At least for now, being pulled over by a Washington state trooper for driving 11 miles over the limit is costing a Canadian man some $275,000.
That's how much an unnamed 35-year-old British Columbia driver had in his car when he was stopped for speeding south on Interstate 5 on Friday--and that's how much authorities confiscated when he couldn't adequately explain why he was carrying the cash and where it came from, reports the Seattle Times. The freeway is the main north-south thoroughfare from Canada to California and the Mexican border.
The money--$276,640, to be exact--was in one of two suitcases in the car's trunk, the newspaper reports. The driver claimed the stacks of dollar bills it contained came from gambling winnings from successful play at 23 casinos in three different states, but couldn't produce receipts. The arresting trooper searched the car because the driver, although he provided a valid license, "struggled to tell the trooper where he was going and how long he had been in Washington," AP reports.
If a legitimate source for the money can be determined, it will be returned to the driver.
At issue is whether the White House has the power to keep an alleged victim from seeking redress in US courts.
In December 2003, German citizen Khaled el-Masri boarded a bus in Germany for a holiday in Skopje, Macedonia. Instead of a restful vacation, the Muslim man of Lebanese heritage says he ended up in a Central Intelligence Agency isolation cell in Afghanistan as a suspected terrorist. He was released after five months of interrogation with no explanation justifying the action or apology if it was a mistake.
Now, nearly four years later, his lawyers are asking the US Supreme Court to examine whether the Bush administration has the power to prevent Mr. Masri from seeking recourse in American courts.
Masri's lawyers claim that the CIA kidnapped and tortured an innocent man. The government has never responded directly to the accusation. Instead, Justice Department lawyers asked a US judge to throw the case out of court to prevent disclosure of state secrets. He did.
At issue in El-Masri v. US is the government's use of the so-called state-secrets privilege. The judicial doctrine provides that some legal cases must be dismissed if the central evidence in the court battle would require disclosure of national security secrets. The Bush administration is using the same doctrine to block a string of legal challenges to other secret terror-war tactics, including warrantless electronic surveillance in the US.
Back in the 1970s and ’80s, in the wake of post-Watergate reforms, which put a brake on the executive power amassed by Richard M. Nixon, a small group of Republicans — including, most notably, Dick Cheney, who was then President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff and later President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense — abandoned traditional conservatives’ suspicion of concentrated government power and began looking for ways to expand presidential prerogatives. As Charlie Savage, a reporter for The Boston Globe, observes in his astute and harrowing new book, "Takeover,” those efforts made some progress during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, and came to startling fruition under the current administration of George W. Bush and Mr. Cheney, now the vice president.
Indeed, Mr. Savage suggests that after Sept. 11 a “perfect storm of political pressures,” including a compliant, Republican-controlled Congress and a public fearful of further terrorist attacks, enabled an aggressive White House to expand vastly the powers of the executive branch and dangerously tip the constitutional system of checks and balances.
Before a judge renders an opinion, he might rely on case law or consider precedents established by the U.S. Supreme Court. But this week at the federal court in Concord, Magistrate Judge James Muirhead reached for his copy of Green Eggs and Ham.
Muirhead channeled Dr. Seuss after an inmate mailed him a hard-boiled egg to protest his diet at the state prison.
"No fan I am of the egg at hand," Muirhead wrote.
He continued: "I do not like eggs in the file. I do not like eggs any style."
Then Muirhead ordered the egg destroyed.
"Today! Today!" he demanded. "Today I say! Without delay!"
Muirhead could not be reached for comment, but Daniel Lynch, deputy clerk at the U.S. District Court on Pleasant Street, confirmed that the egg had been tossed.
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The defendant in a state senator's lawsuit is accused of causing untold death and horror and threatening to cause more still. He can be sued in Douglas County, the legislator claims, because He's everywhere.
State Sen. Ernie Chambers sued God last week. Angered by another lawsuit he considers frivolous, Chambers says he's trying to make the point that anybody can file a lawsuit against anybody.
Chambers says in his lawsuit that God has made terroristic threats against the senator and his constituents, inspired fear and caused "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants."
The Omaha senator, who skips morning prayers during the legislative session and often criticizes Christians, also says God has caused "fearsome floods ... horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes."
He's seeking a permanent injunction against the Almighty.
Chambers said the lawsuit was triggered by a federal suit filed against a judge who recently barred words such as "rape" and "victim" from a sexual assault trial.
The Philippines Supreme Court has asked a fired judge who claims he is assisted by three elves to stop making threats of “ungodly reprisal.”
The court kicked Florentino Floro Jr. off the bench largely because of his belief in the supernatural, the Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.). A medical clinic determined that the judge was suffering from psychosis.
