Court won't toss race-riot lawsuit: Black Woman Killed by Whites - Police Did Nothing

A federal appeals court has declined to dismiss a lawsuit filed against York City and five former city police officers, meaning the suit may proceed towards a trial set for January. The city and the officers were sued in 2003 by the family of Lillie Belle Allen, a black woman killed during the 1969 race riots. The Allen family alleges that the officers, including former Mayor Charles Robertson, did nothing to prevent Allen's death at the hands of white gang members and in fact encouraged the whites to kill blacks. The defendants had asked U.S. Middle District Court Judge Yvette Kane to dismiss the suit, partly because, they argued, the statute of limitations had run out. Kane denied the request, and the defendants appealed her ruling. Yesterday, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal because the court lacks jurisdiction to rule on it. "Denials of statute of limitations defenses ... are not subject to immediate appellate review," Judge Edward R. Becker wrote in an opinion on the court's Web site. This was the third Appeals Court ruling related to the suit this year. In February, the court upheld Kane's decision that the city's insurer, Clarendon National, is off the hook for the Allen suit, leaving the city facing uninsured what could be a massive award to Allen's family. Then, last month, the Appeals Court upheld Kane's opinion that the suit could not be thrown out because of qualified immunity, which protects public employees from suits involving the performance of their jobs. In her original opinion last March, Kane denied the request for dismissal because "the statute of limitations does not begin to run until a plaintiff has discovered or, exercising reasonable diligence, should have discovered an injury and its cause."  The York Dispatch (York, PA) April 14, 2005

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• All-white Jury May Hear Race Riot Trial [more]