New Orleans, LA - (504) 509-5023
Attorneys William Most, Caroline Gabriel, David Lanser, and Hope Phelps have all been selected for the 2024 Louisiana Super Lawyers or Rising Stars lists.
Each year, no more than 2.5 percent of the lawyers in the state are selected by the research team at Super Lawyers to receive this honor. We are proud that all of the lawyers in our firm were chosen for 2024!
WWLTV reports that:
The family of a severely autistic teen has settled its wrongful death lawsuit against the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and the shopping center where the boy died in JPSO custody in 2020 for $1.25 million.
But the parents of the 16 year old who died, Eric Parsa, pushed for more than just money in the settlement talks. They wanted additional training for JPSO deputies in how to handle people with severe autism.
In addition to compensation, the settlement requires the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office to retrain all its field officers next year with a special training program regarding persons with autism. That training will be developed by an expert from outside Sheriff’s Office.
Most & Associates obtained this victory in collaboration with The Cochran Firm Mid-South. We are incredibly proud of Eric’s parents in fighting so hard for justice. Because of their commitment, they have made it less likely that what happened to Eric will happen again.
We are proud to announce that William Most was selected by New Orleans Magazine to be among the 2023 Top Lawyers for Labor & Employment, as selected by New Orleans Magazine.
Each year, New Orleans Magazine allows local attorneys to vote for the top lawyers in a variety of categories. According to the magazine, the methodology is the following:
The voting was open to all licensed attorneys in New Orleans. They were asked which attorney, other than themselves, they would recommend in the New Orleans area. Each attorney was allowed to recommend up to three colleagues in each given legal specialty. Once the online nominations were complete, each nominee was carefully evaluated on the basis of the survey results, the legitimacy of their license and their current standing with the State Bar Association of Louisiana. Attorneys who received the highest number of votes in each specialty are reflected in the following list.
Thank you to all our colleagues who voted!
Today, Judge Nghana Lewis of the 40th Judicial District in Louisiana ordered St. John the Baptist Parish to halt consideration of whether to rezone land where a wealthy developer is seeking to build one of the world’s largest grain terminals.
The ruling is a key victory for Most & Associates’ client The Descendants Project, which has sought to block construction of the proposed massive grain terminal by Greenfield Louisiana LLC. On Thursday, Dr. Joy Banner, a co-founder of the Descendants Project, testified that the St. John the Baptist Parish Council violated a judge’s order when it requested that the planning commission rezone the land from residential to heavy industrial use — a step toward allowing the controversial project to move forward.
Judge Lewis wrote in the order that the Parish's rezoning application is "at best, incomplete, and, at wors[t], dissembling" because it says that the property is currently agricultural. The judge determined the Parish's failure to update its zoning maps after a separate ruling "points to a lack of transparency and forthrightness by Parish government."
Judge Lewis issued an order prohibiting "consideration of, processing of, or any legal action taken, whatsoever" on the St. John the Baptist Parish's rezoning application until the Court orders otherwise.
For the past five years, Most & Associates and Casey Denson Law have been representing Ellis Ray Hicks, a man who was held in prison two months past the end of his sentence.
Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in Mr. Hicks’ favor, denying qualified immunity to some of the prison officials who illegally detained him.
Read the opinion here: https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/22/22-30184-CV0.pdf
Today, attorneys Hope Phelps and William Most won a preliminary injunction on behalf of their client, The Descendants Project. The ruling prohibits St. John the Baptist Parish from affirming or acting under a 1990 rezoning ordinance that was previously nullified by the court.
The Descendants Project was formed by sisters Joy and Jo Banner of Wallace, La., to preserve and protect the health, land and lives of the Black descendant community in Louisiana’s River Parishes.
The Descendants Project is fighting the unlawful attempts of St. John the Baptist Parish to rezone historic land with ties to slavery on which Denver-based developer Greenfield Louisiana LLC is seeking to build an industrial grain terminal. The terminal would include 56 grain silos—one nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty—that would increase dust, pollution, and explosion risk for area residents.
This ruling represents a major victory for The Descendants Project, as it affirms the irreparable harm that may occur if the parish continues to break the law.
On Wednesday, August 19, 2023, Most & Associates attorney William Most argued in front of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of our civil rights client, Jerry Rogers.
