Court Rulings

Employees who cooperate with an internal investigation and report inappropriate behavior in the workplace are protected from retaliation under civil rights laws, the Supreme Court said Monday, strengthening the laws against sexual harassment on the job.

A Federal Bureau of Prisons policy excluding murderers, rapists and others with violent crimes on their record from an early-release program is invalid because authorities have failed to explain why those inmates are ineligible, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the prison administration to reconsider the application for sentence reduction from Jerry Crickon, a federal prisoner in a Long Beach halfway house due for release in six months.

The Supreme Court announced Thursday a potentially significant change in how crime lab reports are used in trials, ruling that a defendant has the right to cross-examine in front of the jury the experts who prepared these reports. Crime labs have been subjected to criticism in the last decade, much of it because of DNA evidence that has shown at least 240 prisoners were in fact not guilty.

A military appeals court Tuesday upheld the dismissal of war crimes charges against Marine Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, the highest-ranking Marine charged in the 2005 killing of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq.

A Caltech graduate student convicted five years ago of conspiracy and arson for vandalizing 125 SUVs has had his arson convictions overturned and his sentence vacated by a federal appeals court. William Cottrell, 29, should have been allowed to present evidence during his 2004 trial that his suffering from Asperger's syndrome prevented him from forming the specific intent to commit the arson attacks, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in an amended opinion this week. Cottrell's conspiracy conviction was upheld, but the 100-month prison sentence imposed on him for all of the offenses was vacated.

The Obama administration on Friday lost its bid to halt a lawsuit charging that President George W. Bush broke the law when he authorized warrantless spying on terrorism suspects, the only such case to make it to federal court. A federal appeals court rejected the Justice Department's bid to halt the lawsuit by a now-defunct Islamic charity over warrantless wiretapping.

The unraveling of multimillion-dollar Los Angeles cases alleging that Nicaraguan men had been sterilized by pesticide exposure is now threatening to upend hundreds of other claims in U.S. courts, as judges examine charges that plaintiffs' lawyers orchestrated an extraordinary international fraud. At the center of the claims is the pesticide DBCP and allegations that workers in banana plantations in Central America and Africa were harmed by exposure to the chemical.

Although Erla Feinberg's final act might have disappointed most of her grandchildren, it carried out her late husband's dying wish in a way that held up in court. In a unanimous decision, the Illinois Supreme Court this week ruled that Max Feinberg and his wife could legally disinherit any grandchildren who married outside the Jewish faith as long as the method of doing so did not encourage divorce. "Although those plans might be offensive to individual family members or to outside observers, Max and Erla were free to distribute their bounty as they saw fit and to favor grandchildren of whose life choices they approved," Justice Rita Garman wrote.

An Internet blogger nicknamed Minerva was acquitted by a Seoul court Monday on charges that he spread malicious rumors about the South Korean economy that cost the government billions of dollars. Park Dae-sung was released after the court's ruling that he did not violate telecommunications laws with his popular weblogs, which regularly pontificated on South Korea's ailing economy, castigated policymakers and forecast dire scenarios that many investors took to heart.

Just in time for the summer tourist throngs, mimes, musicians and balloon-animal shapers have been newly empowered to bring their entertainments and tip jars to public parks. In a ruling with potentially wide implications for street artists throughout the West, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday struck down curbs imposed by Seattle on those performing at the popular Seattle Center, home of the landmark Space Needle.