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Man pleads not guilty in Oakland bank bomb case
Court Watch |
2013/03/15 06:46
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A 28-year-old former Marine has pleaded not guilty to charges that he tried to blow up an Oakland bank with a car bomb.
The Oakland Tribune reports Matthew Aaron Llaneza of San Jose entered the plea Friday in federal court. If convicted, he could face life in prison for attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
LLaneza's attorney says his client was found to suffer from significant mental illness but was competent to stand trial.
Authorites say Llaneza tried to blow up a Bank of America branch last month and ignite a civil war by blaming the bombing on anti-government militias.
LLaneza has been held in jail since he was caught in an FBI sting operation involving an agent posing as a member of the Taliban. |
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Court says Guam man can sue gov't over surgery
Court Watch |
2013/03/04 20:39
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The Supreme Court says a Guam man can sue the government for a Navy surgeon's unsuccessful cataract surgery.
A unanimous court ruled on Monday for Steven Alan Levin, who was operated on in March 2003 at the United States Naval Hospital in Guam, a U.S. territory. Levin said he withdrew his consent before the operation began but doctors proceeded anyway. Levin suffered complications, which require ongoing treatment.
Levin sued for medical malpractice and battery. The courts threw out the medical malpractice complaint and kept the battery charge. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the government is also immune from being sued for battery.
The Supreme Court reversed that decision, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing for the court that Levin's battery lawsuit against the government can move forward. |
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Milan court convicts 3 Americans in CIA kidnapping
Court Watch |
2013/02/08 21:05
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A Milan appeals court on Friday vacated acquittals for a former CIA station chief and two other Americans, and instead convicted them in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street as part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.
The decision means that all 26 Americans tried in absentia for the abduction now have been found guilty.
The ongoing trials, which have dragged on for years, brought the first convictions anywhere in the world against CIA agents involved in a practice alleged to have led to torture. The case has been the source of diplomatic tensions, although three successive Italian leaders, including the technical government of Premier Mario Monti, have invoked state secrets, which has had the impact of limiting evidence in the successive trials and led to the acquittals of five Italians, including two spy chiefs.
An appeals court sentenced former CIA Rome station chief Jeffrey Castelli to seven years, and handed sentences of six years each to Americans Betnie Medero and Ralph Russomando. A lower court, while convicting 23 other Americans in November 2009, had acquitted the three, citing diplomatic immunity. |
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Court says EPA overestimates biofuels production
Court Watch |
2013/01/30 06:59
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A federal appeals court has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency is overestimating the amount of fuel that can be produced from grasses, wood and other nonfood plants in an effort to promote a fledgling biofuels industry.
At issue is a 2007 renewable fuels law that requires a certain amount of those types of fuels, called cellulosic biofuels, to be mixed in with gasoline each year. Despite annual EPA projections that the industry would produce small amounts of the biofuels, none of that production materialized.
There have been high hopes in Washington that the cellulosic industry would take off as farmers, food manufacturers and others blamed the skyrocketing production of corn ethanol fuel for higher food prices. Those groups said the diversion of corn crops for fuel production raised prices for animal feed and eventually for consumers at the grocery store. Lawmakers hoped that nonfood sources like switchgrass or corn husks could be used instead, though the industry hadn't yet gotten off the ground.
The 2007 law mandated that billions of gallons of annual production of corn ethanol be mixed with gasoline, eventually transitioning those annual requirements to include more of the nonfood, cellulosic materials to produce the biofuels. As criticism of ethanol has increased, lawmakers and even Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have talked of the cellulosic materials as the future of biofuels. |
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Convicted financier says he can't afford a lawyer
Court Watch |
2012/12/19 08:03
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An Indiana financier and former chief executive of National Lampoon who was convicted of swindling investors out of about $200 million says he can't afford to hire an attorney to handle his appeal.
In federal court documents filed Monday, Timothy Durham said his multimillion-dollar Indianapolis home is in foreclosure and all of his financial assets are tied up bankruptcy proceedings of the companies he used to control.
Durham's home in Fortville, Ind., about 20 miles northeast of Indianapolis, has a $5 million mortgage but a free-market value of only $3 million, according to the documents.
Durham says his only income this year was $6,000 he received as a director of Dallas-based insurer CLST Holdings Inc. He also has stock in CLST and National Lampoon, the documents say.
Durham was sentenced to 50 years in prison last month on securities fraud and other convictions in the collapse of Akron, Ohio-based Fair Finance. He also was ordered to pay $202.8 million in restitution. Durham received credit for $6 million that already has been recovered.
Durham and two business partners were charged with stripping Fair Finance of its assets and using the money to buy mansions, classic cars and other luxury items and to keep another Durham company afloat. The men were convicted of operating an elaborate Ponzi scheme to hide the company's depleted condition from regulators and investors, many of whom were elderly.
Defense lawyers argued that Durham and the others were caught off-guard by the economic crisis of 2008, and bewildered when regulators placed them under more strict scrutiny and investors made a run on the company. |
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