Tagged: courts

The Justice Department does not intend to seek the death penalty against a New Orleans man charged with having a role in five 2007 killings, including an off-duty police officer's fatal shooting.

A two-page court filing Monday by U.S. Attorney Jim Letten's office didn't explain its decision in the case against Steven Earl Hardrick.

A March 15 indictment claims Hardrick and others demanded money and cocaine when they broke into the home of New Orleans Police Detective Thelonius Dukes and shot him in October 2007. Dukes died the following month.

The Thibodaux Board of Civil Service has ruled it does not have authority to act on complaints by a police captain who claims Mayor Tommy Eschete and Police Chief Scott Silverii conspired to harass and demote him.

The Daily Comet reports (http://bit.ly/NmD0Fh) the complaint, filed by Calvin Cooks, claims Silverii and other officers spread rumors implicating Cooks in the slashing of tires on police vehicles in 2011.

Livingston Parish will hire a lawyer to defend a $53 million lawsuit against the parish over the costs of cleaning up after Hurricane Gustav.

The Advocate reports International Equipment Distributors Inc., the parish's main contractor in the 2008 cleanup, filed suit last year claiming Livingston had paid only "a small fraction of the money it owes IED."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has refused to pay the parish for most cleanup costs, and the parish is in the process of making a final appeal to FEMA for payment of a portion of the bills submitted by IED.

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Visa, MasterCard, some of the nation's other largest banks have agreed to a multibillion dollar settlement of a class action suit involving credit card transaction fees. Now, those are what merchants pay when you use plastic instead of cash. Retailers allege that the two largest payment networks conspired with the banks to keep so-called swipe fees high. NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports.

Visa and Mastercard have announced that they will pay retailers more than $6 billion to settle several class-action and individual lawsuits retailers have filed since 2005.

According to a Wall Street Journal story from earlier this month, the settlement stems from complaints that Visa and MasterCard, the largest card-payments networks in the world, prohibited retailers from imposing surcharges to customers using those credit cards.