Articles Posted in Federal Law

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Brian Crompton worked as a railroad employee for BNSF Railway.  On April 24, 2011, Crompton worked on a locomotive that was to travel from Paducah, Ky., to downstate Centralia, Ill.  Crompton was severely injured during the trip from Paducah when he was knocked off the train by a door that flew open when he was throwing a switch.  Crompton brought a lawsuit against BNSF under the Locomotion Inspection Act and the Federal Employment Liability Act (FELA) claiming that BNSF chose not to keep the locomotive and its parts in good working order.

BNSF moved for summary judgment on both counts of the complaint, which was denied by the U.S. District Court judge who found that Crompton had presented sufficient evidence to suggest that the door latch on the front cab door was defective and thus the case could go to the jury for its determination of the facts.

After the jury trial, BNSF was found negligent, and Crompton was found to be contributory negligent.  The jury found that 70% of the fault for Crompton’s injury could be assigned to BNSF and 30% to Crompton.  Because the Locomotive Inspection Act is a strict liability statute, BNSF was required to pay the entire amount of Crompton’s damages, which totaled $1.6 million.  BNSF appealed to the U.S Court of Appeals in Chicago.

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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago has agreed that a concert ticket tying parking to the music concert was not a violation of the federal antitrust laws. 

James Batson brought a ticket from O.A.R. Concert at Live Nation’s box office at the 3 on July 10, 2010.  After buying the ticket, Batson noticed on the face of the ticket that a $9 parking fee was included in the price. Every ticket sold included the fee regardless of whether the buyer needed to park a car.

Batson filed suit alleging violations of federal antitrust law as well as California’s unfair competition law.  Live Nation moved to dismiss.

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On March 23, 2010, two officers of the Chicago Police Department flagged down two men who appeared panicked.  One of the men told the officers that a Hispanic man wearing a white tank top had just fired a gun at him. The man directed the police officers to an alley in which the shooting occurred. 

As the officers drove down the alley, they noticed that the door to Juan Castillo’s garage was open;  two Hispanic men and a white man were standing inside.  The men were ordered to step out of the garage and place their hands on the squad car.  They complied and the two officers searched the garage.  One of the officers testified at trial that the search was brief.  Both officers were looking for a place where a gun could easily and quickly be hidden.  One of the officers opened a closed cooler and found a .38 caliber handgun with a spent shell casing and two live rounds.  The officers detained Castillo, and he was identified by the two men who had approached the officers as the man who shot at them. 

Castillo testified that the officers came into the garage uninvited.  He stated that they showed neither an arrest nor a search warrant and that he never gave them permission to either enter or search the garage.  He testified that they entered and  began opening drawers and cabinets and had to take several items off of the cooler before they could open it to see what was inside it.

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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago has affirmed the decision of a district court judge regarding the conviction of Henry R. Brown. Brown was convicted after a jury trial of conspiring to distribute more than 5 kilograms of cocaine and was sentenced to life imprisonment because of his prior convictions.

On appeal, Brown argued that the district court should have prevented the prosecutor from introducing information obtained from a GPS system that law enforcement officers attached to a car in 2006.  It turned out that the car the GPS unit was attached to was owned by one of Brown’s confederates, Kevin Arms.  Arms alerted police that Troy Lewis was driving the vehicle to Milwaukee to deliver 10 kilograms of cocaine for Arms, Brown and their co-conspirators.  The police used the GPS device to locate the Jeep and perform a stop in Racine, Wis., where the drugs were discovered.

At Brown’s trial, Lewis and Arms testified against him.  Brown argued that the installation of the GPS should be considered reasonable only if the police first obtained a warrant with probable cause.  The panel rejected that argument.

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The U.S. District Court certified a class of property owners in Roxana, Ill., which is a small town across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.  In the lawsuit it was claimed that Shell Oil, together with its subsidiaries, was responsible for the leakage of poisonous benzene and other contaminants into the groundwater under the class members’ homes. 

This case, filed as a diversity lawsuit, charged that the defendants were responsible for the nuisance and related torts in violation of Illinois common law. The property owners sought a remedy for the damages, which they say were primarily the effect of groundwater contamination.

