This case involves a Medicare provider, Home Health Care, Inc., challenging the Secretary of Health and Human Services' disallowance of reimbursement for leased car costs and an employee's salary and travel expenses under the Medicare Act. The court ruled that the disallowance of over half the car lease costs violated the Act's prohibition on federal interference with medical service provision (42 U.S.C. 1395) to the extent those costs related to home visits, as the mileage benchmarks effectively prevented leasing cars, but upheld the disallowance for administrative use as consistent with regulations and comparable provider costs. It also sustained the full disallowance of the employee's costs, finding substantial evidence that the duties could have been handled by existing staff and lacking proof of clerical work. The decision partially reversed the agency's action on the car costs while affirming it on the salary issue.
The plaintiff sued the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, and several former secretaries, alleging that he contracted cancer from exposure to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange while serving in the Vietnam War. After an earlier partial dismissal, the case proceeded only against three former secretaries in their individual capacities on claims of intentional torts violating Fifth Amendment due process rights. The court granted the defendants' motion to dismiss, holding that the doctrine of intra-military immunity barred the claims. The core reasoning was that such immunity is essential to protect military commanders during combat operations, even though the United States was not formally at war, and the court followed prior district court decisions applying similar immunity principles.
This case under the Federal Tort Claims Act involved a plaintiff who fell and fractured her elbow while walking on the semi-circular granite platform steps around a fountain at the Smithsonian's Museum of History and Technology. The plaintiff claimed the steps were unreasonably dangerous due to their design, lack of visual cues from the variegated granite, absence of markings or warnings, and the government's prior knowledge of similar incidents. The court found that the defendant's architects had approved a faulty design despite recognizing the hazard, establishing actual notice and negligence as the proximate cause of the injury. It rejected contributory negligence and awarded the plaintiff $30,000 in damages for medical expenses, pain, and limited mobility. The ruling was based on evidence of the steps' visual defects, public usage observations showing frequent trips, and internal government documents expressing design concerns.
This case involves a wrongful death and survival action brought by the co-administratrices of Corine Morgan's estate against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act, alleging negligence by St. Elizabeths Hospital in its handling of Joseph Morgan, who had been committed there after assaulting his wife. The court found that the hospital negligently prepared a competency report to the D.C. Court of General Sessions and failed to follow its own diagnostic standards, which contributed to Morgan's erroneous release despite his organic brain damage from alcohol and risk of violent behavior. These errors were a concurring cause of Morgan's release and his subsequent killing of his wife on March 26, 1967. The court awarded $90,000 in damages on the wrongful death count and $10,000 on the survival count.
In Fisher v. Renegotiation Board, Georgetown University law students sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain three categories of documents from the Renegotiation Board concerning excess profits determinations for eight defense contractors. After in camera review on remand, the district court ordered full public disclosure of seventeen unilateral Board orders and 153 renegotiation agreements, minus confidential commercial details in attached exhibits, while upholding the withholding of contractor reports, statements of non-applicability, and thirty-eight internal memoranda. The court reasoned that Exemption 4 protects trade secrets and confidential financial information supplied by contractors, and Exemption 5 shields deliberative inter-agency materials, but final agency opinions and orders reflecting the Board's own determinations are not exempt and must be released without redactions beyond protected data.
This case involved a plaintiff who was subjected to multiple "vagrancy observations" by District of Columbia police while walking in public areas at night, leading him to seek declaratory and injunctive relief against these practices and the underlying vagrancy statute. The court held that the police's vagrancy observation practices were unconstitutional as applied to the plaintiff because the officers lacked specific and articulable facts justifying the stops under standards from Terry v. Ohio, and ordered the expungement of related records while declaring the plaintiff's right to be in public spaces while sober and well-behaved. The court did not address the constitutionality of the vagrancy statute itself, as the practices were found invalid first. It rejected class action status and limited relief to the individual plaintiff.
