Published: April 09, 2007

WV Family Foundation to file table game suit this week

By Mannix Porterfield
Register-Herald Reporter

By Mannix Porterfield

REGISTER-HERALD REPORTER

A legal challenge to West Virginia’s new law allowing casino-style gambling in four dog-and-horse track counties could be hurled before the week is out.

If not, Lewisburg attorney Barry Bruce says the litigation should be launched by the start of next week.

“We keep getting more information and more stuff to file on it,” Bruce said Monday.

“It keeps on expanding. We’re trying to get everything accomplished this week with a final draft to file, or the first of next week. It’s becoming more and more complex with the information we continue to gain. We’re lining up experts to testify. That’s where we are.”

After a great deal of convulsion over the issue, lawmakers agreed to let voters in Jefferson, Ohio, Hancock and Kanawha counties decide whether to allow table games at tracks in their areas.

All four counties have scheduled special elections June 9, triggering speculation the West Virginia Family Foundation, a conservative Christian group that is leading the opposition, would seek injunctions to block them.

Ray Lambert of Beckley, the group’s chairman, acknowledged the foundation is considering an injunction to prevent any of the four counties from having an election, but other legal options are in hand.

“Seeking a declaratory judgment is another,” he said.

Overall, the main thrust is to file a civil suit and use any local actions as “a stepping stone to get us to the West Virginia Supreme Court, which we believe will have the final say,” Lambert said.

“We want to attack it at its roots so we can kill it,” he said.

“We’re confident that is unconstitutional. The West Virginia Supreme Court has already ruled that the slot machine bill fell under the lottery because it could be owned, operated and regulated by the state.”

Bruce said he can attack the table game law from a number of ways.

“What we want to do is get a quick way to get a final resolution and make sure the Supreme Court has all the information before them,” the attorney said.

“There are a lot of complicated issues. The intellectual property issue is in there. There’s the equal protection under the laws issue.”

Lambert’s group announced it would challenge the law on the final day of the recent session, even before Gov. Joe Manchin signed the bill.

“How can you own table games?” Lambert asked, drawing a distinction between the 1984 lottery amendment and this year’s law.

“There’s no switch you can turn the table games off like you can a lottery terminal.”

What’s more, the group is considering a challenge to the “intellectual properties” clause in the act, saying this phrase is traditionally applied to compositions, literature and other copyrighted materials, or inventions with patents, all of which involve an exercise of the intellect.

“How can you consider table games, blackjack and poker, as intellectual properties, since they’ve been played for eons and eons?” Lambert asked.

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com