National Roundup

Indiana
Court upholds marriage limit on son’s inheritance
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The Indiana Supreme Court has upheld a woman’s will that made her adult son’s inheritance dependent on whether he was married.

The court said in a 5-0 ruling last week that nothing in state law prohibits a will from making an inheritance based on certain behavior that must be undertaken, or avoided, by the beneficiary, The (Northwest Indiana) Times reported.

The question reached the Indiana Supreme Court after a woman from southern Indiana’s Jackson County died in 2016. Her trust awarded her adult son his share of her estate outright if he was unmarried at the time of her death, but required his share go into a subtrust controlled by her adult daughter if the son still was married to his third wife.

The Indiana Court of Appeals had ruled last year those conditions were an illegal restraint on marriage.

While state law prohibits wills from limiting marriages by the spouse of the deceased, the Supreme Court said no such restriction applies to trusts, an increasingly popular substitute for wills, and the terms of a trust are permitted to set marriage conditions for a spouse, an adult child, or anyone else set to benefit from the trust.

“In fact, the trust code does not prohibit conditions in restraint of marriage at all,” Justice Geoffrey Slaughter wrote for the court. “What it prohibits is ignoring the settlor’s intent (and where relevant, the trust’s purpose) as manifested in the trust’s plain terms.”

Justice Christopher Goff said he agreed with the outcome in the case but warned about a potential “Pandora’s Box of unintended and harmful consequences” that could follow the court’s ruling if the General Assembly doesn’t tighten the trust code.

Goff suggested someone could create a trust with conditions such as the recipient not marrying a person from a different race, refusing to pay property taxes, or participating in another illegal act.

“Surely, the Legislature would not have intended such an unjust or absurd result,” Goff said.


Washington
Slain reporter’s father takes on Facebook over violent video
WASHINGTON (AP) — The family of a slain journalist is asking the Federal Trade Commission to take action against Facebook for failing to remove online footage of her shooting death.

Andy Parker says the company is violating its own terms of service in hosting videos on Facebook and its sibling service Instagram that glorify violence.

His daughter, TV news reporter Alison Parker, and cameraman Adam Ward were killed by a former co-worker while reporting for Roanoke, Virginia’s WDBJ-TV in August 2015. Video footage of the shooting — some of which was taken by the gunman — repeatedly resurfaces on Facebook and Instagram despite assurances from top executives that it will be removed, says a complaint being filed Tuesday by Parker and attorneys with the Georgetown Law Civil Rights Clinic.

“The reality is that Facebook and Instagram put the onus on victims and their families to do the policing of graphic content — requiring them to relive their worst moments over and over to curb the proliferation of these videos,” says the complaint.

The complaint says Facebook is engaging in deceptive trade practices by violating its own terms of service and misrepresenting the safety of the platform and how hard it is for users to get harmful content removed.

Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Andy Parker said during a press conference announcing the FTC complaint that he also wants to see action from Congress, echoing some of the calls made last week by whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, who has accused the company of harming children, inciting political violence and fueling misinformation.

Parker said he agreed with Haugen on the need to strip away some of the protections granted by a 25-year-old law — generally known as “Section 230” — that shields internet companies from liability for what users post.

He previously worked with the Georgetown law clinic to file a similar FTC complaint against Google and its YouTube service. The FTC doesn’t typically disclose whether or not it has decided to investigate a complaint.


New York
Religious vaccine exemption stays for health care workers
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A federal judge ruled Tuesday that New York must continue to allow health care workers to seek exemptions from a statewide COVID-19 vaccine mandate on religious grounds as a lawsuit challenging the requirement proceeds.

Judge David Hurd in Utica had issued a temporary restraining order a month ago after 17 doctors, nurses and other health professionals claimed in a lawsuit that their rights would be violated with a vaccine mandate that disallowed the exemptions.

Hurd’s preliminary injunction Tuesday means New York will continue to be barred from enforcing any requirement that employers deny religious exemptions.

Hurd wrote that the health care workers suing the state were likely to succeed on the merits of their constitutional claim. The question presented in this case, Hurd wrote, is whether the mandate “conflicts with plaintiffs’ and other individuals’ federally protected right to seek a religious accommodation from their individual employers. The answer to this question is clearly yes.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration began requiring workers at hospitals and nursing homes to be vaccinated on Sept. 27 and more recently expanded the requirement to include workers at assisted living homes, hospice care, treatment centers and home health aides.

An email was sent to the Hochul administration seeking comment.

The state has not provided information on the total number of health care workers who have sought religious exemptions.

The plaintiffs, all Christians, oppose as a matter of religious conviction any medical cooperation in abortion, including the use of vaccines linked to fetal cell lines in testing, development or production, according to court papers.

Several types of cell lines created decades ago using fetal tissue exist and are widely used in medical manufacturing, but the cells in them today are clones of the early cells, not the original tissue.

The COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is produced by using an adenovirus that is grown using retinal cells that trace to a fetus from 1985, according to the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a January statement that “abortion-derived” cell lines were used to test the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines but not in their development or production.

Hurd also allowed the plaintiffs to keep their identities private by using pseudonyms such as “Dr. A.” and “Nurse J.” The plaintiffs said they wanted to proceed anonymously because they feared the risk of ostracization or retaliation.