Summary: Supreme Court vacates DC circuit ruling on Bannon conviction Justice Department supports dismissal of Bannon contempt charges Bannon convicted for defying congressional Jan. 6 subpoena The Supreme Court on Monday cleared a path for Stephen K. Bannon’s effort, backed by the Justice Department, to dismiss his conviction for defying a congressional subpoena related to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. In a brief, unsigned order Monday morning, the court vacated a judgment by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upholding Bannon’s conviction. The high court sent the case back to the appeals court for reconsideration in light of a motion to dismiss that the Justice Department filed two months ago. Bannon, an influential right-wing podcaster and former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, spent four months in prison in 2024 after a jury found him guilty on two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress. Bannon had refused to respond to demands for testimony and documents by a House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, the jury found. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2024 upheld the convictions, and the full appeals court later declined to rehear the case. In October, Bannon appealed to the Supreme Court. The high court had previously denied his request to postpone his prison sentence pending his appeal. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the Justice Department has sought to undo a number of criminal cases brought by prosecutors in prior administrations, employing sweeping orders as well as smaller-scale interventions. In one of his first acts in office, Trump issued a blanket pardon to more than 1,500 people who had been convicted or charged in connection with Jan. 6 — a series of cases that had emerged from the largest investigation in the Justice Department’s history. Trump has directed a purge of prosecutors and federal investigators who worked on those cases. More akin to its intervention in the Bannon case, the department told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in September that it would no longer defend the conviction of Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser during his first administration, who served a four-month sentence for defying a congressional subpoena. The department also recently agreed to give former national security adviser Michael Flynn a payout to settle claims that he was wrongfully prosecuted as part of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Bannon’s most recent petition to the Supreme Court argued that he was following the advice of his attorney in refusing to cooperate with the congressional subpoena. He also says he believed that records the committee sought were protected by executive privilege, a constitutional principle that shields the internal communications of presidents’ top aides. The trial judge did not allow him to use those arguments as a defense in court. This time, the Justice Department — which had prosecuted Bannon’s case under the Biden administration — is supporting his bid to reverse his convictions. In a February filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the justices to reverse the appeals court ruling and send the case back to trial court for dismissal. Such an outcome “is in the interests of justice,” Sauer wrote. The Justice Department has concurrently laid the groundwork for that dismissal in lower court. In another sign of shifting priorities, Justice Department attorneys moved last month to dismiss charges against two former Louisville police officers accused of wrongdoing related to the 2020 raid that led to Breonna Taylor’s death. And officials have taken other steps to walk back consent decrees with police departments across the country secured during the Biden administration. Salvador Rizzo contributed to this report.

A federal civil jury on April 2 awarded a $307.6 million verdict to a Detroit man who alleges he suffered in prison for more than two years because the state's former prison health care contractor would not pay to reverse his colostomy. Former Michigan inmate Kohchise Jackson alleged in a lawsuit filed in 2019 that he had to serve his entire prison sentence with a stinky and leaky plastic bag attached to his side because the state's former prison health care contractor, Corizon Health, did not want to pay for surgery to reverse his colostomy, as a cost-cutting measure. A jury deliberated just a little over two hours in federal court in Detroit April 2 before returning the verdict. It awarded $300 million in punitive damages against defendant CHS TX, Inc., the company that purchased Corizon Health after its 2023 bankruptcy, and $100,000 in punitive damages against Dr. Keith Papendick, who was Corizon's "director of utilization management" while Jackson was in prison from 2017 to 2019. The jury also awarded $7.5 million in compensatory damages against CHS TX. "I think that this jury recognized the basic human rights and the constitutional rights of everybody," Detroit attorney Jonathan Marko, who represented Jackson, said after the verdict. "This is a warning shot across the bow to for-profit health care companies" that get their money from taxpayers, through the prison and jail system, Marko