By 4:45 p.m. the same day, the Fifth Circuit panel issued a unanimous opinion ruling in favor of our client - and against the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff - on all claims.
Attorneys William Most and Hope Phelps with civil rights plaintiff Jerry Rogers.
The case involved the 2019 arrest of Rogers by the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office. The sheriff's office arrested Rogers because he had criticized a detective in private emails, calling the detective "clueless" when he failed to solve a high-profile murder.
But like everyone in the United States, Rogers has a right to the freedom of speech - and so Most & Associates took his case and fought for the vindication of that right.
Audio of the oral argument can be found at this link; Mr. Most’s portion begins at 18:10.
On Tuesday, July 18, 2023, a federal judge ruled in favor of Most & Associates’ client Shawn Briscoe on all claims against a former state corrections officer.
The lawsuit involved a February 3, 2018 incident at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. At 5:35 a.m. on that morning, inmate Briscoe was attacked by another inmate. Security camera footage showed that correctional officer Dallas Stewart went to the tier window and watched as Briscoe was stabbed and burned.
Despite witnessing the attack, Stewart did nothing to intervene, call for help, or provide medical assistance to Briscoe. When Briscoe asked her for help, Stewart told Briscoe to "take your licks." As a result, Briscoe did not receive medical attention for his burns or stab wounds until approximately 8:45 a.m., after Stewart's shift had ended.
Most & Associates brought a federal lawsuit on behalf of Briscoe against Stewart. On July 10, 2023, the parties held a trial in front of Judge Shelly Dick. On July 18, 2023, Judge Dick issued her ruling from the bench. She determined that the plaintiff Shawn Briscoe won on all his claims, including his federal constitutional claims, his state constitutional claim, and his state-law claim. Accordingly, Judge Dick awarded Briscoe damages, attorneys fees, and costs.
David Lanser, the attorney at Most & Associates who led the representation of Mr. Briscoe, commented: "Freedom from violence is a human right, but it is one rarely afforded to people who are incarcerated. It is a relief to see a rare instance of accountability, as prison officials are routinely let off the hook for failing the people who rely on them for safety and care."
The case is Briscoe v. LeBlanc, 19-cv-00029-SDD-SDJ (M.D. La.).
The United States Department of Justice has taken the uncommon step of supporting one one of our clients' cases by filing a "statement of interest" in court. In its brief, the Department of Justice articulates how the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office may have violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to accommodate a severely autistic child, which led to his death.
Read the Pro Publica story about the filing here. Or read the Department of Justice brief itself here.
On February 15, 2023, Most & Associates secured a settlement of $1.17 million for two journalists and twelve protesters who were subject to mass arrests by the Baton Rouge Police Department following the 2016 police killing of Alton Sterling. The settlement was approved by the city council the day before attorneys were scheduled to deliver closing arguments in a federal civil rights trial brought by the journalists and protesters.
The trial, which began two weeks earlier, had been dramatic. It addressed the events of Sunday, July 10, 2016, when a youth-led march went to the state capitol to protest police violence. Protesters were directed by police to go to the intersection of East Boulevard and France Street. Once there, BRPD told the protesters to clear the streets – each of the fourteen plaintiffs complied. At trial, BRPD representative Chris Polito testified that his agency had “no evidence” that any plaintiff failed to comply with police orders.
Even after the protesters cleared the streets, BRPD officers said “where you are standing is not good enough,” and swept in to make mass arrests of protesters and journalists – including those who were standing on private property with permission to be there.
Video at trial showed BRPD officers ordering protesters to “leave the area” and simultaneously chasing down and arresting people who attempted to leave. Each of the fourteen plaintiffs was arrested by BRPD, strip-searched, and imprisoned in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. One of the plaintiffs was only seventeen at the time – but BRPD still put her in an adult prison where she too was strip-searched and detained.
The trial had many unusual moments, such as:
Two defendants – BRPD officers Jonathan Abadie and Willie Williams – acknowledged on the stand that they had plead the Fifth rather than answer questions about fabricating false evidence and committing perjury.
Plaintiff’s expert, Robert Pusins, testified that he had never before seen officers plead the Fifth in a civil case in his thirty-plus years of experience.
