Justia New York Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

These six lawsuits involved an accident near Geneseo, New York, where a charter bus carrying members of an Ontario women's hockey team plowed into the rear-end of a tractor-trailer parked on the shoulder of the highway. The charter bus's driver, his employer, and the company that leased the bus were Ontario domiciliaries (collectively, bus defendants), as were all the injured and deceased passengers. The tractor-trailer driver was a Pennsylvania domiciliary, as were his employer and the companies that hired the trailer (collectively, trailer defendants). In a certified question from the Appellate Division, the court was called upon to decide the choice-of-law issue presented by the lawsuits, which were brought to recover damages for wrongful death and/or personal injuries. As a preliminary matter, the court held that the lower courts were not foreclosed from engaging in choice-of-law analysis where CPLR 3016(e) must be read together with CPLR 4511(e). The court concluded that Ontario had weighed the interests of tortfeasors and their victims in cases of catastrophic personal injury, and had elected to safeguard its domiciliaries from large awards for non-pecuniary damages. Therefore, in lawsuits brought in New York by Ontario-domiciled plaintiffs against Ontario-domiciled defendants, the bus defendants in this case, the court held that New York courts should respect Ontario's decision, which differed from but certainly did not offend New York's public policy. The court held, however, that there was no cause to contemplate a jurisdiction other than New York with respect to the trailer defendants where the conduct causing injuries and the injuries themselves occurred in New York. The trailer defendants did not ask the Supreme Court to consider the law of their domicile, Pennsylvania, and they had no contacts whatsoever with Ontario other than the happenstance that plaintiffs and the bus defendants were domiciled there. Accordingly, the orders in these cases should be modified in accordance with this opinion. View "Edwards, et al. v. Erie Coach Lines Co., et al.; Godwin, et al. v. Trentway-Wagar, Inc., et al.; Butler v. Stagecoach Group, PLC, et al.; Cowan, et al. v. Stagecoach Group, PLC, et al.; Davidson v. Coach USA, Inc., et al.; Roach, et al. v. Coach USA, Inc" on Justia Law

Benito Acevedo was convicted of criminal sale of controlled substance in the third degree and possession of a controlled substance in the third degree and sentenced as a predicate felony offender with a prior violent felony to a prison term of six years and three years of post-release supervision. Dionis Collado was convicted of two counts of second degree robbery and was then adjudged a second violent felony offender and sentenced to concurrent eight-year prison terms. At issue was whether a resentencing sought by a defendant to correct an illegally lenient sentence was effective to temporally resituate the sentence and thus alter the underlying conviction's utility as a predicate for enhanced sentence. The court held that the decisive feature in these cases was that the sentencing errors defendants sought to correct by resentencing were errors in their favor. The court also held that resentence was not a device appropriately employed simply to alter a sentencing date and thereby affect the utility of a conviction as a predicate for the imposition of enhanced punishment. Therefore, the Sparber relief defendants obtained was not effective to avoid the penal consequences of reoffending. Accordingly, the judgment of the Appellate Division was reversed and the order of the Supreme Court reinstated. View "People v. Acevedo; People v. Collado" on Justia Law

Plaintiffs, companies that acquired Floating Rate Accrual Notes (FRANs), commenced numerous separate actions against Argentina seeking damages for the nation's default on the bonds and the claims were subsequently consolidated. At issue, through certified questions, was whether Argentina's obligation to make biannual interest-only payments to a bondholder continued after maturity or acceleration of the indebtedness, and if so, whether the bondholders were entitled to CPLR 5001 prejudgment interest on payments that were not made as a consequence of the nation's default. The court answered the certified questions in the affirmative and held that the FRANs certificate required the issuer to continue to make biannual interest payments post-maturity while the principal remained unpaid; having concluded that the obligation to make biannual interest payments continued after the bonds matured if principal was not promptly repaid, and that nothing in the bond documents indicated that the payments were to stop in the event of acceleration of the debt, it followed that Argentina's duty to make the payments continued after NML Capital accelerated its $32 million of the debt in February 2005; and based on the court's analysis in Spodek v. Park Prop. Dev. Assoc., the bondholders were entitled to prejudgment interest under CPLR 5001 on the unpaid biannual interest payments that were due, but were not paid, after the loads were either accelerated or matured on the due date. View "NML Capital v. Republic of Argentina" on Justia Law