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The plaintiffs, In Defense of Animals and Patricia Haight brought suit against the defendants, Michael Berens, the principal research investigator of the study in question, and the Barrow Neurological Institute, St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, Catholic Healthcare West Arizona, and Catholic Healthcare West, his employers, under the False Claims Act. In 1997, defendant Michael Berens, Ph.D., submitted a grant application to the NIH in which he sought federal funding for a project to develop a canine model to study glioma, a form of human brain cancer, and attempted to
create a process for implanting gliomas in the brains of beagles. The plaintiffs brought suit against Dr. Berens under the False Claims Act asserting that he had lied in his grant application in order to obtain NIH funding. The district court granted summary judgment to the defendants, holding that the plaintiffs failed to produce sufficient evidence from which a reasonable jury could find that the challenged grant application statements were objectively false.
In response, the plaintiffs filed a notice to appeal 51 days later, relying on a circuit court precedent allowing plaintiffs 60 days to file a notice of appeal in these types of cases.
However, an intervening Supreme Court decision declared that plaintiffs have only 30 days to file a notice to appeal in this type of case.
This case was amended and superseded by
US ex rel Haight v. Catholic Healthcare West
, 602 F.3d 949 (9th Cir., 2010).
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