BRPD officers admitted that the affidavits of probable cause used to imprison plaintiffs had been written in advance of the protest. Abadie testified that it was “predetermined” what the protesters would be arrested for.
An officer testified at trial that his name had been forged on the affidavit of probable cause for plaintiff Raae Pollard. Another officer reported that his name had been forged on "numerous" affidavits. Both officers reported the forgery to their chain of command, but no investigation was ever done.
A BRPD representative admitted that BRPD’s punitive “civil unrest” policy was applied to the protesters “because of the content of their speech.”
A BRPD representative admitted that BRPD used a less-than-lethal sonic weapon called a Long Range Acoustical Device (LRAD) on protesters, even though BRPD had never used the device before and had no safety training or safety manual. One officer said they were “messing around” with the weapon when they used it on protesters at close range.
A BRPD internal affairs supervisor testified that no investigations had been opened into any officer’s conduct related to the protests, except for one investigation into an officer who had pointed out that BRPD officers were violating protesters civil rights.
A BRPD representative admitted that then-chief-of-police Carl Dabadie had ordered every single internal affairs investigator to stay at the office, rather than witness the police handling of the protest.
A BRPD representative testified that BRPD was so proud of the way it handled the protest that it sent an officer to “debrief” and train other police departments around the nation about BRPD’s methods.
Last year, Most & Associates’ attorneys uncovered the fact that the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office has been illegally destroying critical officer disciplinary records.
Today, Verite News published a story on the issue, explaining that:
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office has been unlawfully destroying its deputies’ disciplinary records for at least 10 years, according to records provided by state officials responsible for overseeing the retention of records by state, parish and local agencies.
Read more here: https://veritenews.org/2023/01/12/jpso-has-been-illegally-destroying-records-of-alleged-officer-misconduct-for-years/
Today, the New York Times detailed the work of Most & Associates on Louisiana’s epidemic of overdetention. Read the story online, or below:
About 200 to 250 inmates are held beyond their legal release dates on any given month, with the average additional time lasting around 44 days in 2019.
By Glenn Thrush
NEW ORLEANS — The judge told Johnny Traweek he had served his time, seven months, for hitting someone with a saucepan in a drunken fight, then suggested he could be released from the Orleans Parish prison by midnight.
Mr. Traweek began giving away his jailhouse comforts — a blanket, two orange sweatshirts, ramen, soda. Then he waited out the final hours of May 2, 2018, his last legal day behind bars.
Midnight came, midnight went. Around 4 a.m., Mr. Traweek was lying in bed, eyes open, when the staff summoned inmates for predawn breakfast. He would repeat that routine, including the sleepless nights, 19 more days because the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections did not process his paperwork in a timely manner.
“It’s a bad, bad feeling,” said Mr. Traweek, now 70. “Every day, I’m getting up and thinking I’m going to get out. And it doesn’t happen. I knew I wasn’t in there for any charge, and still I have to sit there.”
Mr. Traweek’s case was neither atypical nor the worst of its kind: Roughly 200 inmates are held beyond their legal release dates on any given month in Louisiana, amounting to 2,000 to 2,500 of the 12,000 to 16,000 prisoners freed each year. The average length of additional time was around 44 days in 2019, according to internal state corrections data obtained by lawyers for inmates — and until recently, the department’s public hotline warned families that the wait could be as long as 90 days.
In most other states and cities, prisoners and parolees marked for immediate release are typically processed within hours — not days — although those times can vary, particularly if officials must make arrangements required to release registered sex offenders. But in Louisiana, the problem known as “overdetention” is endemic, often occurring without explanation, apology or compensation — an overlooked crisis in a state that imprisons a higher percentage of its residents than any other in most years.
The practice is also wasteful. It costs Louisiana taxpayers about $2.8 million a year in housing costs alone, according to department estimates.
“The state has not made liberty, or taxpayer money, a priority in how they run their prisons,” said William B. Most, a lawyer based in New Orleans who has filed two class-action lawsuits on behalf of overdetained inmates.
“To our clients, it is an extremely scary experience because they do not know why they are being held, when they will be free or how they can get free,” he added. “All they know is they should not be behind bars.”