Since then Floro has battled to get his job back, appearing on TV and winning converts who seek his healing powers. At the same time, a series of unfortunate incidents have befallen the supreme court justices or their families, including serious illnesses and car accidents.
Floro says the person to blame for the mishaps is one of the elves, "Luis," a "king of kings" who is an avenger. He told the newspaper that the elves help him predict the future, but he has never consulted them when issuing judicial decisions.
It took seven years, but Los Angeles federal prosecutors are finally on the verge of putting famed plaintiffs lawyer William Lerach in federal prison.
Several people briefed on the case said Monday that Lerach and the prosecutors had agreed on a binding deal in which Lerach's lawyers would ask for a sentence of 12 months and prosecutors would seek 24 months.
If U.S. District Judge John Walter does not want to sentence Lerach within that range, the deal would be scuttled.
The agreement, said people familiar with the case, would have Lerach pay a fine of $8 million, and would get his former firm -- now known as Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins -- out from under the investigation.
Lerach announced late last month that he would be retiring. He left the firm on Aug. 29.
Lerach has been the target of L.A. federal prosecutors since 2000, when a Beverly Hills ophthalmologist aiming to lessen his prison sentence for insurance fraud told the government that he had been given illegal kickbacks by Lerach while serving as a lead plaintiff in securities class actions.
DETROIT -- A U.S. Justice Department official has been arrested on suspicion of traveling to Detroit over the weekend to have sex with a minor.
John David R. Atchison, 53, an assistant U.S. attorney from the northern district of Florida, was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Detroit Monday afternoon.
An undercover officer posed as a mother offering her child to Atchison for sex, according to police.
Prosecutors said Atchison flew from Pensacola, Fla., to Detroit on Sunday intending to have sex with the 5-year-old girl.
He was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
He is charged with enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity.
After what appears to be a college alumni prank, two New York men are suing their alma mater over an announcement in the school's newsletter stating that they were "life partners" who had been married. It added that they were leaders of a nonexistent group called the Gay Rights Brigade.
Ross Weil, 29, and Brett Royce, 28, college buddies and former New York housemates, filed a $1.5 million defamation suit against American University in Manhattan federal court on Aug. 30, claiming the school acted maliciously and with "gross negligence" by printing the announcement.
The Class Notes section of the spring edition of American Magazine, a quarterly publication for the Washington, D.C., university, asserted that Weil and Royce tied the knot in Boston on June 10, 2006.
The newsletter also trumpeted that Weil, a certified public accountant, was named "chief operating officer of the Gay Rights Brigade," a made-up group.
"No one contacted my clients to check the information," said lawyer Michael Kaufman, who represents Manhattan residents Weil and Royce. "Obviously, neither of my clients submitted it."
Bankruptcy lawyers for Northwest Airlines Corp. were denied $4.2 million in end-of-case bonuses Tuesday, with a judge saying their average rates of about $500 an hour had already provided adequate compensation.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Allan Gropper rejected a $3.5 million bonus for Northwest Airlines' lead law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, which ushered the airline out of bankruptcy in May. A law firm representing creditors, Otterbourg, Steindler, Houston & Rosen, was denied a $700,000 bonus.
Gropper said that for the attorneys to deserve a so-called fee enhancement, their work should have a remarkable result that couldn't be expected from lawyers being paid their regular fees.
A flight attendants union as well as the U.S. Trustee and a creditor-turned-shareholder objected to the bonuses, arguing they were unjustified. Those groups said Northwest's bankruptcy had not produced a remarkable result, since its share price has dropped 22 percent since the company emerged from court protection on May 31.
The Association of Flight Attendants also objected on the grounds that pilots and flight attendants took pay cuts and schedule changes to help the airline out of Chapter 11.
Jackson & Campbell's Robert Rider Jr. concedes that he tapped another firm lawyer on the backside at a party, according to court papers.
But in a civil suit against Rider, 44, Elisa Eisenberg describes the incident as career-ending assault and battery. Eisenberg, 42, a former nonequity partner at the 50-lawyer firm based in Washington, D.C., is suing Rider (also a nonequity partner), Jackson & Campbell, firm president Richard Bryan and former president James Schaller.
In her complaint, filed in June in D.C. Superior Court, Eisenberg says an intoxicated Rider forcefully groped her at a party for a client in June 2006. Eisenberg, who declined to comment, further alleges that Jackson & Campbell created a hostile work environment by refusing to fire Rider, ultimately forcing her to resign the following January.
Eisenberg, who is represented by Lauri Cleary of Lerch, Early & Brewer, is not yet at another firm.
The firm, along with Bryan and Schaller (who both declined to comment), filed a motion to dismiss on Aug. 21.
A federal judge's hair-trigger declaration of a mistrial without polling the jury means the government is now barred by double jeopardy from retrying two white-collar defendants.
