Supreme Court Notebook

Justices reject Arizona bid over abortion drugs

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court is refusing to allow Arizona to enforce stringent restrictions on medical abortions while a challenge to those rules plays out in lower courts.

The justices on Monday left in place a lower court ruling that blocked rules that regulate where and how women can take drugs that induce abortion. The rules also would prohibit the use of the abortion medications after the seventh week of pregnancy instead of the ninth.

Planned Parenthood was among abortion providers that challenged the rules in federal court. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals prevented the state from putting them in place during the legal challenge. Similar laws are in effect in North Dakota, Ohio and Texas. The Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down the restrictions in that state.

The rules would ban women from taking the most common abortion-inducing drug, mifepristone, after the seventh week of pregnancy. The Food and Drug Administration approved its use in 2000 through the first seven weeks of pregnancy. It is prescribed along with a second drug, misoprostol.

Since the FDA approval, medical researchers and clinical trials have shown that mifepristone is effective in much smaller doses and for two weeks longer in a pregnancy, the challengers said. The second drug also may be taken at home.

Arizona's rules would require that the drugs be taken only at the doses approved by the FDA in 2000 and only at clinics.

Planned Parenthood says that medical abortions now account for more than 40 percent of abortions at its clinics.

To justify the restrictions, Arizona and the other states have pointed to the deaths of at least eight women who took the drugs. But the 9th circuit said the FDA investigated those deaths and found no causal connection between them and the use of mifespristone or misoprostol.

Justices won't review incontinence briefs ruling

PHOENIX (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court is letting stand a lower court's ruling requiring Arizona's Medicaid program to provide broader coverage for incontinence briefs for disabled people.

The justices on Monday declined to review the ruling issued last May by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal.

The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the Arizona Center for Disability Law. The suit challenged the state's policy of providing incontinence briefs only to treat skin problems and infections and not to prevent those problems.

A federal judge ruled in 2012 that the state's Medicaid plan had to provide the briefs.

The appeals court upheld that ruling but struck down a requirement that Arizona retroactively pay for the briefs.

Court rules for energy firm in class-action suit

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court won't make it tougher for defendants in class-action lawsuits to transfer cases from state courts to more business-friendly federal court.

The justices on Monday ruled 5-4 in favor of a Michigan energy company that wanted to move a class-action case from Kansas state court to federal court without showing evidence that damages in the case would exceed $5 million. That is the minimum amount required for transferring such cases.

The case involved a group of royalty owners who sued Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co. alleging they were underpaid royalties on oil and gas wells.

A federal judge refused to transfer the case without evidence of damages. A federal appeals court declined to consider an appeal, but the Supreme Court said the law does not require such evidence.

Houston medical student's killer loses appeal

HOUSTON (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review an appeal from a 34-year-old Houston man sent to death row for abducting and killing a medical student who was returning a movie to a video store 14 years ago.

Without comment, the high court Monday ruled in the case of Perry Williams. His lawyers had argued in lower courts he had deficient legal help at his trial for the slaying of 22-year-old Matthew Carter.

Williams testified at his trial that Carter begged for his life before he shot the victim in the head near Houston's Texas Medical Center where Carter was a first-year student at Baylor College of Medicine. Court documents show Williams contended the September 2000 slaying was accidental.

Evidence showed Williams and three accomplices split $40 taken from Carter.

Published: Tue, Dec 16, 2014