In December 2020, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the practices the state used to determine the release of its prisoners, particularly those, like Mr. Traweek, who remained behind bars despite being eligible for immediate release. The investigation, according to people with knowledge of the situation, is expected to find widespread violations of a federal law that guarantees imprisoned people their “rights, privileges or immunities.”
State officials have been cooperating with the investigation, so it is possible it could result in an agreement. Such a deal would probably require an overhaul of procedures used to calculate time served, according to people who have spoken to investigators, and mandate the replacement of the state’s outdated corrections computer system known as CAJUN. (Its error message is a pixelated pop-up of a bunny behind bars.)
Prisoners’ rights groups say that federally mandated changes, while welcome, would do little to overcome the core problem that defines Louisiana’s troubled criminal justice system: an entrenched belief that an inmate’s freedom is worth less than everyone else’s.
“We exist in a space between malice and incompetence,” said Jamila Johnson of the Promise of Justice Initiative, a nonprofit in New Orleans that has sued the state for unlawful detention and poor treatment of prisoners.
A spokesman for Louisiana’s corrections department declined to discuss overdetention or even provide basic information about how the system operates and declined to respond to specific claims by inmates, citing the continuing litigation.
But in a deposition taken in January, James M. Le Blanc, who has run the agency for 14 years, acknowledged that the state has “had a problem with immediate releases” since at least 2012. He said the department had halved waiting times in recent years, from an average of more than 70 days a decade ago, and claimed that parish prison officials were also responsible for the drawn-out releases.
“We’re not where we need to be,” he added.
The problem crops up sporadically in other states, including neighboring Mississippi, and in the federal Bureau of Prisons. New York City recently agreed to pay out as much as $300 million to thousands of current and former inmates at local jails who had been kept hours or a few days after they were supposed to be released. But those waiting times are relatively short compared with what prisoners in Louisiana endure.
The state routinely sends prisoners with sentences under 20 years (and those with serious physical or mental conditions) to jails or prisons run by governments in local parishes, which are the equivalent of county governments elsewhere. That means parish prisons serve not only as traditional jails, but also as officially designated extensions of the state prison system.
It is a jumbled and sluggish system with tangled lines of communication and jurisdiction — and many of the prisoners who have been kept past their release dates fell into the chasm between dysfunctional state and parish bureaucracies.
A judge freed Brian Humphrey from the jail in Bossier Parish in northwest Louisiana on April 16, 2019, after he had served three years for an offense related to assault. He prepared to leave that night. Instead, he languished.
The corrections department, for reasons that remain unclear, waited 10 days to even begin processing his paperwork, according to records obtained in a 2021 class-action lawsuit his lawyers filed against the state. Instead of freeing Mr. Humphrey, as he was legally bound to do, the parish sheriff transferred him to a state-run work camp outside Shreveport, where he stayed until he was released on May 13, 2019.
That was 27 days beyond his release date.
Louisiana has one of the most overcrowded prison systems in the country, yet parish sheriffs are often reluctant to release people they believe are at high risk of committing new crimes. Some even view inmates housed in local facilities as worth holding onto as free labor.
In October 2017, Sheriff Steve Prator of Caddo Parish, which includes Shreveport, told reporters he was concerned that a recent criminal justice effort in the state was bad for parish governments. Not only would it result in higher crime rates among the “bad” former prisoners, but it would also deprive his staff of free labor provided by the “good ones.”
“They’re releasing some good ones that we use every day to wash cars, to change oil in our cars, to cook in the kitchen, to do all that, where we save money,” Sheriff Prator said.
There are few incentives for rushing an inmate out the door, especially if the state is picking up the tab: Reimbursement rates for state prisoners are a significant source of income in the parishes, and a handful of parish facilities have eagerly accepted migrants detained at the border, which offers even higher federal reimbursement rates.
Even well-intentioned corrections officials must navigate the state’s complex web of sentencing statutes and time calculation rules before signing off on the release of a prisoner.
Over the past several decades, formulas for sentencing guidelines have shifted, and record keeping has been spotty. Those documents can span multiple decades and cover several facilities, making it hard to nail down a precise accounting of time served — which is often the cause of snags.
