JAMES E. CRAWFORD JR’S Law Blog

$14 million DUI award restored in Washington state

  DUI Laws & Info  -   POSTED: 2009/07/17 09:22

The Supreme Court in Washington state on Thursday unanimously reinstated a $14 million award to a family who sued a tavern and a bartender after one of the bar’s customers drove away from the establishment and collided with their car, leaving a 7-year-old-boy a paraplegic.
Under state law, bartenders who serve visibly intoxicated customers are liable for damages to potential victims. At question was the type of evidence needed to prove “negligent overservice.”

Most states have so-called “dram shop” laws that can make taverns or bartenders — and in some states, even social hosts — liable for damages if they serve intoxicated customers who leave the premises and harm themselves or others.

Washington state’s justices noted that a forensic consultant found that the bar patron — Hawkeye Kinkaid — likely drank the equivalent of either 21 12-ounce beers or 30 ounces of 80-proof alcohol, and probably had a blood alcohol content of 0.32 at the time of the collision. The legal threshold in Washington state is 0.08.

Kinkaid was drinking at the Bellingham Moose Lodge, about 90 miles north of Seattle, just before the April 2000 accident. Kinkaid’s girlfriend, Alexis Chapman, was a bartender at the lodge and served him the night of the accident.

After Kinkaid left the lodge, he drove his car across the center line of a road in nearby Ferndale, striking the car of Bianca Faust of New York City, who was driving with her two children and infant grandchild. Kinkaid was killed and everyone in Faust’s car was injured, including 7-year-old Christopher.

Faust and her family members sued both the lodge and Chapman, and won in Whatcom County Superior Court. The award was later overturned by the state Court of Appeals, which said Faust had to present “specific point-in-time evidence” that Kinkaid seemed drunk when Chapman served him alcohol.

But the Supreme Court disagreed, noting Thursday that in statements to others, Chapman said Kinkaid was too “tipsy” to be driving and that he was so drunk that night that she eventually refused to serve him.

Ruling: Court failed its duty to Muslim scholar

  Breaking Legal News  -   POSTED: 2009/07/20 10:56

U.S. officials should have given a Muslim scholar a chance to show he was no supporter of terrorism before barring him from the country, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.
Tariq Ramadan, a professor sympathetic to Palestinian resistance to Israel, had his U.S. visa revoked in 2004 as he was about to take a tenured teaching job at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

His subsequent applications for a new visa were denied on the grounds that he had donated $1,336 to a charity that gave money to Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that it was legal for the government to bar Ramadan from the country, but said it had an obligation to inform him of the concerns about his donations and give him a chance to prove he didn’t know his money would go to Hamas.

The three-judge panel said it was possible that a consular official had, in fact, given him that opportunity, but there was no record of it before the court.

The case will now return to a lower court and the government will be given a chance to figure out more about the exact details of the conversations between Ramadan and the consular staff in Bern, Switzerland that handled his visa application.

Ramadan could also reapply for the visa, the court said.

Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued Ramadan’s case before the appeals court, said he was hopeful the Obama administration would allow the professor to enter the U.S. without further litigation.

“Over the next few weeks, we’ll be encouraging the administration to take a new look not only at Ramadan’s case but at the cases of other foreign scholars and writers who were excluded by the Bush administration on ideological grounds,” he said.