Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in support of a father who sued anti-gay protesters over their demonstration at the 2006 funeral of his son, a Marine killed in Iraq.

Only Virginia and Maine declined to sign the brief by the Kansas attorney general.

Albert Snyder sued over protests by the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church at his son's funeral in Maryland. The church pickets funerals because they believe war deaths are punishment for U.S. tolerance of homosexuality.

The Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether the protesters' message is protected by the First Amendment.

In the brief filed Tuesday, the states argued they have a compelling interest in protecting the sanctity of funerals.

The presiding judge in the Rohm & Haas/Dow Chemical cancer cluster trial, which had been scheduled to begin on June 7, has set September 20 as the new trial date.

Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Allan Tereshko, in ordering the new schedule in the first of 31 related cases, cited “issues attendant to a trial of this magnitude and complexity,” including pending appeals filed by the defendant of pre-trial motions. The plaintiff in the trial is Joanne Branham on behalf of her deceased husband, Franklin Delano Branham, from McCullom Lake, Illinois.

All the plaintiffs (ten have died since the suits were filed) assert that Philadelphia-based Rohm & Haas, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dow, poisoned the air and groundwater in the McCullom Lake community with vinyl chloride (among other toxic chemicals) discharged from its chemical-manufacturing plant into an unlined waste pit near their homes. They allege that prolonged exposure caused them to contract rare malignant brain cancers and brain tumors.

Mr. Branham was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a lethal form of brain cancer, in 2004, just a few years after he and Joanne relocated to Apache Junction, Arizona, near Phoenix. He died just one month after brain surgery. 

Contacts:
Aaron J. Freiwald, Esq.
ajf@layserfreiwald.com
215.875.8000
Stephan Rosenfeld (for Layser & Freiwald)
215.514.4101
steph@idadvisors.com

A federal judge has ruled two Connecticut public high schools can't hold their graduations inside a church because that would be an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

U.S. District Court Judge Janet Hall made the ruling Monday in the case of Enfield High School and Enrico Fermi High School, both in Enfield.

The Enfield school board says it voted to hold services June 23 and 24 at The First Cathedral in Bloomfield because it had enough space at the right price. But two students and three of their parents sued.

The judge says Enfield had unconstitutionally entangled itself with religion by agreeing to cover much of the church's religious imagery. She also says the town coerced the plaintiffs to support religion by forcing them to enter the church for graduation.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block a lawsuit against a former prime minister of Somalia over claims that he oversaw killings and torture in his home country.

The high court said it will allow lawsuits against Mohamed Ali Samantar to go forward despite his claims of immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. However, the court warned that the U.S. District Court will have to decide whether Samantar can access other claims of immunity that could stop the trial.

The court's decision could have broad foreign policy implications. Allowing lawsuits against former foreign officials living in the United States could increase the likelihood that U.S. officials would be sued in overseas courts. An increase in the number of U.S. lawsuits dealing with past actions in foreign countries could also affect the United States' current ties with those countries.

Samantar was defense minister and prime minister of Somalia in the 1980s and early 1990s under dictator Siad Barre.

He now lives in Virginia. He is being sued under the Torture Victim Protection Act by Somalis living in the United States who were subjected to persecution in the 1980s. They say Samantar was in charge of military forces who tortured, killed or detained them or members of their families.

U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Anderson Jr. of South Carolina found Wilson's behavior so outrageous that he held her in contempt of court, ordering her to return $2,500 of her juror's pay and perform 120 hours of community service. Anderson said he would have put Wilson in jail for six months if she did not have four children at home.

But when the defendant in the case, Brandon Basham, asked for his death sentence to be thrown out as a result of Wilson's conduct, Anderson refused and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., backed him up.

And when Basham took his plea to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Elena Kagan agreed that the judge had made the correct call. The high court, to which Kagan has since been nominated, could say as early as Tuesday whether it will hear Basham's case.

It is no surprise that the government is seeking to preserve what it already has won, especially after the time and expense of a capital punishment trial.

The company that owns the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig argued in federal court Tuesday that plaintiffs should not begin collecting evidence and testimony on the Gulf oil spill until the November deadline for claimants to file suit.

Transocean Ltd. made its arguments in Houston after the federal court there accepted the company's petition to limit its liability in the oil spill to less than $27 million, the amount the company says the sunken rig is worth.

U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison made no rulings Tuesday. He scheduled two more court dates for early June, noting he wants to focus on whether the suit should remain in Texas or move elsewhere and whether depositions should begin immediately.

Ellison indicated he didn't want to wait.

"Is that a luxury we have in this case? Isn't that an awful long delay?" he asked the Transocean attorneys who argued to wait until all the lawsuits have been filed.

Transocean owned the rig that blew up April 20, killing 11 workers and causing one of the worst U.S. oil spills in decades.

The liability limit set by Ellison's court is based on a 19th century federal maritime law. Lawsuits have been filed in numerous states, and Transocean has said it filed its petition under the 1851 Shipowner's Limitation of Liability Act to get all the lawsuits aggregated in one court.