Eideard

North Carolina loves colorful characters

A state law barring felons from owning firearms unfairly prevented a Garner man from owning guns, the N.C. Supreme Court has ruled, thrusting the court into the national debate over gun ownership.

The opinion applied only to Barney Britt, who was convicted of a drug crime in 1979, and it didn’t have an immediate effect on the thousands of other felons in the state. Criminal defense lawyers who practice in federal courts said they don’t know what effect, if any, the opinion will have on federal rules, which prevent felons from buying and owning weapons except when a state has restored that right…

Though the opinion focused just on Britt’s case, both sides of the gun control issue saw the ruling as significant because the state’s highest court found that Britt had a right to bear arms that trumped the state’s ability to restrict him from owning any weapons…

“This has implications beyond just North Carolina,” said Robert Levy of the Cato Institute, a Washington-based Libertarian think tank that opposes gun control. “North Carolina has now decided that some felonies are not so serious to result in deprivations of the right to defend oneself…”

Of course, the [hopefully] ex-drug dealer wasn’t asking to defend himself [from whom?] – he wants to go hunting.

The office of N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper, who defended the state law in the case, declined to comment on the ruling.

A passionate hunter who never had any subsequent arrests, Britt had his right to own guns restored from 1987 until 2004, when the new law went into effect.

I wonder how passionate he was about earning a living dealing quaaludes?

Shucks, they only took 4 years to pay off…

The insurer for five Robert’s Fresh Markets should pay the grocery chain’s owner more than $21 million for unreasonably failing to pay what was necessary to fix Hurricane Katrina windstorm and other damage, a federal appeals court has ruled.

“It’s the biggest Katrina judgment in Louisiana or Mississippi that we know of,” Philip Franco, who represented Marc Robert II in his battle against United Fire & Casualty Insurance Co., said Tuesday. Soren Giselson, head of the Louisiana Association of Justice insurance section, agreed with that assessment.

The $21 million award, Franco said, gave his client almost exactly what he said United Fire & Casualty Insurance Co. still owed him to repair the stores — $16.7 million — plus penalties for delaying payment…

Each store was assigned money to cover building damage, business interruption, tenant improvements and loss of business personal property from windstorm and from vandalism, theft or looting.

Of the stores covered by the $21 million award, the Kenner store reopened in November 2005, and Marc Robert hopes to get the St. Claude store back in operation as soon as he gets money from the judgment and agrees with the Schwegmann family interests, who own the building, on how it should be repaired, Franco said. The jury set aside $1,080,000 for the Schwegmann owners, half of it for lost rents and other half for penalties….

Two things:

This article is from the original trial. The sleazy insurance company appealed and it took another 13 months to get them to pay up!

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Google is not liable for defamatory comments that appear in news articles, blogs and forums displayed in its search results, a high court judge in London has concluded in a landmark ruling for UK defamation law.

The case, against Google’s US and UK operations, had been brought by London-based Metropolitan International Schools.

MIS runs distance learning courses in games development under the name Train2Game. MIS launched legal action over comments on the forum of a website that it claimed were defamatory and that appeared in Google’s search results.

The company claimed that Google was liable as a publisher of defamatory comments. Google responded that it has no responsibility for the words and comments.

Mr Justice Eady ruled in a judgment in the high court..that Google was a “facilitator” and not a publisher of the content.

“When a snippet is thrown up on the user’s screen in response to his search, it points him in the direction of an entry somewhere on the web that corresponds, to a greater or lesser extent, to the search terms he has typed in,” Eady said. “It is for him to access or not, as he chooses. [Google] has merely, by the provision of its search service, played the role of a facilitator.”

The court made it clear if you feel you’ve been defamed – address your complaint to the person who actually wrote and published the material. Makes sense to me; but, then, I’m not a lawyer.

Lund District Court found that a 38-year-old man, who stood accused of sexual molestation charges by his female neighbor, was most likely not pleasuring himself on his home’s balcony while the woman was in her nearby kitchen.

The court acquitted the unidentified suspect on all charges after ruling he may have simply been scratching at a rash that was present in his groin area.

The man openly admitted in court he may have been present on his balcony on occasions that his neighbor was in her home’s kitchen.

The defendant also admitted his robe may have been open during some of those instances, but insisted such displays were not intentional and only occurred when he was wearing underwear.

Well, I don’t know if I can stand all the excitement and controversy. Phew!

Four men connected to The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious file sharing site, were convicted by a Swedish court Friday of contributory copyright infringement, and each sentenced to a year in prison.

Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was accused of funding the 5-year-old operation.

In addition to jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures, for the infringement of 33 specific movie and music properties tracked by industry investigators…

The verdicts are a significant symbolic victory for Hollywood, the record labels and the rest of the content industry that claims online piracy costs them billions of dollars in lost sales.

