After plaintiff was exonerated for a crime that he served seventeen years in prison for, he filed suit against various government and law enforcement personnel over his wrongful conviction and imprisonment. The Fifth Circuit held that false imprisonment was a "continuing tort" in Texas and defendant's claim was timely filed; defendant's due process claim against the county defendants was properly dismissed as time-barred; but absolute immunity barred defendant's due process claim against the prosecutor. Accordingly, the court affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded for further proceedings. View "Moon v. City of El Paso" on Justia Law

A party is bound by the terms of a consent decree that it voluntarily entered. The Fifth Circuit mostly affirmed the district court's judgment finding that Delta had violated a consent decree requiring Delta to comply with a desegregation order that it had voluntarily entered into. In this case, the desegregation requirements arose out of and served to resolve a longstanding desegregation effort in Concordia Parish properly overseen by the district court; were within the scope of the case; and furthered the equal protection objectives of the original complaint. The court rejected Delta's alternative argument that the district court's order granting further relief exceeded its remedial authority. Finally, the court vacated a portion of the district court's order requiring Delta to obtain authorization before enrolling students from other parishes under separate desegregation orders. View "Smith v. School Board of Concordia Parish" on Justia Law

Officer Joseph Danzy responded to a call about two suspicious men in an Akron neighborhood. He found Rauphael Thomas and Jesse Gray standing on the sidewalk. One thing (a Terry frisk) led to another (a tussle on the ground), which led to another (the discharge of Thomas’s concealed pistol). Thomas sprinted away, and Danzy shot him. Thomas died. His mother and estate administrator, Sherry Wilkerson, filed constitutional and state-tort claims against the officers, the City of Akron, and its police department. The district court denied Danzy summary judgment on one claim, which Danzy appealed. Wilkerson cross-appealed the grant of summary judgment on the other claims. The Sixth Circuit agreed Danzy was not entitled to summary judgment on the Terry stop-and-frisk; the Court agreed Wilkerson was not entitled to judgment in her favor on the other claims raised. View "Wilkerson v. City of Akron" on Justia Law

The Ninth Circuit vacated the district court's order denying defendant's motion seeking discovery on a claim of selective enforcement. Defendant was convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and conspiracy to interfere with commerce by robbery after he was caught in a law enforcement reverse sting operation to rob a fictitious stash house. The panel held that in these stash house reverse-sting cases, claims of selective enforcement are governed by a less rigorous standard than that applied to claims of selective prosecution under United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996). The panel held that a defendant need not proffer evidence that similarly-situated individuals of a different race were not investigated or arrested to receive discovery on a selective enforcement claim like the defendant's. Rather, a defendant must have something more than mere speculation to be entitled to discovery, and the district court should use its discretion to allow limited or broad discovery based on the reliability and strength of the defendant's showing. Because the district court applied the wrong legal standard, the panel remanded to the district court to determine in the first instance whether defendant has met his burden. View "United States v. Sellers" on Justia Law

The Seventh Circuit reversed the district court's grant of summary judgment for Stryker in an action filed by plaintiff, a former employee, alleging a claim of retaliation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court, giving plaintiff as the non-moving party the benefit of conflicts in the evidence and any reasonable inferences in her favor, held that there was a genuine issue of material fact about the reason Stryker fired her. In this case, a reasonable jury could interpret the suspicious timing of her firing as evidence that one or both decision‐makers initially found plaintiff's actions in the Vail incident to be tolerable, and that they decided only later, after she had filed her internal complaint, to use that incident as a pretext to fire her for retaliatory reasons. Accordingly, the court remanded for further proceedings. View "Donley v. Stryker Corporation" on Justia Law

The First Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision upholding the determination of the Massachusetts Bureau of Special Education Appeals (BSEA) ruling against all of Plaintiff’s claims seeking placement for her minor child in a school outside of the Boston Public Schools (BPS) system, holding that there was no basis in which to reverse the district court’s decision. Plaintiff, on behalf of her minor child, initiated this proceeding pursuant to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 20 U.S.C. 1400 et seq. A hearing officer denied relief. The district court affirmed the BSEA’s decision. On appeal, Plaintiff raised a number of claimed errors during the hearing. The First Circuit affirmed, holding (1) the district court applied the proper standard in evaluating the minor child’s education progress; and (2) Plaintiff’s challenges to the conduct of the hearing itself did not warrant reversal of the district court’s decision. View "Johnson v. Boston Public Schools" on Justia Law

The First Circuit denied Petitioner’s application seeking permission to file a successive motion under 28 U.S.C. 2255 to vacate her conviction and sentence for possessing a destructive device during and in relation to and in furtherance of a crime of violence, holding that Petitioner’s application did not meet the requirements for certification of a successive section 2255 motion. Petitioner sought to file this successive motion in 2016 following the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015). Petitioner then supplemented her motion after Sessions v. Dimaya, 138 S. Ct. 1204 (2018), was decided. Petitioner hoped to argue in the district court that the rule announced in Johnson and reiterated in Dimaya rendered the definition of “crime of violence” under which she was convicted unconstitutionally void for vagueness. The First Circuit denied the application, holding that Johnson’s rule, reaffirmed in Dimaya, did not extend to Petitioner’s conviction under 924(c)’s residual clause. View "Brown v. United States" on Justia Law

Plaintiff filed suit against her former employer, Pearson, alleging claims of Title VII sex discrimination and other claims, after she allegedly did not get the same chance to resign with severance pay that three male employees received. Plaintiff also claimed that Pearson lost a key email exchange. The Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court's overruling of plaintiff's objection about the emails and the district court's cure -- barring plaintiff from disputing her description of the emails but declining to grant further sanctions -- was sufficient. The court also affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment on the severance-pay discrimination claim where the three proposed comparators were not similarly situated to plaintiff. The court held that there was no evidence of pretext and the misstatement of the standard of review was harmless because the court's review was de novo. View "Barbera v. Pearson Education, Inc." on Justia Law

Plaintiff, an Illinois state prisoner, filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983, alleging that prison officials conspired to and did violate his First and Eighth Amendment rights while he was incarcerated at the Menard Correctional Center. The Seventh Circuit affirmed in part the district court's grant of defendants' motion for summary judgment, holding that no reasonable jury could conclude that plaintiff's grievances and complaints about the conditions of his confinement were a motivating factor in—or even factored into—Defendant Harrington's approval of placing him in segregation after a May 2012 incident. The court also held that no reasonable jury could find that Defendants Harrington or Page acted with deliberate indifference towards plaintiff or otherwise disregarded or failed to act on knowledge of a substantial risk to plaintiff's health and safety. Finally, plaintiff failed to identify any evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, of an agreement to deprive him of his constitutional rights. View "Daugherty v. Harrington" on Justia Law

The Eighth Circuit affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment for DCDC in an action alleging claims of gender, age, and disability discrimination under state and federal civil rights laws. Plaintiff, a 56 year old woman, worked as a correctional officer until she was injured in inmate altercations. After plaintiff worked the maximum allowable number of days of light duty pursuant to the terms of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), she was terminated when no other suitable position was found. The court held that plaintiff failed to establish a prima facie case of sex discrimination; plaintiff's prima facie evidence of bad faith supporting her claim of failure to accommodate/disability was rebutted by the incontrovertible evidence that plaintiff could not have been reasonably accommodated; and plaintiff's age discrimination claim failed because she did not produce evidence of a similarly situated younger person who was treated differently. View "Faulkner v. Douglas County" on Justia Law