This case is a bankruptcy appeal involving dairy farmer Dallas Stevenson and his corporation Stevenson Trucking, both of whom signed a note and conditional sales contract for a 1978 Mack tractor. The district court held that the corporation was ineligible for relief under the bankruptcy laws intended for individuals, but that Stevenson personally qualified as a debtor entitled to protection. The court affirmed the bankruptcy judge's confirmation of a modified repayment plan requiring Stevenson to pay $1,675 per month, conditioned on his payment of all required insurance on the tractor within five days or else the order would become void. The reasoning emphasized that the bankruptcy statute's purpose is to give individual debtors temporary protection from creditors provided they maintain the collateral in accordance with the sales contract terms.
In Reddix v. Thigpen, a federal district court considered a habeas corpus petition from a Mississippi death row inmate convicted of capital murder during a 1974 store robbery. The petitioner was present with an accomplice who struck and killed the victim using a wrench, but the petitioner was unarmed, did not strike the victim, and had no intent or plan to kill. The court granted the writ, vacated the death sentence, and ordered the petitioner's immediate release, reasoning that under the Supreme Court's decision in Enmund v. Florida the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit imposing the death penalty on a defendant who neither took life, attempted to take life, nor intended to take life, and that the petitioner had already been sufficiently punished for the underlying robbery. The opinion emphasized that the Mississippi capital murder statute's felony murder provision did not require proof of intent to kill.
This case involves two consolidated civil actions by plaintiffs Thomas Webb and Hartley Peavey against the United States seeking recovery of income taxes paid for 1977 and 1978 after the IRS disallowed claimed ordinary loss deductions. The plaintiffs had exchanged promissory notes for newly authorized common stock in Sound Systems, Limited, a corporation they founded that had sustained substantial operating losses, and one plaintiff also sought to deduct a diesel tax payment made on behalf of a prior business. The court decided in favor of the government and dismissed the complaints, ruling that the stock did not qualify as Section 1244 stock because the notes exchanged for it constituted securities and were worthless at the time of the exchange. The court further held that the diesel tax payment was not deductible under Sections 162 or 212 of the Internal Revenue Code because it was not an ordinary and necessary expense of the plaintiff's own trade or business or tax liability.
The case involved Dennis Ronald Sheehan and his wife suing the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act for damages from Mr. Sheehan's alleged exposure to radiation during Army service in 1952-1953, including claims of negligence in exposure, concealment of risks, and failure to warn both during and after service. The court dismissed all claims, concluding they were barred by sovereign immunity under the Feres doctrine and by the FTCA's two-year statute of limitations. The court reasoned that the Feres doctrine precludes government tort liability for injuries to servicemen arising out of or in the course of activity incident to service, that the failure-to-warn claims formed a continuing tort tied to military service and thus were also barred, and that Mr. Sheehan's injuries had manifested and his claim had accrued by 1979 at the latest, well before his 1981 administrative filing. Mrs. Sheehan's claim was separately barred for failure to exhaust administrative remedies.
The case involved Dr. and Mrs. Lane seeking a refund of over $28,000 in federal income taxes and penalties paid for 1974 after the IRS disallowed deductions for partnership losses from an apartment complex called Captain Grant Apartments, Phase II, as well as certain interest and miscellaneous expenses. The court ruled that the taxpayers were not entitled to deduct the losses or the interest payments because a related corporation, not the partnership, owned and operated the property during the first nine months of 1974. The core reasoning was that the corporation was an active business entity with title to the assets and operations, and the taxpayers were bound by the corporate form they had chosen without fraud or mistake; the interest was likewise a corporate obligation. The court disallowed the asserted penalty under Section 6653(a).
This case concerns whether the EEOC could investigate a sex discrimination charge against Mississippi College, a Baptist-owned religious educational institution, after it declined to hire Dr. Patricia Sumners, a female Presbyterian, for a psychology faculty position and instead hired a male Baptist. The court decided that the EEOC had no jurisdiction to issue or enforce its subpoena, because the college qualified for the statutory exemption from Title VII for religious institutions regarding employment connected to their religious activities. The core reasoning was that any EEOC investigation would require improper government entanglement with the college's religious hiring practices and beliefs, violating the First Amendment's free exercise clause as interpreted in precedents shielding religious organizations from federal oversight of ministerial and faith-related employment decisions.