“The Pirate Bay has claimed all the time that their activities are legal,” Henrik Pontén, a lawyer who represented the film and computer game companies in the trial, told the Swedish media. “Now that it has been proven illegal we presume that they will stop.”

Henrik Pontén, the MPAA lawyer, must live in Cloud Cuckoo-land.

An Austrian woman who bombarded her son with phone calls over a two-and-a-half year period was fined by a court for stalking him, Austrian media reported.

The 73-year-old woman, who phoned her son up to 49 times a day was fined 360 euros ($478) by the court in the southern city of Klagenfurt.

“I just wanted to talk to him,” the woman told the court, according to Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung. “I can’t talk to my son, nor my daughter. I’ve never seen my grandchild — who is already 15-years-old,” she said.

The case was brought by the son.

Which generation is the most neurotic?

The highest Italian court has reversed the conviction of a judge who refuses to enter courtrooms where a crucifix is hanging.

Judge Luigi Tosti is Jewish but he says his main objection to the crosses is that they violate the separation of church and state, mandated by the Italian constitution adopted after World War II, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Italy neither requires nor bans crucifixes from the courtroom and from schools and other government buildings. Although Italians are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, the church has had no special standing for decades.

In 2004, Tosti threatened to display a menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum that is one of Judaism’s religious symbols, in his courtroom. He changed his mind when Italian Muslims supported the plan, the ANSA report said.

Har!

That’s the NeoPlan StarLiner on the left – the A9 Coach copy on the right

The First Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing has ordered three Chinese automakers to pay $2.92 million compensation and $169,000 in legal costs to Germany auto company Neoplan which had successfully sued them for patent infringement.

The court said the A9 coach produced by Zhongwei Passenger Bus Company and Zhongda Industrial Group China has essentially the same design as the Neoplan Starliner. The companies have been ordered to stop producing the A9 and Beijing Zhongtong Xinghua Auto Sales Company has been ordered to halt sales of the vehicles.

The Neoplan Starliner was developed in 2005 by well known German coachmaker Neoplan Bus GmbH and was covered by patents. The company discovered in 2006 that the A9 coach produced by the Zhongwei Passenger Bus Company was almost identical with the Starliner…

Neoplan Starliner coaches are produced both in Germany and in southeast China’s Zhejiang Province by the Youngman Coach Company. The selling price in China is around $292,000. Youngman said that the appearance of the A9 coach on the market had not affected sales of the Starliner.

Step by step, the longest march, shall be won. Singly none.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

A judge has ordered a Toronto woman to testify without her niqab at a sexual assault trial – raising the thorny issue of whether Muslim women should be allowed to appear as witnesses wearing a veil that covers everything but the eyes.

The issue is a collision of two rights, pitting religious freedom against the right of a defendant to face an accuser in open court…

In October, Ontario Court Justice Norris Weisman reached his “admittedly difficult decision” to force the complainant to testify with her face bared after finding her “religious belief is not that strong … and that it is, as she says, a matter of comfort,” he wrote in his ruling…

In his judgment, Weisman wrote “at the 11th hour we learned … she has a driver’s licence with her unveiled facial impression upon it.” She told court she took comfort the picture was taken by a female and there was a screen between her and potential male onlookers.

But Weisman wrote the “driver’s licence can be required to be produced by all sorts of males,” such as police officers and border guards…

Debate about Muslim women and head coverings has surfaced in recent years over girls wearing the hijab to play sports and whether voters must show their faces.

Alia Hogben, executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, said, in court “the laws of the country should be acceptable,” and although it is important that “sensitivity be shown … showing the face is acceptable.”

Civil law takes precedence over religious custom. At least in a civilized secular democracy.

An NHS doctor allegedly held captive by her parents is due to arrive back in Britain after she was freed by a Bangladesh court in a landmark legal victory under the UK’s Forced Marriage Act. Dr Humayra Abedin, 33, from east London, was brought before the high court in the capital, Dhaka, after five previous requests had been defied by her family.

Human rights groups hope the case will set a strong international precedent and deter families who might be planning similar courses of action.

Anne-Marie Hutchinson, the lawyer who acted for Dr Humayra Abedin in the UK, said: “Humayra is elated. Exhausted, but elated. She is very, very tired, she is emotional. She appeared before the court and told them she was being held against her will and that she wanted to leave. She didn’t want to bring charges against her parents.”

She said there are believed to be around 300-350 similar cases affecting British women.

A sad, sad tale. One that, unfortunately, is not uncommon. Religions and cultures persist which deny even the simplest of individual liberties to women.

UPDATE: It now turns out she was forced to marry in a Muslim ceremony 14 November – and has instructed her lawyers to work to have that marriage annulled.