December 11, 2023 — The National Marine Fisheries Service must pay attorney fees for Gulf of Mexico charter captains who successfully challenged the agency’s requirement for them to pay for vessel monitoring systems.
The settlement approved by the U.S. Fifth District Court of Appeals calls for the U.S. Department of Commerce and NMFS to pay $160,000 for lawyers of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a non-profit legal foundation who represented lead plaintiff Allen Walburn, a Naples, Fla., charter operator and five other Gulf captains.
The appeals court Feb. 23 decision “struck down the VMS monitoring requirement implemented by the Department of Commerce and the other defendants under the Administrative Procedure Act and strongly implied it was prohibited as an unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution,” wrote John Vecchione, senior litigation counsel for the NCLA, in a Dec. 8 email to the captains.