In what lawyers for the two men say is an unprecedented decision, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. DeGennaro, 06-4195-cr, said Monday that Eastern District of New York Judge Leonard Wexler abused the considerable discretion given judges for declaring a deadlocked jury.
The ruling is a victory for Michael DeGennaro and Frank Borghese, who were among a group of senior executives at Symbol Technologies, a Long Island bar code scanning company, accused of fraudulent accounting practices and other misconduct designed to boost Symbol's stock price over a five-year period.
A second federal judge has found New York state's persistent felony offender statute unconstitutional because it allows judges to find facts that can lead to a sentence beyond the statutory maximum.
Southern District of New York Judge John Koeltl found that N.Y. Penal Law § 70.10 violated the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial because, under the rapidly evolving case law of the U.S. Supreme Court, a jury has to find the facts that the state law leaves to the judge.
Judge Koeltl granted a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to inmate William Washington in Washington v. Poole, 06 Civ. 2415. The decision comes five months after Eastern District of New York Judge John Gleeson made a similar ruling in a habeas case and just one month after Southern District of New York Judge Robert Sweet went the other way and upheld the law.
These three decisions will now join a fourth that is pending in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Phillips v. Artuz (WL 1867386).
"The constitutionality of these statutes is obviously still in play," said Jonathan Kirshbaum of The Center for Appellate Litigation, who represented Washington.
Before putting the cuffs on Rodel Rodis, the Ninth Circuit says the cops should’ve asked him more questions about his fishy-looking $100 bill.
No doubt.
Because Rodis, it turns out, is a San Francisco lawyer — one who has already helped sue the government for violating people’s rights. So it doesn’t surprise us that he wasn’t the type to forgive and forget when the police brought him down to the station so they could make a phone call to investigate the bill — one that, as it turned out, was perfectly legit.
“The decision is just so satisfying because of what was at stake,” Rodis said Tuesday afternoon, hours after a Ninth Circuit panel published a decision (.pdf) saying he can go ahead and sue two police officers for violating his civil rights. “Any one of us can have a $20 bill, a $50 bill, and we can’t all have a counterfeit detector pen to make sure all the bills we have are genuine.”
Even a pen like that couldn’t keep Rodis, who does mostly civil and immigration work, from arrest back in 2003, though. When he went to pay for “a few items” with a $100 bill, the cashier examined it for authenticity. Because it was really old and appeared to have an unusual texture, she called in her manager. While Rodis paid with another, apparently normal-looking $100, the manager compared the first fishy-looking one to others in the store’s safe, and tested it with the store’s counterfeit detector pen — which indicated the money was real. Still, the manager remained suspicious and called the police, so Rodis waited.
The officers examined the bill and “concluded it was probably counterfeit,” Tuesday’s opinion says, but decided they needed an expert opinion from the Secret Service. Before getting that, though, they arrested Rodis, “because the officers believed it would be easiest to continue the investigation from the police station.”
California attorney Fredric J. Greenblatt represented numerous plaintiffs in a case against something called "Century Crowell Communities, aka Century Vintage Homes." He moved to disqualify opposing counsel on the ground that opposing counsel had "improper contacts with four persons who were clients or former clients of Greenblatt’s law firm."
The trial court denied the motion, apparently noting that the evidence suggested that if anyone had acted improperly, it was Greenblatt, and not his opposing counsel. Unwisely, Greenblatt appealed the denial of his motion. Today, the Court of Appeal summed things up thusly:
Plaintiffs contend the trial court abused its discretion in denying their motion to disqualify defendants’ counsel because (1) defendants’ counsel improperly communicated with adverse parties without consent of plaintiffs’ counsel; (2) the trial court erroneously based its decision on the ground that plaintiffs had failed to show prejudice; and (3) the trial court considered facts and evidence that were not properly before the court. We find no abuse of discretion, and we affirm. In addition, because the face of the record suggests misconduct on the part of [plaintiffs'] counsel, we will refer the matter to the State Bar of California for further investigation and, if appropriate, imposition of sanctions. . . .
[W]e are astonished – as was the trial court – that plaintiffs chose to support their motion to disqualify defendants’ counsel with declarations that on their face indicate improper and unethical conduct on the part of plaintiffs’ own counsel.
Oops. Greenblatt's self-reported misconduct included naming plaintiffs who had never agreed to be part of the lawsuit, and having plaintiffs sign verifications of discovery responses they had never seen. Ramon Ramirez v. Century Crowell Communities (Fourth App. Dist. Div. 2, Aug. 28, 2007) No. E040425.
Questions linger about limits on civil liberties and influence of politics on justice.
WASHINGTON -- As Alberto R. Gonzales closes the door on his Washington career, he leaves an enduring legacy: a Justice Department mired in controversy over the firing of U.S. attorneys and a series of legal and moral challenges to his post-Sept. 11 policies on presidential power, torture and domestic spying.
