The Supreme Court says an American mother illegally moved her son from Chile to the United States during a custody dispute with the boy's British father.

The high court on Monday said an international child custody treaty demands that the child goes back to the South American country.

The parents separated in Chile, and the courts there had granted the father visitation rights. But the mother fled with the boy to Texas and filed for divorce. She asked the court there to change the father's visitation rights. The father asked that the boy be returned to Chile.

The justices say the mother can argue in the lower courts that her safety may be at risk in Chile. That is an exception that can overrule the requirement that the child be returned to Chile.

A German man who called himself Clark Rockefeller and who spun fantastic stories about his past is appealing his sentence for kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter in Boston.

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter is expected to appear before a tribunal in Suffolk Superior Court on Wednesday.

Gerhartsreiter was sentenced to four to five years in prison last year for kidnapping his daughter in 2008. They were found in Baltimore and the girl was unhurt.

Defense lawyers argued Gerhartsreiter was legally insane.

Gerhartsreiter used multiple aliases to move in wealthy circles in Boston, New York and Los Angeles after coming to the U.S. in the 1970s. At times, he claimed to be a physicist, an art collector, a ship captain and a financial adviser.

The Supreme Court has ruled that teenagers may not be locked up for life without chance of parole if they haven't killed anyone.

By a 5-4 vote Monday, the court says the Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release.

The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. Graham, now 22, is in prison in Florida, which holds more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.

"The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. "This the Eighth Amendment does not permit."

Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with Kennedy and the court's four liberal justices about Graham. But Roberts said he does not believe the ruling should extend to all young offenders who are locked up for crimes other than murder; he was a "no" vote on the ruling.

Life sentences with no chance of parole are rare and harsh for juveniles tried as adults and convicted of crimes less serious than killing, although roughly three dozen states allow for the possibility of such prison terms. Just over 100 prison inmates in the United States are serving those terms, according to data compiled by opponents of the sentences.

Those inmates are in Florida and seven other states — California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina — according to a Florida State University study. More than 2,000 other juveniles are serving life without parole for killing someone. Their sentences are not affected by Monday's decision.

Bank holding company Washington Mutual Inc. has filed an amended Chapter 11 reorganization plan.

The plan filed Sunday in Delaware bankruptcy court is based on a settlement involving WMI, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and JPMorgan Chase Bank, which filed lawsuits against one another after the FDIC seized Washington Mutual's flagship bank in 2008 and sold its assets to JPMorgan for $1.9 billion.

The FDIC objected to the initial settlement plan, resulting in negotiations that led to the amended plan.

In addition distributing some $7 billion in funds among various parties as part of the settlement, the plan allows certain creditors to buy new shares in the reorganized company. Holders of existing shares would receive nothing.

The Supreme Court has declined to take up a challenge from cable television operators to the 18-year-old requirement that they carry local broadcast stations on their systems.

The justices rejected an appeal Monday from Cablevision Systems Corp. The court upheld a federal "must carry" law, enacted in 1992 when cable TV systems faced much less competition than they do today.

Cablevision, the nation's fifth-largest cable TV operator, sued the Federal Communications Commission over its ruling that forced Cablevision to carry the signal of a distant home-shopping station on its Long Island cable systems. The federal appeals court in New York upheld the FCC's determination.

Cablevision said in court papers that "the monopolistic nature of the cable industry...has been replaced by vibrant competition."

The Obama administration urged the court to stay out of the case. It noted that being carried on cable systems "remains critical to broadcast stations' financial viability generally."

CDC, COUNTY AND ILLINOIS STATE HEALTH DEPARTMENT REPORTS ARE “INADMISSIBLE,” JUDGE RULES;

A state court judge is barring from evidence studies by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Illinois Department of Health, and the McHenry County Health Department in what is believed to be the largest brain cancer cluster cases in the U.S. courts. The first trial in the group of 31 cases is to begin here on June 7.

Court of Common Pleas Judge Allan Tereshko last week ruled against Rohm & Haas/Dow Chemical, the defendant, deciding that the public health epidemiological studies are “irrelevant” to the case and “can only serve as a source of confusion and misdirection.”

The brain cancer cluster victims from McCullom Lake, Illinois, are asserting 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. The Plaintiffs allege that prolonged exposure caused them to contract rare malignant brain cancers and brain tumors; 10 of the victims have died.

The first three brain cancer victims – next-door neighbors who were each diagnosed with malignant brain cancer within the same year – filed suit in April 2006.  Less than a month later, the McHenry Health Department, using outdated cancer-rate data (based on zip codes) for the area that includes McCullom Lake, told local residents there was no epidemiological evidence of a brain cancer cluster.  McCullom Lake’s population is only about 1,000 people; the population of its zip-code region is roughly 50,000.   Later, the state Department of Health announced that more recent data showed that there was no epidemiological evidence of a brain cancer cluster in McHenry County – population more than 300,000.  Under public pressure, the county government then asked the CDC to review the analyses of the two health departments. 

The Court’s order comes after attorneys for Rohm and Haas/Dow have claimed in pre-trial proceedings and in the news media that no public agency has found a brain cancer cluster in McCullom Lake.  Their statements rely on the flawed studies that the judge has now ruled inadmissible, according to Aaron J. Freiwald, lead trial attorney for the plaintiffs.

“The studies cited by the defendant were about as valid in this case as if you did a study of brain cancer rates in the entire state of Illinois or in all of the Western Hemisphere,” Freiwald said.  “They, too, wouldn’t tell you anything about brain cancer rates in McCullom Lake. When you do the math, using reliable, objective data, there is no escaping the fact there was and is a cancer cluster in McCullom Lake Village.”

The trial Court, in granting Plaintiff’s Motion to Preclude evidence of the studies, noted that the studies supported by the defendants “do not attempt to discretely address the pattern of brain cancer represented in the significantly smaller subset which is the Village.”

The first brain cancer cluster case to go to trial will be on behalf of Joanne Branham, who lived with her husband Franklin Delano Branham in McCullom Lake for 30 years.  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. 

Jury selection is scheduled for June 3rd. 

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

File-sharing software company LimeWire has lost a long-running court battle to the major recording companies.

A judge with the U.S. District Court in New York ruled this week that the company and its chairman, Mark Gorton, were liable for inducing copyright infringement.

The decision in the case, which began in 2006, doesn't mean the site will shut down right away. The record labels and LimeWire are to meet with Judge Kimba Wood on June 1 to determine the next steps, such as a possible deal to work together going forward and a potential award for damages.

Recording Industry Association of America Chairman Mitch Bainwol said in a statement Wednesday that the ruling was "an extraordinary victory" against one of the largest remaining file-sharing services in the United States.

The RIAA said more than 200 million copies of LimeWire's file-sharing software have been downloaded so far, including 340,000 in the last week alone.

The ruling could pave the way for a deal, similar to the way Napster was sued out of existence in 2000 but was reborn and is now under the ownership of Best Buy Inc. with licensing deals with all the major recording companies.

"This isn't about getting something shut down, it's about getting something licensed and legal," said Steve Marks, general counsel for the RIAA.