Sarah O’Brien, a supervising lawyer with the public defenders’ office in Orleans Parish, has tried to take a more proactive approach. She reviews court records for prisoners around the state, typically those serving longer sentences, who might be entitled to immediate release because of errors in their time calculations.
She is constantly consulting a photograph on her phone. A cheat sheet she put together, written in fastidious longhand, lists all the relevant state laws and their dates of passage. It covers a full page of graph paper.
She also cultivates relationships with court and corrections workers. Recently, she moved up an inmate’s release date by a year after tracking down a juvenile detention record believed to have been lost in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Ms. O’Brien found a back-office worker who had access the paperwork, and the woman responded, “If there are records, I got ’em!”
She found them, and the man was freed.
Just as often, the opposite is true, lawyers and inmates say. Officials in the system can hold up a release on little more than a whim, sometimes because they have interpreted a judge’s decision in their own way.
One former inmate from New Orleans served more than 18 months beyond his three-year plea agreement because a staff member in his state-run prison in Homer, La., noticed a glitch in the document signed by his trial judge — the order the charges were listed in was incorrect — that should have had no bearing on his release.
The prisoner, a man in his late 40s who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was incarcerated for a sexual offense, wrote letter after letter to state officials. After a few months, he had what he assumed to be a breakthrough. The prison official who had blocked his release promised she would personally walk him out of prison if he was able to retrieve a missing document from the court.
It took him weeks to do so. When he turned it over, he instead waited for months before his case was finally sorted out.
He withdrew from the inmates he had befriended, fearful that his growing anger would spill over into physical aggression, and threw himself into his job as an orderly, sweeping up his cellblock and collecting garbage. Only during weekly Bible study sessions would he engage.
“How do I describe what it’s like?” he said. “It’s like you’re pretty much a nobody. You can write. You can request to speak to this person or to that person. But you’re at their mercy — why? — because they don’t want to be bothered.”
In a recent story entitled “Nonprofit challenges deal shielding Greenfield from $200 million in local tax liability,” the Lens reports on the latest work of Most & Associates’ attorneys. The Lens explains:
An arrangement that would allow Greenfield, the company seeking to construct a large grain terminal in St. John the Baptist Parish, to avoid paying some $200 million in local taxes is a sham, a nonprofit group said in a letter addressed to the parish’s tax assessor on Wednesday, asking him to treat the tract of land at issue as taxable property.
The cooperative endeavor agreement (CEA) that Greenfield entered into with the Port of South Louisiana in April is essentially a “simulation,” and does not constitute a bona-fide transfer of property under Louisiana’s civil code, William Most, an attorney representing the Descendants Project, said in a letter to Lucien Gauff, the parish’s assessor.
Read more here: https://thelensnola.org/2022/12/07/nonprofit-challenges-deal-shielding-greenfield-from-200-million-in-local-tax-liability/
On Wednesday November 16, 2022, a twelve person federal jury sitting in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana returned a unanimous verdict finding Chief Engineer Warlito Tan, Jr. NOT GUILTY on all four felony counts against him. The government charged Chief Tan with violating the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships (APPS), violating the Ports and Waterways Safety Act, Obstruction of Justice, and Obstructing a Coast Guard Investigation. The jury heard testimony from fourteen witnesses over the course of seven days.
Attorney Caroline Gabriel of Most & Associates was on the trial team that led to a full acquittal of our client. Attorney Ed MacColl of Thompson, MacColl & Bass LLC, P.A. led the team, aided by Briton Sparkman of Chalos & Co., P.C.
Chief Tan testified in his own defense and explained to the jury that at all times he believed he was properly operating the oily water separator on board the vessel and that he never knowingly made any inaccurate entries in the oil record book. He further explained that he fully cooperated with the U.S. Coast Guard, never lied to the port state investigators, and returned on two separate occasions to the U.S. to defend the charges against him, despite having been permitted to return home to the Philippines to attend to family matters while the case was pending over the past eighteen months.
We are enormously proud of client’s courage, honesty, and perseverance.
Today, the Lens published a story about Most & Associates’ work. The story details how Most & Associates uncovered the fact that the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s office used criminal search warrants to obtain the school and medical records of an autistic child they killed - even though JPSO did not suspect any crime had been committed.
