Posts Tagged ‘deadline’
Death Row appeal lost in the mail. Alabama says, “So what!”
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear an appeal from a death row inmate who faces execution after a mailroom mix-up at one of the nation’s most prominent law firms.
Lawyers at the firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, had agreed to represent Cory R. Maples, a death row inmate in Alabama, without charge. When an Alabama court sent two copies of a ruling in Mr. Maples’s case to the firm in New York, its mailroom sent them back unopened and stamped “Return to Sender.”
Two associates handling Mr. Maples’s case had indeed left the firm, but it appears that no one told the court or the mailroom that new lawyers there had taken over. A court clerk in Alabama put the returned envelopes into the court file and did nothing more…
In urging the court not to hear the case, Troy King, Alabama’s attorney general, wrote that Mr. Maples had been represented by “a team of attorneys from a multimillion-dollar law firm” who should know that rules are rules.
“Filing deadlines apply to death row inmates,” Mr. King wrote. “Countless attorneys have missed filing deadlines over the years, and state and federal courts routinely dismissed their client’s tardy appeal as a consequence. This case is no different, and it presents nothing new or nationally compelling.”
Mr. Garre responded that the case, Maples v. Thomas, No. 10-63, was hardly routine. Among other things, he said, “the state contributed to the missed deadline” and “a man’s life is at stake.”
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal. Which surprises me as much as the cold heart of the Alabama Attorney General doesn’t.
Pharmco missed deadline – loses patent extension!
The United States Patent and Trademark Office on Friday again denied the Medicine Company’s request to extend the life of the patent protecting its main drug, the blood thinner Angiomax.
Medicines has been trying since 2001 to undo an error, when it narrowly missed a 60-day deadline for requesting the patent extension. Because the patent office would not accept the late application, the patent has been scheduled to expire next Tuesday, rather than in late 2014.
On Tuesday, however, a federal judge ordered the patent office to reconsider its rejection of the extension, suggesting the agency had been too strict in interpreting the law regarding the 60-day deadline. The judge, Claude M. Hilton of the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., also told the patent office to keep the patent in force while it conducted its reconsideration.
By Friday, however, the patent office had already concluded its review, telling the company that it would stick with its previous decisions and would not accept the company’s application.
The decision, and especially how rapidly it was made, stunned and infuriated the company…
The Patent Office is, after all, usually ready to rollover for corporate America.
In a 15-page decision, accompanied by more than 300 pages of attachments, the Patent Office defended its decision. It said Medicines had waited until the last minute to file the fairly simple patent extension application. It also said the company did not sue the patent office until the patent had nearly expired, instead spending years lobbying Congress. “MDCO’s dire situation is therefore exclusively of its own making,” it said.
FDA warns makers of unapproved narcotics
Seeking to remove unapproved drugs from the marketplace, the Food and Drug Administration has ordered nine companies to stop manufacturing narcotics whose therapeutic claims have not been proved.
The FDA’s warning letters notified the companies they may be subject to legal action if they do not stop manufacturing and distributing “prescription unapproved products” that include high-concentrate morphine sulfate oral solutions and immediate-release tablets containing morphine sulfate, hydromorphone or oxycodone.
This action does not include oxycodone capsules. All of these drugs are used for pain relief and are forms of previously approved medications…
If these drugs are not off the market by those deadlines, a company could face seizure of the narcotics and legal action…
The FDA believes Americans have access to plenty of legal narcotics for pain relief and removing these unapproved drugs will not create a shortage.
Anyone remember the FDA standing up on their hind legs like this…oh, say, a couple of years ago?
