Kyros Law has announced that it has filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari in the United States Supreme Court to review the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision affirming the dismissal of the class action lawsuits brought by former WWE wrestlers, claiming they suffered neurological injuries while competing in the ring.
The cases originally brought by Billy Jack Haynes along with Russ McCullough, Matt Wiese and Ryan Sakoda were dismissed by the Connecticut courts in 2016. The wrestlers appealed and were told they had filed too early and ordered to wait for the final outcome in other consolidated cases in the District of Connecticut. Those cases included the Laurinaitis action in which wrestlers Jimmy Snuka, Balls Mahoney, and Mr. Fuji alleged negligence after they were diagnosed postmortem with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE).
Once the Laurinaitis case was dismissed in 2018, Haynes and the other putative class plaintiffs again appealed. This time, the Second Circuit ruled the wrestlers were too late to file their appeals, according to their attorneys. The Court relied on a 2018 Supreme Court Case Hall v Hall decided in the interim which ruled that cases consolidated can now be immediately appealed. The Second Circuit applied the new Hall rule retroactively to deny the wrestlers second appeal. “This 2019 Second Circuit ruling per the wrestlers petition effectively created an impossible ‘Catch-22’ depriving them of any rights to appeal or have any meaningful hearing on the claims they presented,” claims Kyros Law.
The petition also seeks review of Cassandra Frazier’s claims regarding the untimely death of long-time WWE wrestler, Nelson Frazier, “who was similarly denied appellate rights under the Second Circuit interpretation of Hall,” the attorneys claimed.
In response to the petition, WWE attorney Jerry McDevitt issued the following response:
“[Konstantine Kyros] has no automatic right to appeal to the Supreme Court. He has to ask them to accept an appeal, and that is what he filed. The large majority of requests are denied, and the Supreme Court typically takes cases presenting some issue of national import where the courts in the various federal circuits differ on some specific issue of federal law.
“Here, Kyros is asking the Supreme Court to reverse the Second Circuit decision that he filed an appeal too late in the cases of Billy Jack Haynes, Russ McCullough, Matthew Wiese, Ryan Sakoda and Nelson Frazier.
“He is not attempting to have them hear the dismissals of all the other cases, which are now over for good. The lower courts threw those cases out on the basis of state law, which the Supreme Court would not touch.
“It is an exercise in futility, because even if the Supreme Court were to hear his request and find that his appeal on behalf of those five was timely, he would still lose on the merits because their claims are all barred by statute of limitations. In short, a waste of time and money which we don’t think will go anywhere.
“He will, however, have to face a sanctions hearing next month on how much he has to pay WWE.”