We are proud to announce that William Most was selected by New Orleans Magazine to be among the 2022 Top Lawyers for Labor & Employment, as selected by New Orleans Magazine.
Each year, New Orleans Magazine allows local attorneys to vote for the top lawyers in a variety of categories. According to the magazine, the methodology is the following:
The voting was open to all licensed attorneys in New Orleans. They were asked which attorney, other than themselves, they would recommend in the New Orleans area. Each attorney was allowed to recommend up to three colleagues in each given legal specialty. Once the online nominations were complete, each nominee was carefully evaluated on the basis of the survey results, the legitimacy of their license and their current standing with the State Bar Association of Louisiana. Attorneys who received the highest number of votes in each specialty are reflected in the following list.
Thank you to all our colleagues who voted!
Last night, the Baton Rouge Metro Council voted to pay $86,000 to our client, law professor Thomas Frampton, along with a promise to dismiss allegations of contempt against the professor.
The settlement followed a court order by federal judge John W. deGravelles, in which the judge found "overwhelming evidence" that the City of Baton Rouge had acted in "bad faith and in retaliation" against Professor Frampton.
Frampton is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. In early 2021, Professor Frampton represented the Green family of Baton Rouge pro bono in a civil rights case against the City of Baton Rouge. The lawsuit addressed what another federal judge had called a “serious and wanton disregard” of the Green family’s constitutional rights by Baton Rouge Police Department officers. In May of 2021, the family settled the claims with the City.
Following the settlement, and at the Green family’s request, Prof. Frampton publicly shared body camera footage (available here) of the BRPD officers’ treatment of the Green family. On May 27, 2021, the video became a national news story: the CBS Evening news ran a piece entitled “Baton Rouge reaches $35,000 settlement with family after police strip-searched teen and entered home without warrant.
The very next day, the City of Baton Rouge went to court and asked that Frampton be found “in contempt.”
Frampton then filed suit in federal court, arguing that the City was retaliating against him for exercising his freedom of speech.
The court agreed with Frampton, concluding that "City/Parish would not have pursued this matter in the absence of its bad faith motive to retaliate."
For further information, see WAFB news coverage here.
The Advocate covered new revelations about East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office Deputy Braxton, a law enforcement officer who choked our client to unconsciousness.
“The Sheriff’s Office determined that Braxton repeatedly assaulted inmates, made false statements, withheld medical care, slept on the job, and much more,” said one of Skinner’s attorneys, William Most. “Baton Rouge taxpayers should ask why they are still paying this man’s salary.”
For more information, read the full article here.
On May 13, 2022, a federal judge ruled that our client Jerry Rogers is "entitled to judgment in his favor" on constitutional and state-law claims of false arrest and false imprisonment.
The case involves the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's office’s 2019 arrest of Jerry Rogers, a former sheriff's deputy who now works as an federal investigator.
In a series of private emails, Mr. Rogers had criticized a STPSO deputy regarding the failure to solve a high-profile murder. Defendants – three members of the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office including Sheriff Randy Smith – found out about the criticism, and reacted by arresting Rogers under a criminal defamation statute that had been declared unconstitutional as applied nearly a half-century earlier.
Defendants arrested Rogers even though they were warned twice in advance by the District Attorney’s office that arresting Rogers would be unconstitutional.
But despite all this, each Defendant has testified that they would arrest Jerry Rogers all over again, even knowing what they know now.
These facts led federal judge Triche Milazzo of the Eastern District of Louisiana to conclude that:
no reasonable officer could have believed that probable cause existed where the unconstitutionality of Louisiana’s criminal defamation statute as applied to public officials has long been clearly established and where the officers had been specifically warned that the arrest would be unconstitutional.
She therefore ruled that "Plaintiff is entitled to judgment in his favor on his claim for § 1983 false arrest and state law false arrest and false imprisonment against Defendants Canizaro and Culpeper in their individual capacities."
Attorneys William Most and David Lanser, with co-counsel, have filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States challenging a decision by the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine that a state law nuisance claim is preempted by the Federal Aviation Act. Attorneys Most and Lanser are fighting for the rights of an environmental non-profit and a collection of Maine residents who, if the Court's decision is allowed to stand, would have no legal recourse against the harmful actions of Maine’s electric power utility.
Read the brief HERE.
