Court won't block deportation of Ohio man
WASHINGTON (AP) - A Supreme Court justice is refusing to block the deportation of an immigrant in the Cincinnati area who has been helping care for a disabled child.
Justice Elena Kagan on Wednesday denied an emergency appeal from 27-year-old Yancarlos Mendez without comment.
Mendez says in court papers that he has been in the U.S. since 2015 and was picked up by immigration officers in late November following a local court conviction for driving without a license.
Mendez says he has provided financial and emotional support to a 6-year-old boy who was paralyzed below the waist in an accident. Mendez recently married the boy's mother in a jailhouse wedding.
Mendez says he is a citizen of the Dominican Republic and Spain.
Justices rule against prisoner in lawyer fee case
WASHINGTON (AP) - A Supreme Court ruling will mean that prisoners who win civil rights lawsuits against their jailers will generally be handing over more of their winnings to their lawyers.
Lower courts had been split over how much federal law requires prisoners to pay their lawyers after winning money in those cases. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that courts must apply the prisoner's winnings to pay attorney fees but cap the amount at 25 percent of the prisoner's award. The defendants pay the rest of the lawyer's fee.
Some lower courts had interpreted the law to mean that a judge could set a lower percentage for the prisoner to pay.
The case the justices decided involved an Illinois prisoner who won a $308,000 judgment after being beaten by corrections officers.
Court sides with Chicago museum in terrorism case
By Mark Sherman
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court is preventing survivors of a 1997 terrorist attack from seizing Persian artifacts at a Chicago museum to help pay a $71.5 million default judgment against Iran.
The court ruled 8-0 Wednesday against U.S. victims of a Jerusalem suicide bombing. They want to lay claim to artifacts that were loaned by Iran to the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute more than 80 years ago.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court that a provision of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act does not support the victims' case. That federal law generally protects foreign countries' property in the U.S. but makes exceptions when countries provide support to extremist groups.
The victims, who were wounded in the attack or are close relatives of the wounded, argued that Iran provided training and support to Hamas, which carried out the attack. Iran has refused to pay the court judgment.
The federal appeals court in Chicago had earlier ruled against the victims. The Supreme Court affirmed that ruling Wednesday.
The artifacts in question are 30,000 clay tablets and fragments containing ancient writings known as the Persepolis Collection. University archeologists uncovered the artifacts during excavation of the old city of Persepolis in the 1930s. The collection has been on loan to the university's Oriental Institute since 1937 for research, translation and cataloging.
Other items, including some at the Field Museum of National History in Chicago, were part of the case at an earlier stage.
Justice Elena Kagan did not take part in the case.
Dodd-Frank whistleblower protection is narrow, court says
By Jessica Gresko
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that whistleblower protections passed by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis only apply to people who report problems to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, not more broadly.
The justices said that a part of the Dodd-Frank Act that protects whistleblowers from being fired, demoted or harassed only applies to people who report legal violations to the SEC. They said employees who report problems to their company's management but not the commission don't qualify.
People who report issues to their company's management, to another federal agency or to Congress are still protected against retaliation but under an older law, the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act. But the two laws differ in a number of ways, including how long people have to bring a lawsuit and how much money they can get in compensation. A person who wins a lawsuit under the Dodd-Frank Act's whistleblower protection provision can get more money than someone who wins under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act's provision.
The justices were unanimous in agreeing that the whistleblower protection in the Dodd-Frank Act only covers people who report to the SEC. Writing for the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said "Dodd-Frank's text and purpose leave no doubt" about who the term "whistleblower" applies to.
"The definition section of the statute supplies an unequivocal answer: A 'whistleblower' is 'any individual who provides ... information relating to a violation of the securities laws to the Commission,'" she wrote.
The SEC had interpreted the whistleblower protection in the Dodd-Frank Act more broadly, an interpretation the Supreme Court rejected.
The court's ruling comes at a time when the Trump administration has already laid out changes it wants to make to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which the administration believes went too far and has hurt economic growth. President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the law as a "disaster" and has promised to do "a big number" on it. The Trump administration had nonetheless argued that the law did provide broad protection. Businesses had opposed that reading of the law.
The case the court ruled in involves Paul Somers, who worked for San Francisco-based Digital Realty Trust Inc., a real-estate investment trust that owns data centers worldwide. Somers was the company's second in command in Singapore when he made accusations to senior managers that his boss had hidden millions of dollars in cost overruns, granted no-bid contracts and made payments to friends, among other things. Somers was fired in 2014 after making the allegations. He sued, saying his firing was a retaliation that violated the Dodd-Frank Act. He also alleged he had been discriminated against for being gay.
Lower courts had sided with Somers, saying he was entitled to whistleblower protections even though he didn't disclose his allegations to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The case is 16-1276, Digital Realty Trust Inc. v. Somers.
Published: Fri, Feb 23, 2018
