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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
DANTE DEVON WHITLEY,
Defendant-Appellant. |
No. 20-1955 |
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Western District of Michigan at Grand Rapids.
No. 1:19-cr-00296-1—Paul Lewis Maloney, District Judge.
Argued: April 27, 2022
Decided and Filed: May 18, 2022
Before: SUTTON, Chief Judge; MOORE and GILMAN, Circuit Judges.
_________________________
OPINION
_________________________
RONALD LEE GILMAN, Circuit Judge. Dante Devon Whitley was the subject of a
traffic stop for failing to come to a standstill before exiting a private drive onto a public street.
Prior to pulling Whitley over, law-enforcement officers had been surveilling Whitley for
suspected drug trafficking. During the stop, the officers noticed a digital scale sitting on
Whitley’s lap. They asked Whitley to exit the vehicle so that they could further investigate the
scale. Whitley initially refused, but he eventually complied after his mother arrived. At that
point, a drug-detection dog was brought on the scene and alerted to the presence of narcotics in
Whitley’s vehicle. The officers then conducted a warrantless search. In the vehicle, they found
a Glock 19mm handgun with an extended magazine, ammunition, over $7,600 in cash, a digital
scale, and a pound and a half of marijuana.
Whitley moved to suppress this evidence, as well as several post-Miranda statements that
he made, as fruits of an unlawful stop and search. The district court denied the motion. For the
reasons set forth below, we AFFIRM the judgment of the district court. |
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GREG ADKISSON et al.,
Plaintiffs-Appellees,
v.
JACOBS ENGINEERING GROUP, INC.,
Defendant-Appellant. |
No. 21-5801 |
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Nos. 3:13-cv-00505; 3:13-cv-00666; 3:14-cv-00020; 3:15-cv-00017; 3:15-cv-00274;
3:15-cv-00420; 3:15-cv-00460; 3:15-cv-00462; 3:16-cv-00635;
3:16-cv-00636—Thomas A. Varlan, District Judge.
Argued: March 11, 2022
Decided and Filed: May 18, 2022
Before: SUTTON, Chief Judge; GILMAN and ROGERS, Circuit Judges.
_________________________
OPINION
_________________________
RONALD LEE GILMAN, Circuit Judge. This consolidated action involves a group of
plaintiffs who worked, or had spouses or next of kin who worked, on the Tennessee Valley
Authority’s (TVA’s) coal-ash cleanup, removal, and recovery project at the Kingston Fossil Fuel
Plant (the Plant) in Roane County, Tennessee. Plaintiffs sued Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc.
(Jacobs)—an entity that has served as the TVA’s prime contractor for the coal-ash cleanup since
February 2009—for numerous common-law torts.
After this court reversed and remanded the district court’s initial decision to dismiss the
case for lack of jurisdiction, the district court bifurcated the case and proceeded with Phase I to
determine whether Jacobs should be held generally liable to Plaintiffs. A jury found that Jacobs
had a duty to Plaintiffs, that Jacobs breached that duty, and that Jacobs’s actions were a potential
cause of Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries. Phase II, which has not yet occurred, is intended to assess
specific causation with respect to individual Plaintiffs and the extent to which they are entitled to
damages.
Both before and after Phase I of the trial, Jacobs filed motions seeking derivative
immunity from suit based on its status as a government contractor. The district court denied
Jacobs’s motions. Jacobs subsequently filed yet another motion seeking derivative immunity
based on what it claimed were intervening changes in the applicable law. The district court
construed the motion as one for reconsideration under Rule 54(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil
Procedure. It again denied Jacobs’s motion. This interlocutory appeal concerning Jacobs’s
alleged immunity followed. For the reasons set forth below, we AFFIRM the district court’s
denial of derivative contractor immunity. |
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