Justia U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

Articles Posted in January, 2015
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Plaintiffs petitioned for rehearing from the court's summary order and from the opinion filed the same day. The complaint alleged that Bear Stearns was liable as the clearing broker for Baron's fraud. The court reaffirmed its holding that Bear Stearns' conduct as alleged in the Amended Complaint is not sufficient to state a claim for relief under Section 10(b) and Rule 10(b)(5) of the Securities Exchange Act, 15 U.S.C. 78j, 17 C.F.R. 10b-5. Therefore, the petition for panel rehearing with respect to Bear Stearns is denied. The court next addressed the SEC's arguments made in an amicus brief. The court concluded that plaintiffs' and the SEC's concerns that the court's opinion disregarded ATSI Commc'ns, Inv. v. Shaar Fund, Ltd. are wholly unfounded. The facts alleged in this complaint do not involve any ongoing market affected by false pricing signals by Isaac Dweck. Rather, they involve misrepresentations to the victims by Baron salespeople as to how the price they were charging for particular securities was arrived. There is no presumption of reliance based on any identifiable market, and given the lack of an allegation that any plaintiff knew of the stock parking or prices used therein, no allegation of reliance upon the parking transactions at issue. View "Fezzani v. Bear, Stearns & Co." on Justia Law

Posted in: Securities Law
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Defendant plead guilty to use and possession of a chemical weapon in violation of 18 U.S.C. 229(a)(1) and consumer product tampering in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1365(a). Defendant's conviction stemmed from his dispersing liquid mercury at the Albany Medical Center (AMC) on four occasions in retaliation for what he considered to be substandard care and excessive billing. The court concluded that defendant's attempt to deter the public from seeking treatment at a regionally important medical center for fear of exposure to a dangerous chemical violates section 229(a)(1); the court rejected defendant's claim of ineffective assistance of counsel based on counsel's failure to challenge defendant's prosecution under section 229(a)(1); and defendant's sentence was procedurally reasonable where the district court did not err in applying a two-level offense adjustment for use of a special skill in the commission of the offenses, in applying a two-level adjustment for the vulnerability of the victims of the offenses, in adequately considering the 18 U.S.C. 3553(a) factors, and in explaining its choice of sentence. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court. View "United States v. Kimber" on Justia Law

Posted in: Criminal Law
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Plaintiff filed suit against media outlets after they accurately reported her arrest and charge for various drug-related offenses. Plaintiff claimed that the published articles, while factually true at the time of publication, became false and defamatory when her charges were nolled and the records of her arrest and prosecution erased under Connecticut's Criminal Records Erasure Statute, Conn. Gen. Stat. 54-142a. The court affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment for defendants, concluding that the Erasure Statute does not render tortious historically accurate news accounts of an arrest. While reporting plaintiff's arrest without an update may not be as complete a story as plaintiff would like, it does not imply anything false about her. View "Martin v. Hearst Corp." on Justia Law

Posted in: Injury Law
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Defendant plead guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm and was sentenced to 36 months' imprisonment and three years of supervised release. The district court imposed a special condition of supervised release that delegated the discretion to select between inpatient and outpatient treatments to the Probation Department. The court concluded that defendant did not have a sufficient opportunity to raise a contemporaneous objection to the challenged delegation as a condition of supervised release; defendant could not have known of the delegation until the district court had imposed sentence; and therefore the court will consider defendant's challenge under plain error review. On the merits, the court agreed with its sister circuits and concluded that the district court's delegation to the Probation Department of the discretion to require either inpatient or outpatient drug treatment was an impermissible delegation of judicial sentencing authority. The court rejected defendant's remaining claims. Accordingly, the court vacated and remanded with respect to the challenged condition of supervised release. The court affirmed as to the remaining claims. View "United States v. Matta" on Justia Law

Posted in: Criminal Law
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Petitioner, a citizen and native of the Kyrgyz Republic, petitioned for review of the BIA's order dismissing his appeal from the IJ's denial of his applications for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). Petitioner claimed that he was persecuted because he is an ethnic Korean and an Evangelical Christian. The court granted the petition for review because the IJ and the BIA failed to adequately explain why the significant violence petitioner suffered was insufficiently egregious to constitute persecution and failed to consider record evidence of petitioner's aunt's testimony and affidavit, which tended to prove that the Kyrgyz police are unwilling or unable to protect petitioner from private persecutors. View "Pan v. Holder" on Justia Law

