By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

A judge sentenced a Chattanooga woman to 42 months in prison for faking breast cancer and told her it was "reprehensible" that she took donations of sick leave, money and cancer patient support services for five years.

"It seems like to me some confinement is necessary," Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Don Poole said Monday after a four-hour hearing in which attorneys for 39-year-old Keele Maynor asked for a probation sentence that would allow her to work and pay about $54,000 in restitution.

Poole added 10 years of probation to the sentence for Maynor, a mother of three, and ordered her taken into custody immediately. She will be eligible for parole after serving one-third of the prison sentence. He ordered her to start making $300 monthly restitution payments after her release.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

The Supreme Court says the National Football League can be considered as 32 separate teams - not one big business - when it comes to to selling NFL-branded items like jerseys and caps.

The high court has unanimously reversed a lower court ruling throwing out an antitrust suit brought against the league by one of its former hat makers.

American Needle had sued the league after losing the contract to Reebok. The company said the NFL violated antitrust law because all 32 teams worked together to freeze it out of the NFL-licensed hatmaking business. The NFL said it did not violate antitrust law because the teams are all one business.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

Massachusetts' highest court ruled Wednesday that corporations can't face criminal charges in cases where none of their employees committed a crime, calling the theory "illogical."

The Supreme Judicial Court ruling came in a case where an Acton nursing home owner was charged with involuntary manslaughter after a patient in a wheelchair toppled down the stairs to her death in 2004.

State attorney general Martha Coakley's office charged Life Care Centers of America, Inc. with involuntary manslaughter, arguing the charge was justified due to a combination of various staff mistakes, none of which were criminal.

The SJC flatly rejected the argument, saying the AG can't combine actions that were at worst, negligent, and then charge the company with a crime.

"This theory is illogical and such an argument cannot succeed," the court wrote. "If at least one employee did not act wantonly or recklessly, then the corporation cannot be held to a higher standard of culpability by combining various employees' acts."

Coakley's office said it was disappointed by the decision, but it has not dropped the charge. Spokeswoman Emily LaGrassa said the AG was deciding whether to proceed based on possible criminal liability by a nursing supervisor.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

Last month, by a vote of 5 to 4, the U.S. Supreme Court gave carte blanche to the world's largest corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to support or oppose candidates for elected office. Big Business domination of Washington and state capitals will now intensify.

The case of Citizens United portends dire consequences for the nation's constitutional premise of "we the people," not we the corporations. Our constitution, at its origins and through all of its amendments, makes no mention of corporate entities, only human beings and their government.

For 120 years, it was not Congress but the Supreme Court that expanded the definition of "persons" to include for-profit corporations for the purposes of applying constitutional protections. For 30 years, the court has granted First Amendment speech protections to corporations as "artificial persons."

But not until last month has the court declared that the First Amendment gives corporations the right to spend unlimited money to influence elections. The court majority, self-styled believers in precedent and judicial restraint, overturned two major Supreme Court decisions and reversed decades of campaign-finance laws aimed at preventing corporations from having undo influence over local, state and national elections.

Granted, existing campaign-finance rules have been inadequate. Regular news reports document how corporate spending debases elections and elected officials. But that doesn't mean things can't get worse. The court has challenged whatever social mores are left that view no-holds-barred corporate cash register politics as unseemly.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

Last month, by a vote of 5 to 4, the U.S. Supreme Court gave carte blanche to the world's largest corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to support or oppose candidates for elected office. Big Business domination of Washington and state capitals will now intensify.

The case of Citizens United portends dire consequences for the nation's constitutional premise of "we the people," not we the corporations. Our constitution, at its origins and through all of its amendments, makes no mention of corporate entities, only human beings and their government.

For 120 years, it was not Congress but the Supreme Court that expanded the definition of "persons" to include for-profit corporations for the purposes of applying constitutional protections. For 30 years, the court has granted First Amendment speech protections to corporations as "artificial persons."

But not until last month has the court declared that the First Amendment gives corporations the right to spend unlimited money to influence elections. The court majority, self-styled believers in precedent and judicial restraint, overturned two major Supreme Court decisions and reversed decades of campaign-finance laws aimed at preventing corporations from having undo influence over local, state and national elections.

Granted, existing campaign-finance rules have been inadequate. Regular news reports document how corporate spending debases elections and elected officials. But that doesn't mean things can't get worse. The court has challenged whatever social mores are left that view no-holds-barred corporate cash register politics as unseemly.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.