Neither Mohawk Indian governmental nor sovereignty rights are violated by the application of a provision of New York’s “scaffold law” to injuries a worker suffered during a fall while working on a privately owned building on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, a state appeals court has ruled.
Other upstate New York appeals court panels also held recently that a major Tennessee-based seller of cigarettes is liable for more than $1 million in state taxes for under-reporting income he made from tobacco sales to American Indian vendors in New York and that two upstate counties illegally closed Cayuga Indian cigarette stores and seized their products last year in New York’s Seneca and Cayuga counties for non-payment of tobacco taxes.
