Weekly Case Digests February 10, 2020 February 14, 2020.

Byline: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF

7th Circuit Digests

7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. William Anthony Dodds

Case No.: 19-1135

Officials: BAUER, BRENNAN, and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Sentencing Supervised Release

William Dodds appeals several conditions of supervised release imposed as part of his sentence for passport fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1542. Dodds contends the challenged conditions are either unconstitutionally vague or lack adequate justification. But in the district court, he objected to only one of the proposed conditions and affirmatively waived any challenge to the rest. While the written judgment must be modified to conform one condition to the oral pronouncement, in all other respects it is correct, so we modify the written judgment and affirm the judgment as modified.

Modified and affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Osama Taha v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 781

Case No.: 19-1085

Officials: SYKES, HAMILTON, and BRENNAN, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Failure to State Claim

Federal law imposes a duty on unions to fairly represent all employees in their bargaining units. Osama Taha sued his union, arguing it breached that duty after his employer fired him for abandoning his job. Although the union grieved Taha's firing, he alleges it did so unfairly. He also contends the union wrongfully shut down his grievance process. The district court dismissed Taha's second amended complaint for failure to state a claim, finding it gave no details to support any allegation of unlawful union conduct. Our review compels the same conclusion. Because Taha's complaint fails to state a plausible claim for relief, we affirm.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Barbara Kaiser v. Johnson & Johnson and Ethicon, Inc.,

Case No.: 18-2944

Officials: FLAUM, KANNE, and SYKES, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Damages

Barbara Kaiser had surgery to implant the Prolift Anterior Pelvic Floor Repair System, a transvaginal mesh medical device that supports the pelvic muscles. Within a few years of her surgery, Kaiser began experiencing severe pelvic pain, bladder spasms, and pain during intercourse. Her physician attributed these conditions to contractions in the mesh of the Prolift. Kaiser had revision surgery to remove the device, but her surgeon could not completely extract it. He informed her that the painful complications she was experiencing were likely permanent.

Kaiser sued Ethicon, Inc., Prolift's manufacturer, and Johnson & Johnson, its parent company, seeking damages under the Indiana Products Liability Act, IND. CODE 34- 20-1-1 to 34-20-9-1. (Johnson & Johnson has no distinct role in this litigation, so we refer to the defendants collectively as "Ethicon.") After a two-week trial, a jury found Ethicon liable for defectively designing the Prolift device and failing to adequately warn about its complications. The jury awarded a hefty sum: $10 million in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages, though the judge granted Ethicon's motion for remittitur and reduced the punitive award to $10 million.

Ethicon's appeal is a broad-spectrum attack on the judgment, starting with an argument about federal preemption and moving through several issues of Indiana product-liability law, a claimed evidentiary error, and challenges to the compensatory and punitive damages. We reject these arguments and affirm. One issue in particular warrants special mention upfront. Our caselaw interprets the Indiana Product Liability Act to require a plaintiff in a design-defect case to produce evidence of a reasonable alternative design for the product. The Indiana Supreme Court disagrees. See TRW Vehicle Safety Sys., Inc. v. Moore, 936 N.E.2d 201, 209 (Ind. 2010). The state supreme court's decision controls on a matter of state law, so we apply TRW rather than our own contrary precedent.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Judy Lynn Prater v. Andrew Saul

Case No.: 19-2263

Officials: RIPPLE, SYKES, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Disability Benefits RFC Assessment

Judy Prater applied for Social Security Disability Insurance Benefits based on a variety of mental and physical impairments. An administrative law judge denied her application on the ground that her residual functional capacity ("RFC") allows her to perform limited sedentary work, and the district court affirmed. On appeal, Ms. Prater argues only that the RFC assessment is too vague about her need to alternate between sitting and standing. However, because the sit/stand limitation in the RFC assessment specifies that Ms. Prater may change positions as needed so long as she remains in position for at least thirty minutes at a time, we affirm the judgment of the district court.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Kevin Ingram

Case No.: 19-1403

Officials: FLAUM, ROVNER, and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Sufficiency of Evidence

A federal jury convicted Kevin Ingram of three counts of Hobbs Act robbery (Counts 13), one count of attempted Hobbs Act robbery (Count 4), and four counts of possession of a firearm in furtherance of those crimes of violence (Counts 58). Ingram now appeals, arguing (1) that there was insufficient evidence on Count 5 for the jury to return a conviction and (2) that his conviction on Count 8 cannot stand because attempted Hobbs Act robbery does not qualify as a crime of violence. For the following reasons, we affirm.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Thomas A. Censke v. United States of America

Case No.: 18-2695

Officials: WOOD, Chief Judge, and HAMILTON and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges.

Focus: FTCA Violation Prison-mailbox Rule

Prisoners face unique challenges when submitting legal filings. Non-prisoners often have access to electronic filing methods and, if not, can take their filings to...

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