Casino Lawsuit - NM slot malfunction submitted to Supreme Court

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) – A New Mexico attorney says Native American gambling casinos have become big business, such an expansive enterprise that he believes they should be exempted from a cornerstone of Indian legal authority – tribal sovereignty.
Sam Bregman has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case where a client, retired Albuquerque city worker Gary Hoffman, sued Sandia Resort and Casino over what the tribe characterized as a malfunctioning slot machine that displayed a $1.6 million jackpot.
Bregman represented Hoffman in a lawsuit, but a state District Court judge dismissed it and the New Mexico Court of Appeals upheld that decision. Both rulings supported Sandia Pueblo's position that the tribe can't be sued because of the tribe's sovereign immunity.
Sandia attorney David Mielke said there's nothing to debate.
Sovereignty is an endowed right for tribes, he said, going way back to an 1831 Supreme Court ruling involving the Cherokee Nation and Georgia, where justices determined Indian tribes hold the authority to govern themselves and negotiate agreements with other governments.
“You can't take a tribe into a different jurisdiction. Each is recognized as a government,” Mielke said.
Applying similar reasoning, he added, “You can't sue the state of New Mexico in Texas.”
After New Mexico's Supreme Court declined to take the case, Bregman filed a request this summer asking the U.S. Supreme Court to look at it. Because the nation's highest court chooses cases it will consider, there's no guarantee the dispute will get that far.
Bregman's argument is that tribal gambling has grown into a wealthy business across the United States, far removed from issues that he says are central to sovereignty, such as Indian water and land rights or tribal self-governance.
According to the National Indian Gaming Association, tribal casinos reported $26.2 billion in revenues in 2009. Meanwhile, Bregman said slot machine malfunctions have been reported at Indian casinos in Minnesota, Oklahoma, Florida and elsewhere.
“Tribes spend millions of dollars every year to lure non-Native Americans onto their grounds to gamble in a commercial casino environment,” Bregman said. “Then when someone feels they've been cheated, they say, 'Sorry, you can't sue us.”'
Hoffman's dispute started in 2006, when he thought he had won $1.6 million on a nickel slot machine at Sandia Pueblo's casino just north of Albuquerque, only to be told by casino managers the machine had malfunctioned.
Bregman said Hoffman was given $385 and two dinner passes.
Mielke said the slot machine in question offered a maximum payout of $2,500 and gamblers were told so on a disclaimer mounted on the machine's front panel. He called such malfunctions “very rare” but said slot machines are computers, and like any machine, they can break and work improperly.
Asked about Bregman's sovereignty argument, Mielke said some immunity is waived under New Mexico's tribal gaming compact but those instances are limited to personal liability, such as slip-and-fall lawsuits, and issues involving damage to property.
Mielke said Sandia hasn't had another malfunction since Hoffman's case, despite the casino's 2,100 slot machines performing about 8 million spins daily. He said when a machine begins “acting up in your favor, people tend to continue playing.”
Bregman was skeptical, saying it's improbable an Indian casino would ever inform gamblers they hadn't really lost money.
“Apparently, these malfunctions only work one way,” Bregman said. “There is an undercurrent, we believe, of Native American casinos refusing to pay the large jackpots because they feel they can get away with it. They don't have to answer to anybody for it.”