said. During the trial, a New York City man who was a top official with Corizon, Isaac Lefkowitz, refused to answer questions when he was called to the witness stand, citing his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, court records show. "This is a criminal enterprise," Marko told jurors during his closing argument. Lefkowitz "was scared of being criminally prosecuted in this courthouse." Adam Masin, a New York attorney representing defendants CHS TX and Papendick, told jurors during his closing that Lefkowitz's appearance in the case was just one of a series of distractions in a trial he called "a circus" and "a spectacle." Lefkowitz had nothing to do with Jackson's lawsuit because he did not become a Corizon official until 2021, long after Jackson was released from prison and the same year the MDOC's five-year, $716 million contract with Corizon ended, Masin argued. Lefkowitz is also not currently a director of CHS TX and has no current role with the defendant company, Masin told jurors. The trial also heard testimony from former Corizon employees, not all of whom worked in Michigan prisons, who testified for Jackson and the defendants. Masin, who declined to comment when reached by telephone after the verdict, described much of the plaintiff's case as "random, unproven stories ... intended to distract you." He said Jackson's lawyers "relied too much on self-serving prison gossip." The Michigan Department of Corrections was not a defendant in the case. Jackson, 44, of Detroit, who alleged deliberate indifference to his serious health needs, was paroled in May 2019 after serving two years and two months in prisons near Jackson and St. Louis. He developed a hole in his colon in 2016, before he was sent to prison. It happened while he was in the St. Clair County Jail in Port Huron, awaiting trial on charges that included assault with a dangerous weapon. Doctors outside prison treated Jackson with a colostomy, which diverted his colon and the human waste it carried to a plastic bag, through a hole in his side. Jackson alleges he was supposed to have surgery to reverse the colostomy in February 2017. Instead, Corizon left him with it. He alleges the bag frequently leaked, sending waste onto himself and his bunk; smelled bad; and he sometimes had to clean out the bag and reuse it when prison replacements were not available, making his prison stay traumatic and dangerous. "Nobody wanted to be my bunkie, for sure," Jackson told the Detroit Free Press in a 2019 interview. "I didn't get along well with others, because of the bag and the smell," which resulted in "a couple of altercations," he said. Marko said the case was about justice not just for Jackson but for tens of thousands of prisoners who have received inadequate health care while in prison from contractors seeking to maximize their profits. He asked the jury to award Jackson $75 million in compensatory damages and $650 million in punitive damages. "You have the power to stop them," Marko said of prison health care providers who have harmed prisoners, in urging jurors to return a large verdict. "Claw back that taxpayer money." Masin argued that at least 1 million Americans live with colostomy bags and there is no medical consensus on how quickly a colostomy should be reversed. Performing the surgery would have come with medical risks, Masin told jurors. What's clear, he said, was that there was no pressing medical need for the reversal surgery, which Jackson had done after he was released from prison and suffered no ill effects. It was also false that Corizon would save money by denying Jackson the reversal surgery, Masin said. If approved while Jackson was in prison, the surgery would have been paid for by Medicaid, he said. "What if this man had a life sentence?" asked Ann Arbor attorney Ian Cross, who also represents Jackson. "Is it fine for him just to wear a bag for the rest of his life?" This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: “Jury awards former Michigan inmate $307.6M in prison health care suit” USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Summary: Gainwell Technologies accused of submitting $500 million false Medicaid claims U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin allows second amended complaint Whistleblowers include former chief medical officer Brian Daley Long-standing claims that the Eleanor Slater Hospital defrauded Medicaid out of nearly a half-billion dollars by having its fiscal agent, Gainwell Technologies, submit "fraudulent" claims are back on the federal court docket. And now, the federal government has weighed in with an opinion on the law that lets the case go forward. What's behind the lawsuit? Allegations by two former top doctors at the state-run hospital and the former chief financial officer that Gainwell had a central role in a decades-long fraud at the state-run hospital involving bilking Medicaid for up to $100 million a year, while "improperly warehousing, undertreating, and overmedicating ... primarily mentally disabled patients." The suit alleges almost $500 million in "false" claims between 2016 and 2021 alone. Gainwell remains the state's fiscal agent for Medicaid and has denied any wrongdoing or legal responsibility. The company is also responsible for navigating the state's current