The defendants petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for leave to appeal the certification of the class.  The court of appeals decided to grant the request in order to clarify class action law.  See Blair v. Equifax Check Service, Inc., 181 F.3d 832, 835 (7th Cir. 1999). 

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This is a case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago found that the defendant had contracted with an out-of-state buyer. The court found that the buyer performed all contractual obligations in his own state; however, the required sufficient minimum contacts were not found to establish personal jurisdiction in the plaintiff’s state of Wisconsin.

Marvin Greving was a Wisconsin resident who lived and ran a farm in Walworth County, Wis., since April 1971.  Greving and his wife conducted their personal and business matters only in Wisconsin.  Greving has a Wisconsin driver’s license, Wisconsin insurance and pays taxes in that state. In addition, Greving purchased all of his supplies for his farm from Wisconsin vendors.

In 2003, Greving attended a meeting at an insurance agency in Rochelle, Ill. At that meeting, Greving met Tom Wilson, a grain originator from Northern Grain LLC.  Northern Grain is organized under Delaware law, but is located in Harmon, Ill.

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A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago naming several United States and Canadian companies as defendants.  The allegations in the complaint allege that these companies acted on a medical discount scam that targeted seniors. 

According to the FTC’s lawsuit, seniors in the United States were victims of deceptive telemarketing telephone calls that proposed phony discounts on prescription drugs.  Some of the calls even pretended to be associated with Social Security, Medicare or a medical insurance company.

According to the FTC, the telemarketing phone calls pitched a prescription drug discount card that would supposedly provide big discounts or even free subscription drugs for seniors.  Many of the victims believed they needed to purchase this card in order to continue to receive Social Security benefits, Medicare or other medical insurance.  The sale of the discount card was a part of the scam.  Discount cards that these companies were selling to seniors were actually free by simply calling a toll-free telephone number or visiting a website. 

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In a case decided in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Perry v. A.W. Chesterton Inc., it was determined that brakes located onto a rail car are a “part or appurtenance” to a locomotive and therefore the plaintiff’s state law asbestos claims were pre-empted by the federal Locomotive Inspection Act (LIA).  

Alice Perry brought this lawsuit on behalf of her husband, who died of asbestos-related injuries after installing and removing Railroad Friction Products Corp. brake shoes on rail cars.The locomotive is at the front of the train, which pulls the rail cars that carry the cargo of passengers or products.

Perry argued that the specific brakes and brake materials that her husband was exposed to were found only in rail cars and not locomotives. She maintained that her claim was not pre-empted by the LIA, which governs only locomotives.

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Officials at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) believe that U.S. truck and bus regulators are not catching on to serious safety hazards before fatal crashes occur.  The NTSB has stated that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has known about deficiencies in bus company practices before some fatal crashes, but the agency took no steps to correct them.  The FMCSA has known about these deficiencies before the fatal accidents took place, but did not take any action to shut down carriers until afterward.  The NTSB chairman said in a statement that some of these cases are under investigation by the agency. 

The report said that there has been a long period of time — maybe years — that the FMCSA has chosen not to take action against some bus companies despite repeated safety citations. The report also reinforced the fact that the FMCSA did nothing to take some of the dangerous buses out of service and off the road. 

The chairman of the NTSB, Deborah Hersman, said in a statement that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration needs to crack down before more deadly crashes occur, not just after high-visibility events.  Ms. Hersman also said that poor performing bus companies were on the FMCSA’s radar for safety violations, but they did not take any action and allowed these bus companies to continue operating.

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The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has found five safety violations that carried a proposed penalty of $158,015 against an Illinois roofing company.  The company, Affordable Roofing and Exteriors, Inc. of Trenton, Ill., was cited after inspections at three job sites where workers were improperly using fall protection during the installation of shingles on residential roofs. Since 2009, Affordable Roofing has been cited in five inspections for similar violations by OSHA.

The inspections were carried out in 2013 in Granite City and Belleville, Ill.

At each job site inspection, OSHA found that there were willful violations for failing to ensure that workers used fall protection while doing their work on residential roofs. 

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