"This resignation is not the end of the story," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday in a statement that indicated Democrats' intent to continue probing Gonzales' tenure. "Congress must get to the bottom of this mess and follow the facts where they lead, into the White House."
The controversies lingering beyond Gonzales' scheduled departure next month fall into two broad categories: whether he went too far in abridging civil liberties in the name of safeguarding the nation against terrorist threats, and whether he and his subordinates allowed political considerations to intrude improperly on the administration of justice.
In a highly unusual move, U.S. District Judge Martin Jenkins, a life-tenured federal judge in San Francisco, is prepared to give up his seat and has applied for an opening on the California State Court of Appeal bench.
Jenkins, 54, a moderate Democrat and former state trial court judge in Oakland, Calif., was appointed by President Clinton a decade ago. He confirmed rumors that he has submitted an application with Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for the vacancy.
Jenkins declined to discuss his plans further or reasons for his willingness to go from the federal court to state court, where he would face periodic confirmation votes by California voters.
Those close to him have indicated his practice of working long hours and meticulous attention to detail in a large federal caseload has taken a toll.
Refusing to pay $28,000 in attorney fees a decade ago has turned into a more than $250,000 headache for Houston attorney Robert S. "Bob" Bennett.
In an Aug. 16 memorandum opinion in Bennett v. Coghlan, a three-justice panel of Houston's 1st Court of Appeals affirmed an award of tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees that lawyer Kelly Coghlan says he had to run up trying to collect attorney fees Bennett owed him.
The 1st Court's opinion laid out the following: In 1996, Bennett and Coghlan represented parties in an antitrust suit, identified in a footnote as Piggly Wiggly Clarksville Inc., et al. v. Mrs. Baird's Bakeries/Johnny B. Tucker d/b/a/ H&M Grocery, et al. v. Mrs. Baird's Bakeries Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Paris Division. After the litigation in Mrs. Baird's, Coghlan sent Bennett a bill for $28,000, which Bennett refused to pay.
Coghlan, principal in Houston's Coghlan & Associates, says he and Bennett had a verbal agreement that Bennett would pay Coghlan a percentage of the attorney fees for his work on the Mrs. Baird's litigation, a class action involving numerous plaintiffs and attorneys.
This is why we must elect a Democrat -- any Democrat -- to be President next year. We're being governed by a regime heavily beholden to fundamentalist Christian interests which would, if allowed, be just as repressive as the Taliban was in Afghanistan:
[The FCC} fined KCSM, a public broadcaster operated out of San Mateo Community College, $15,000 for profanity that aired in the Martin Scorcese-produced documentary "The Blues: Godfathers and Sons." In a 2006 order, the commission said, "The gratuitous and repeated use of this language [the word "fuck"] in a program that San Mateo aired at a time when children were expected to be in the audience is shocking."
Scorcese replied in a letter to the FCC last year that he had "deep concern over the adverse impact that the FCC's actions will have on the creative process generally."
Why did the FCC pick on tiny KCSM? Because a single viewer complained about it.
"All it takes is one viewer to complain," said Marilyn Lawrence, KCSM's general manager. Given the $200,000 in discretionary spending the station has in its $5 million budget, Lawrence said $15,000 isn't an insignificant amount. Although the station is appealing the fine, KCSM remains skittish about attracting the FCC's attention again.
For a recent art history show it aired, the station instructed its producers to airbrush the nude behind of the Venus de Milo statue. While KCSM has restored the full contours of Venus' marble behind in subsequent airings, it still precedes the program with a "Viewer Discretion Advised" warning that states, "The following program is a college-level telecourse and may contain subject matter intended for mature audiences."
The station also still pixelates bare body parts in movies like 1967's PG-rated "The Graduate" - even when the movie is aired as part of a film-history telecourse. The station is so scared about profanity leaks that it bleeped out a person cursing in German in an English TV program it aired.
"Now, my staff spends at least half a day a week looking for those types of things," Lawrence said.
Financial experts for retailer Sharper Image are expected to testify today that the company could be pushed into bankruptcy if it is forced to pay up to $900 million to settle a class action lawsuit being pushed by 27 state attorneys general and several plaintiffs attorneys.
At a final fairness hearing today, U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga must weigh Sharper Image's financial health against the demands of various plaintiff groups and attorneys general who want customers compensated for $300 air purifiers they say were ineffective.
An estimated 3 million consumers have purchased the San Francisco-based company's Ionic Breeze purifiers since 1999. The machine, which was supposed to remove dust, pollen and other pollution from household air, did not work and in some cases caused more health problems, such as allergies, according to consumers.
Consumer Reports magazine slammed the device in one of its issues.
Details here from the Daily Business Review via Law.com.
