Supreme Court won't hear two Cobell appeals

[Waya]

The plaintiffs in the billion-dollar Indian trust fund lawsuit said they will continue to press the case after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected two of their appeals on Monday.

Without comment, the justices declined to review two recent decisions in the long-running lawsuit. One of them involved the removal of Judge Royce Lamberth from the case at the request of the Bush administration.

Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation who is the lead plaintiff, said she was disappointed the high court didn't act on the appeal. "Until this point, no one on the federal bench had come to understand the more than a century of government wrongdoing in this case better than Judge Lamberth," she said of the Reagan nominee.

But she said the plaintiffs welcomed the assignment of Judge James Robertson, a nominee of former President Bill Clinton, to the case. "Now that the Supreme Court has denied our petition for certiorari, we will turn our full attention to Judge Robertson's courtroom and to efforts to resolve this case expeditiously and fairly," she said. ......


http://indianz.com/News/2007/002080.asp