Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals News

A group of 12 Mississippi Gulf Coast homeowners is using a novel legal strategy to try to recoup losses suffered during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Hundreds of victims of an alleged $7 billion Ponzi scheme are celebrating after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ordered court-appointed receiver, Ralph Janvey, to return millions back to innocent investors.

Columbia does not have to pay a group of designers, architects and builders up to $4 million for a city-funded hotel that was never built, a judge ruled Wednesday.

A condemned killer who prosecutors said had been faking mental illness to avoid execution won a reprieve from a federal judge less than two hours before he could have been taken to the Texas death chamber Tuesday evening.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee has set a modern record for sluggishness in the impeachment proceedings against federal District Judge Thomas Porteous of Metairie.

Some of alleged swindler Allen Stanford's investors, including baseball star Johnny Damon, will see their funds returned after a U.S. appeals court ruled the receiver in the fraud case may not sue them.

Republican senators are somehow surprised by negative publicity over their vote endorsing Halliburton's gang rape cover-up. Both of my senators have attempted damage control.

I've ignored until now a Texas case receiving international notoriety in which jurors consulted some of the more punitive verses in the Christian Bible during deliberations in a death penalty case.

The Florida Bar is recommending statewide rules that would make it harder to seal court records and bar judges from hiding the existence of entire court cases, a process known as super-sealing. The proposed rules, unanimously approved by the executive committee of the Bar's board of governors, would impose tough new requirements on those who seek ...

A federal appeals court has upheld a 20-year prison sentence for a former North Carolina teacher convicted of taking children out of state to have sex with them.

Kermit Oliver's work Resurrection is over the altar in the Morrow Chapel at Trinity Episcopal Church, 1015 Holman.

It's now up to a federal judge in New Orleans to decide whether to put a challenge to campaign finance restrictions on a faster track to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia disagree with the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal today to decide whether the statute of limitations bars prosecution of a Klansman convicted of kidnapping two black youths who were drowned 45 years ago.

Reputed Klansman James Ford Seale lost one appeal argument Monday before the U.S. Supreme Court in his quest to overturn his 2007 federal kidnapping convictions in the deaths of two black teens more than 45 years ago.

A federal judge has turned away an effort to block a new federal law that restricts how tobacco is marketed and gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authority over it.

A man convicted of fatally beating and shooting an East Texas man during a burglary almost 12 years ago was executed Thursday, in a case that gained notoriety because jurors may have consulted a Bible to justify his death sentence.Khristian Oliver, 32, was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 6:18 p.m.He told his victim's children, who watched ...

A federal appeals court has reinstated a Metairie man's conviction for a 1999 crime spree in east Jefferson, ruling that a federal judge erred in finding the man's leg shackles violated his right to act as his own attorney during his trial.

A federal appeals court has affirmed a lower court ruling against three Latino voters who tried to change how council members are elected in a Dallas suburb.

One witness who saw 64-year-old Joe Collins being beaten over the head by a rifle-swinging assailant compared it to someone getting pummeled with an ax or a golf club.

Usually when the U.S. Supreme Court declines to take up an appeal, that fact is noted only in a single line on an orders list.