Posted in: Immigration Law
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Petitioner, convicted of, inter alia, rape and unlawful imprisonment of his estranged wife, appealed the dismissal of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. 2254. Petitioner argued that the state trial court violated his constitutional rights to be present during critical stages of trial and to effective assistance of counsel. The state court's affirmance of the exclusion of a note written by the victim for lack of relevance was not based on an unreasonable determination of the facts. Although petitioner argues that the state courts and the district court could not properly reach these conclusions because he was excluded from the Admissibility Hearing, petitioner had provided no basis for impeaching the state courts' factual findings. Petitioner's contention that the state courts' determinations as to relevance were based on unreasonable factual findings is meritless. Given the court's limited role under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) to review habeas petitions to set aside state-court judgments, the court held that the New York courts rejecting petitioner's constitutional claims were not "contrary to" or an "unreasonable application of" clearly established Supreme Court precedent. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court. View "Contreras v. Artus" on Justia Law

Posted in: Criminal Law
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Plaintiffs filed a putative class action suit against the Secretary on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries who were placed into "observation status" by their hospitals rather than being admitted as "inpatients." Placement into "observation status" allegedly caused these beneficiaries to pay thousands of dollars more for their medical care. The district court granted the Secretary's motion to dismiss and plaintiffs appealed. The court affirmed the dismissal of plaintiffs' Medicare Act, 42 U.S.C. 1395, claims where plaintiffs lack standing to challenge the adequacy of the notices they received and nothing in the statute entitles plaintiffs to the process changes they seek. However, the court vacated the district court's dismissal of plaintiffs' Due Process claims where the district court erred in concluding that plaintiffs lacked a property interest in being treated as "inpatients," because the district court accepted as true the Secretary's assertion that a hospital's decision to formally admit a patient is "a complex medical judgment" left to the doctor's discretion. The district court's conclusion constituted impermissible factfinding, which in any event is inconsistent with the complaint's allegations that the decision to admit is guided by fixed and objective criteria. View "Barrows v. Burwell" on Justia Law

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This case stemmed from a dispute between Citigroup and ADIA regarding an Investment Agreement under which ADIA invested billions of dollars in Citigroup. At issue is the arbitration clause contained in the Agreement. The court held that the extraordinary remedies authorized by the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. 1651(a), cannot be used to enjoin an arbitration based on whatever claim-preclusive effect may result from the district court's prior judgment when that judgment merely confirmed the result of the parties' earlier arbitration without considering the merits of the underlying claims at issue in that arbitration. Because Citigroup has not demonstrated an adequate basis for an extraordinary injunction under the Act, the court affirmed the judgment dismissing Citigroup's complaint and compelling arbitration. View "Citigroup, Inc. v. Abu Dhabi Investment Auth." on Justia Law

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Plaintiff filed suit against the county and the police commissioner, alleging that he was retaliated against for exercising his First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Because defendants do not challenge them on appeal, the court did not revisit the district court's conclusions that plaintiff's media communications enjoyed First Amendment protection. The court expressed no opinion as to whether plaintiff would have been able to prevail on the basis of his indirect evidence of retaliatory intent; concluded that plaintiff has proffered sufficient direct evidence of retaliatory intent from which a reasonable jury could find a causal connection between his protected speech and the Department's adverse employment actions and, therefore, plaintiff has established a prima facie case of First Amendment retaliation; concluded that defendants are not entitled to summary judgment based on the Mount Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle defense; and concluded that the record raises several genuine questions of material fact such that an award of summary judgment in defendants' favor is unjust. Accordingly, the court vacated the district court's judgment otherwise and remanded for further proceedings. View "Smith v. County of Suffolk" on Justia Law

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Plaintiff filed suit against two officers and their employers, alleging that the officers knowingly falsified and omitted material facts from police reports, lied to the district attorney and the grand jury, and conspired to do the same, resulting in plaintiff's malicious prosecution. The district court granted in part and denied in part Defendant Buonora's motion to dismiss based on absolute and qualified immunity. The court affirmed the judgment of the district court to the extent it denied Buonora absolute and qualified immunity from suit on certain of plaintiff's 42 U.S.C. 1983 claims unrelated to his grand jury testimony. The third amended complaint alleges misconduct by Buonora that is not based on his grand jury testimony and the district court properly found that absolute immunity is inappropriate. In regards to qualified immunity, the alleged falsification of evidence and the related conspiracy, if true, constitute a violation of clearly established law, and no objectively reasonable public official could have thought otherwise. The court declined to exercise pendent jurisdiction over Buonora's other claims of error at this interlocutory stage. Accordingly, the court dismissed the remainder of the appeal. View "Coggins v. Buonora" on Justia Law