Estate of Fortier v. City of Lewiston: Is Maine\u27s Tort Claims Act Unintelligible?

In Estate of Fortier v. City of Lewiston, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, was asked to decide if the City of Lewiston was “using” an aircraft under the Maine Tort Claims Act (MTCA) when it chartered a plane from Twin Cities Air Services (Twin Cities) as part of an Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corp (AFJROTC) exercise. Tragically, the pilot and three AFJROTC cadets from Lewiston High School lost their lives when the plane crashed into Barker Mountain shortly after take-off. The families of the students brought suit against Lewiston, in part, alleging negligence on behalf of the high school’s Senior Aerospace Instructor, who was responsible for coordinating the chartered flight as part of the AFJROTC program. A slim majority held that, under the court’s rules of statutory construction, and in the interest of narrowly construing exceptions to immunity under the MTCA, the statutory exception for “use” only applied when the governmental entity had some measure of direct control over the vehicle that was being used. Because the aircraft was under the direct control of Twin Cities’ pilot, Lewiston was not “using” the plane as defined by the MTCA and was thus immune from suit. The dissent would not have equated “use” to “operation,” as it believed the majority did, but instead would have used a broader, plain meaning definition of “use.” When Lewiston chartered the plane as part of its AFJROTC program, this “use” qualified as an exception to the MTCA, allowing the lawsuit to go forward

Searching QTL by gene expression: analysis of diabesity

BACKGROUND: Recent developments in sequence databases provide the opportunity to relate the expression pattern of genes to their genomic position, thus creating a transcriptome map. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) are phenotypically-defined chromosomal regions that contribute to allelically variant biological traits, and by overlaying QTL on the transcriptome, the search for candidate genes becomes extremely focused. RESULTS: We used our novel data mining tool, ExQuest, to select genes within known diabesity QTL showing enriched expression in primary diabesity affected tissues. We then quantified transcripts in adipose, pancreas, and liver tissue from Tally Ho mice, a multigenic model for Type II diabetes (T2D), and from diabesity-resistant C57BL/6J controls. Analysis of the resulting quantitative PCR data using the Global Pattern Recognition analytical algorithm identified a number of genes whose expression is altered, and thus are novel candidates for diabesity QTL and/or pathways associated with diabesity. CONCLUSION: Transcription-based data mining of genes in QTL-limited intervals followed by efficient quantitative PCR methods is an effective strategy for identifying genes that may contribute to complex pathophysiological processes

Estate of Fortier v. City of Lewiston: Is Maine\u27s Tort Claims Act Unintelligible?

In Estate of Fortier v. City of Lewiston, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, was asked to decide if the City of Lewiston was “using” an aircraft under the Maine Tort Claims Act (MTCA) when it chartered a plane from Twin Cities Air Services (Twin Cities) as part of an Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corp (AFJROTC) exercise. Tragically, the pilot and three AFJROTC cadets from Lewiston High School lost their lives when the plane crashed into Barker Mountain shortly after take-off. The families of the students brought suit against Lewiston, in part, alleging negligence on behalf of the high school’s Senior Aerospace Instructor, who was responsible for coordinating the chartered flight as part of the AFJROTC program. A slim majority held that, under the court’s rules of statutory construction, and in the interest of narrowly construing exceptions to immunity under the MTCA, the statutory exception for “use” only applied when the governmental entity had some measure of direct control over the vehicle that was being used. Because the aircraft was under the direct control of Twin Cities’ pilot, Lewiston was not “using” the plane as defined by the MTCA and was thus immune from suit. The dissent would not have equated “use” to “operation,” as it believed the majority did, but instead would have used a broader, plain meaning definition of “use.” When Lewiston chartered the plane as part of its AFJROTC program, this “use” qualified as an exception to the MTCA, allowing the lawsuit to go forward

Discharging State v. Hurd: Maine Rule of Evidence 606(B) Should Not Be Used to Prevent a Jury from Fully Reporting its Verdict

In State v. Hurd, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, was asked to decide if a jury may correct a mistake in the reporting of its verdict, mere moments after leaving the courtroom, once the court had declared that the jury was “discharged.” Ryan Hurd was charged with aggravated OUI, among other things, as a result of a crash involving Hurd’s car, which tragically resulted in one person losing his life. During the trial, because there was a dispute regarding whether Hurd was driving the car himself or asked a second person to drive the car, the trial court instructed the jury that Hurd could be found liable of aggravated OUI either as a principal or as an accomplice. After deliberations, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty with respect to aggravated OUI. However, moments after leaving the courtroom, the court received a note from the jury indicating that they had voted on the additional “charge” of accomplice liability. Over Hurd’s objection, the court allowed the jury to resume “deliberations” on this issue, and the jury returned a verdict of guilty for “aggravated operating under the influence— accomplice liability.” Hurd appealed on the basis that the jury should have been prevented from impeaching its own verdict. The majority agreed with Hurd and held that Maine Rule of Evidence 606(b) prohibited the court from acting on the communication it received from the jury regarding the verdict after the court had discharged the jury. The majority seemed to adopt a bright-line test for “discharge,” which occurred when the court originally announced that the jury was discharged. The dissent, while acknowledging the public policy rationales against inquiring into a jury’s verdict, would have analyzed the issue of discharge through a “functional approach.” In this case, because the jury had not yet separated and was still immune from any outside influences that might have pressured it to change its verdict, the dissent argued, discharge had not occurred, and the jury should have been allowed to correct its verdict. This Note begins, in Part II, by discussing the origins of the policy concerns surrounding juror testimony on deliberations and verdicts and then traces these concerns through the adoption of Rule of Evidence 606(b) to present. Part III will discuss the facts of Hurd as well as the majority’s and minority’s analyses. Part IV will look at the timing of jury discharge and its relation to 606(b) in several other jurisdictions, will delve more deeply into the applicability of the public policy concerns to the specific case of Hurd, and will also discuss several other issues regarding the handling of the Hurd trial. Part V will conclude that the policy reasons behind 606(b) have been grossly distorted through the years and will urge the court to re-examine its rationale for prohibiting juror testimony