financial reporting dilemma related to Medicaid payments. The lawsuit is aimed at the state's fiscal agent, instead of the state of Rhode Island and the state agency known as the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH) that runs the state hospital, because of legal barriers to filing this kind of whistleblower case against a state, including sovereign immunity. Kerri White, a spokeswoman for the umbrella agency known as the Executive Office of Health and Human Services that oversees BHDDH, said: "The State is not a party in the Gainwell case and has no comment." Why the case is moving forward U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin initially dismissed the complaint but recently opened the door to fresh arguments by the whistleblowers who brought the complaint. Sorokin then asked the federal government to weigh in on whether a third party, such as Gainwell, could be held liable "for knowingly causing the submission" of false Medicaid claims. U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley answered, advising Sorokin that a fiscal agent can be liable for the submission of a false claim to Medicaid if it failed to stop the payment, or "recklessly" or "deliberately ignored" evidence that a claim violated Medicaid rules. The prosecutor’s filing came just days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order forming a task force, led by Vice President JD Vance and including the Department of Justice, to crack down on state-level fraud in benefit programs, including Medicaid, according to Bloomberg Law, which was the first to report the federal government's entry into the case. What is the lawsuit about? The case, initially filed under seal in June 2022, centers on allegations that Gainwell and unnamed administrators of the hospital, which operates on two campuses in Cranston and Burrillville, "schemed" between 2016 to 2021 to overcharge the Medicaid program in multiple ways. The suit alleges billings for nursing home-level services at a hospital that was not licensed as a nursing home, and at levels that did not reflect the actual cost of the services. Meanwhile, it said, the hospital manipulated patient counts to minimize the number of mentally ill patients. Brian Daley, the hospital's former chief medical officer, Assistant Chief Medical Officer Andrew Stone and former Chief Financial Officer Jennifer White allege that the hospital submitted numerous fraudulent bills to Medicaid, “to the tune of hundreds of millions of federal and state health care dollars,” which Gainwell then approved. "On average," the suit says, Eleanor Slater billed Medicaid almost $550,000 per patient, per year, which is almost four times the state average. And the average stay for each patent was more than nine years. Beyond the financial games, the whistleblowers said that the hospital's patients suffered. "In this rules-free zone, patients were grievously harmed. Psychiatric and developmentally disabled patients were warehoused in ESH, a physically deteriorating state hospital ... for years or decades." Lawsuit: Patients restrained all day, every day and subjected to abuse The suit specifically references Daley meeting a patient in 2018 who had been there since 1958, having been hospitalized for 60 years. "There simply is no medical or psychiatric illness that would require anyone to be in a hospital for 60years, especially a licensed acute-care hospital which ESH was supposed to be," the suit says. "That patient, however, was just the tip of the iceberg." The suit details patients locked in rooms, subjected to physical and sexual harm, and held in physical restraints, such as TAT belts, a kind of wrist-to-wrist restraint that acts like the shackles or handcuffs used in prisons. Patients were held in these conditions, with restraint, "all day, every day, for years, including sleeping hours." "Some were subjected to physical and sexual abuse by dangerous criminals who were transferred to ESH from prison simply because the state had nowhere else to put them," the lawsuit says. Some of the allegations were reported by various news outlets, including The Providence Journal, during then-Gov. Gina Raimondo's administration. How did we get here? Sorokin dismissed the lawsuit in 2025. But he agreed in December to allow the plaintiffs to file a second amended complaint. In his order, he noted that the whistleblowers had not produced a "communication between the state and Gainwell that would support an inference that Gainwell was in on the state’s scheme against the federal government." However, the facts in the new complaint "plausibly allege" that Gainwell acted with "at least, reckless disregard" when it came to the hospital's fraudulent Medicaid billing practices. Sorokin said that the facts presented suggest that even a "simple review" of the hospital's operations would have caused concern for Gainwell, particularly its nursing home designation. "Taken together, these facts suggest that Gainwell acted beyond mere mistake or negligence," Sorokin wrote. This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI hospital 'warehoused' mentally ill patients. Now, a lawsuit is moving forward. Reporting by Katherine Gregg, Providence Journal / The Providence Journal USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect