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Thursday, July 26, 2007

Ind. Decisions - 7th Circuit posts two Indiana decisions

In Randy P. O'Brien v. Ind. Dept. of Corr. (SD Ind., Judge Hamilton), a 9-page opinion, Judge Kanne writes:

Randy O’Brien has been a prisoner in Indiana since 1996, having been convicted of rape, sexual battery, and burglary. In 2001, he was attacked and beaten by two other inmates. In 2003, he brought suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that the warden was deliberately indifferent to his safety in violation of the Eighth Amendment. In 2005, he sought to add additional defendants to his suit. That motion was denied. The district court entered summary judgment in favor of the defendants. He appeals the denial of the motion to add parties and the entry of summary judgment. For the reasons set forth below, we affirm.

Before his conviction, O’Brien was a corrections officer at the Indiana Youth Center. Almost immediately upon his arrival at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in 1996 he was recognized by other inmates as being a former guard. Realizing that his former life was likely to make him a tempting target for other inmates, he requested that the prison take him into protective custody. * * *

Faced with O’Brien’s status as a former prison guard, the staff at Wabash Valley initially brought him into segregation for his safety. Having considered the nature of the threat against him and the availability of placing O’Brien among the at-risk population in D Housing, the prison chose to place him with the other former police officers, guards, and prosecutors in D Housing. As in Lewis, this decision does not amount to an unreasonable response to a known risk.

Noteworthy also in this opinion is the reference to O'Brien's "Indianapolis attorney C. Bruce Davidson, Jr. "On April 8, 2003, attorney Davidson filed a motion seeking an extra two days to respond to the court’s order. For the purposes of this case Davidson was never heard from again. * * * We now know that Davidson was busy robbing a bank in Cincinnati that November—the first of roughly twenty-five bank robberies that attorney Davidson would commit over the next two years. By January 2004, it became clear that Davidson had abandoned his practice of law."

In Dorel Juvenile Group v. DiMartinis (SD Ind., Judge Hamilton), an 8-page opinion, Judge Rovner writes:

Lois DiMartinis (“DiMartinis”) left her job at Dorel Juvenile Group, Inc. (“Dorel”) to work for a competitor, Summer Infant, Inc. (“Summer Infant”). Both companies produce products for infants, children and their parents. * * * By all accounts, the industry is highly competitive and when DiMartinis began working at Dorel, the company asked her to sign a non-compete agreement. DiMartinis declined to do so but did sign a confidentiality agreement. She worked for Dorel for more than nine years, rising to the position of Director of Marketing. * * *

[Eventually she left and went to work for a competitor.] Dorel filed a complaint for injunctive relief and money damages against DiMartinis. The complaint alleged trade secret misappropriation, unfair competition, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. On the same day that Dorel filed the complaint, the company also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction. * * * At the hearing, Dorel clarified that it was seeking only a six month injunction because it expected that the products at the core of its concerns were going to be introduced to the public in the second quarter of 2007. In practical terms, that meant the injunction would stretch from October 20, 2006 through April 20, 2007. At the end of that time, Dorel expected the information would be public and therefore could no longer be considered confidential or a trade secret. * * *

The district court denied the motion. The court noted that, in order to show entitlement to a preliminary injunction, the plaintiff was required to demonstrate a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits and a substantial threat of immediate irreparable harm if injunctive relief was not granted. If those two thresholds were met, the court would consider the balance of harms to both parties and the public interest. Applying all of those factors, the court found that the principal information at stake in the case was brand positioning strategies in certain categories of the juvenile products industry. The evidence demonstrated that, although the information was sensitive and generally treated as confidential by Dorel, the information also was fairly general, subject to change and evolution, and had a very short shelf life. According to the court, because the industry worked on a cyclical calendar, DiMartinis’s new employer would be able to do little with the information before it became public when the products were released into the marketplace. The court found that the evidence did not support the defendant’s theory of inevitable disclosure and that there was no evidence of bad faith or purposeful disclosure by DiMartinis. * * *

The only injunction on appeal is the six month injunction that was set to expire on April 20, 2007. Because we cannot grant any meaningful relief in regards to the injunction that Dorel requested, the appeal must be dismissed as moot. We do not intend for our opinion to be construed as a judgment on the merits of the underlying dispute between Dorel and DiMartinis.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 26, 2007 01:19 PM
Posted to Indiana Decisions