes it permissible for him to release his own software that lets users automatically unfollow everyone on Facebook.The lawsuit, filed by Ethan Zuckerman, a public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the first to use Section 230 against a tech giant in this way, his lawyers said. It is an unusual legal maneuver that could turn a law that typically protects companies like Meta on its head. And if Mr. Zuckerman succeeds, it could mean more power for consumers to control what they see online.“I see and appreciate the elegance of trying to use a piece of law that has made user generated content possible, to now give users more control over those experiences and services,” he said.Section 230, introduced in the internet’s early days, protects companies from liability related to posts made by users on their sites, making it nearly impossible to sue tech companies over defamatory speech or extremist content.Mr. Zuckerman has focused on a part of Section 230 that spells out protection for blocking objectionable material online. In 2021, after a developer released software to purge users’ Facebook feeds of everyone they follow, Facebook threatened to shut it down. But Section 230 says it is possible to restrict access to obscene, excessively violent and other problematic content. The language shields companies from liability if they censor disturbing content, but lawyers now say it could also be used to justify scrubbing any content users don’t want to see.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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      Greenpeace Tries a Novel Tactic in Lawsuit Over Dakota Access Pipeline

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      The environmental group, which is being sued by the pipeline company in North Dakota, threatened to use new European rules to try to limit potential damages.The NewsGreenpeace recently unveiled a new strategy for fighting a costly lawsuit by an energy company that the group contends is designed to silence critics of the oil industry.The suit, first filed in federal court in 2017, alleged that Greenpeace had incited the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016 and 2017, and it sought $300 million in damages.Greenpeace disputes the claims. It says the lawsuit is designed to essentially force the environmental group to go out of business with an expensive legal fight.Its new tactic, led by Greenpeace International in Amsterdam, would use the European legal system to try to minimize the financial consequences of a potential loss in United States courts. In a letter to the company last month, lawyers for the group cited a new European Union directive aimed at curbing SLAPP suits, or Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. Those are defined as meritless suits that seek to shut down civil society groups.The letter called on the company suing it, Dallas-based Energy Transfer, to drop its suit against Greenpeace International, and to pay damages for its legal costs, or risk a countersuit under the new European rules.The BackgroundAfter the Dakota Access Pipeline was approved in 2016, it became the target of high-profile protests by Native American tribes and environmental groups. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe argued that the pipeline encroached on reservation land and endangered the water supply. Thousands of its supporters joined a nearly eight-month protest encampment near the reservation, and tribal leaders mounted their own legal challenge to the project.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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      Jury Finds Parents of Gunman Not Liable in 2018 Texas School Shooting

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      Jurors decided instead that blame rested with the gunman, who was 17 at the time, and the company that sold him ammunition used in the shooting.The parents of a gunman who was 17 when he killed eight students and two teachers at his high school in Santa Fe, Texas, in 2018 are not financially liable for his heinous actions, a jury found on Monday.The verdict, reached after a day of deliberations, followed an emotional three-week trial that was among the first attempts to hold parents accountable in civil court for the actions of their child in a school shooting.But instead of finding that the parents bore responsibility for the shooting, the jury decided that blame rested with the gunman and with the company that sold him ammunition used in the shooting. The jury awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to the plaintiffs, who included the relatives of several of those killed and others who were wounded.The trial came several months after a Michigan couple was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for a mass shooting carried out by their teenage son. In that case, prosecutors presented evidence that the parents had ignored warning signs and failed to lock up a handgun used by their 15-year-old son in an attack at Oxford High School in 2021.The Texas gunman’s parents, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, were not accused of any crime. The trial instead focused on whether they had been negligent in the storage of more than a dozen firearms in their home — two of which were used in the shooting — and had failed to notice that their son was struggling or take steps to help him.After the shooting, the gunman, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial in criminal court, and he remains in a state hospital for mental health treatment. In the absence of a criminal trial, many in Santa Fe, just north of Galveston along the Gulf Coast of Texas, looked to the civil trial as their first opportunity for accountability, six years after the shooting.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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      Willie Brown to Donald Trump: Mention My Name Again and Get Sued

