A police chief has qualified immunity from this civil rights suit filed by two police officers who claim their First Amendment rights were violated when they allegedly were fired in retaliation for visiting a recent arrestee on their lunch hour ...

Tagged with: 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Civil Rights Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

A plaintiff who challenges a medical-records vendor’s $23 sales tax imposed on records he ordered may not bring a class-action consumer complaint in federal court based on his claim that the state exempted medical-records sales from its general sales tax; ...

Tagged with: 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Consumer Protection Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

A “sexual predator” who fled criminal charges in the U.S. and lived in the Philippines for 18 months, then fled to Cambodia to escape similar charges and was deported to the U.S. on yet more charges of sexual offenses against ...

Tagged with: 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Criminal Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

Reversing a district court, the 4th Cir­cuit says a city violated a police officer’s First Amendment rights when it disci­plined him under a social media policy prohibiting “Negative Comments” for Facebook comments about the dangers of premature promotion of inexperi­enced ...

Tagged with: 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Employment Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

A district court did not err in find­ing defendant ineligible for a sentence reduction for trafficking cocaine base because the record supported a finding that at least 25.2 kilograms of the drug were attributable to him in his role as ...

Tagged with: 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Criminal Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

A district court did not err in dismiss­ing a Federal Tort Claims Act suit alleg­ing the Food and Drug Administration negligently issued a salmonella contam­ination warning that devalued plain­tiff ’s South Carolina tomato crop by over $15 million; the 4th ...

Tagged with: 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III Tort

The 4th Circuit affirms a grant of ha­beas relief overturning a death sentence imposed on an African-American man convicted of murder, because the sentenc­ing proceeding before an all-white South Carolina jury “was suffused with racially coded references to a degree ...

Tagged with: 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Criminal Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

A financial services company can­not overturn an arbitration award of $900,000 in compensatory damages to its former employee on the ground that it should have been granted more time to name its preferred arbitrators, after it missed the deadline when ...

Tagged with: 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Contract Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

A woman who claims defendant chari­table organizations unlawfully refused to admit her to homeless shelters because of her alleged mental health disability has failed to state claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act ...

Tagged with: 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Civil Rights Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

An airline employee did not create a material factual issue that employer’s reason for firing him was a pretext for re­taliation for taking Family and Medical Leave on a day when he was scheduled to work, near the end of ...

Tagged with: 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Employment Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III