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      Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, had a message for former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday afternoon: Keep my name out of your mouth or get sued.He stood with his longtime lawyer, Joe Cotchett, on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco, outside John’s Grill, the Saturday spot on Mr. Brown’s lunchtime rotation, and told reporters that he would sue Mr. Trump for slander and defamation if he repeated his concocted helicopter story one more time.“He’s never brought a lawsuit in his life,” Mr. Cotchett said of Mr. Brown. “But you know who’s pushing him to it? A guy by the name of Trump.”Mr. Trump and Mr. Brown have been verbally sparring since Mr. Trump falsely claimed at a news conference on Aug. 8 at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida that he had once nearly died in a helicopter ride with Mr. Brown.Mr. Trump also said that Mr. Brown, who dated Vice President Kamala Harris in 1994 and 1995, said “terrible things” about Ms. Harris just before they almost plummeted to their deaths.“He was not a fan of hers very much, at that point,” Mr. Trump said.Mr. Brown promptly called the tale a lie — saying he had never ridden in a helicopter with Mr. Trump and had never told him disparaging things about Ms. Harris. In fact, he repeatedly told reporters that he respected her and desperately hoped that she would beat the man with whom he had never ridden in a helicopter.Mr. Trump repeated his claims on his social media site, Truth Social, and threatened to sue The New York Times for reporting that the helicopter story was made up. “Now Willie Brown doesn’t remember?” Trump wrote.That’s when Nate Holden, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, said he had taken a rocky helicopter ride with Mr. Trump in 1990 and speculated that the former president might have confused him with Mr. Brown. Both California politicians are Black.Mr. Trump has not spoken about the helicopter incident since Mr. Holden came forward. But Mr. Brown and Mr. Cotchett said they wanted to make sure that he stayed quiet.Asked whether he wanted an apology from Mr. Trump, Mr. Brown said he would rather not hear from him at all.“No, I don’t want his apology,” Mr. Brown said. “I don’t want him to mention my name.”When asked to comment, a spokesman for Mr. Trump pointed to the former president’s threat to sue The Times but did not address what Mr. Brown said.Mr. Holden on Saturday applauded Mr. Brown’s legal threat.“If he’s propagating a lie, he should be held accountable,” Mr. Holden said of Mr. Trump in a telephone interview on Saturday from his home in Los Angeles. “I’m 95 years old, and Willie is 90, and he made the assumption we wouldn’t be here anymore, and nobody would challenge it. Well, we’re alive and well.”Maggie Haberman More

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      New Real Estate Rules Sow Confusion, at Least in Short Term

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      Changes in how real estate commissions are advertised and paid went into effect this weekend. Buyers and even some agents aren’t sure what they mean.An hour before the open house on Saturday afternoon, a real estate agent paced across the dark bamboo floors, straightening the throw blanket, fluffing the pillows and lighting a scented candle.The last-minute sprucing at the $1.2 million condo in Jersey City, N.J., was exactly what agents have done at open houses for decades before this weekend.The difference now is the information they are required to disclose and where they can disclose it when it comes to real estate commissions — a charge that had hovered between 5 to 6 percent of the sales price, and until now was typically paid by the seller and split between the seller’s agent and the buyer’s agent.The changes that went into effect this weekend decouple the two commissions: Sellers are no longer expected to pay buyers’ commissions, though they can still choose to do so, and the proposed commission split can no longer be advertised on the online database commonly used to sell homes, the M.L.S.The new rules went into effect across the United States as part of a $418 million settlement agreement with the National Association of Realtors, a powerful real estate trade group that was successfully sued by a group of homeowners in Missouri who argued that the longtime practice requiring them to pay agents’ commissions led to inflated fees. Brokerages have spent months trying to educate agents and consumers on the looming changes.But when they were implemented nationwide this Saturday, buyers remained befuddled.Sarthak Jain, left, and his wife, Aditi Maheshwari, touring a duplex in Jersey City alongside their Realtor.Andres Kudacki for The New York TimesWe 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