The friend, who did not want to be identified, said Raymond James Duensing, was shot by police several times causing him to receive injuries to his back and arm.
Police said an officer shot Duensing after a traffic stop near Cheyenne Avenue and Jones Boulevard.
Police said the officer fired his weapon after Duensing was asked to get out of his Pontiac rental car because a record’s check indicated he had a warrant for his arrest. Police said Duensing then fled and was unsuccessfully Tased and shot after he reached toward his front right pocket for a .45-caliber handgun. Police also said Duensing reached for a large folding knife.
Not that people in halfway houses aren’t trustworthy… but leaving large sums of money around there probably isn’t a good idea.
Both prisoners eased into halfway houses a full six months before their release dates, taking advantage of a recent change in federal law that allows inmates to do lengthier stretches in community facilities. Weiss resides in Miami, while Lerach is in Southern California.
A BOP spokeswoman would not say why Lerach and Weiss got into halfway houses when they did. Lerach's lawyer, Michael Lipman of Coughlan, Semmer & Lipman in San Diego, did not return a phone call.
Weiss didn't lobby for the placement, said his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman of New York's Brafman & Associates.
"Mel Weiss received the amount of halfway house residency that the Bureau of Prisons approved," Brafman said. "We did nothing to try to increase it, or had any involvement in the process. This happened in prison."
Halfway houses are designed to reintegrate people into the community, says Alan Ellis, a Mill Valley, Calif., attorney who helps convicted defendants navigate the prison system.
"If you need a place to live, they will help you find a place to live. If you need a job, they will help you find a job. If need vocational training, they will help you with that," Ellis said.
I’m presuming these guys still have “a place to live” and neither of them “need a job” or “vocational training.” So, I’m not entirely sure there’s much benefit to them going to a halfway house.
I know I’d be pissed if instead of a legendary surgeon, I got a rookie who botched the job. One wonders if he was charged the same amount of money for the lesser surgeons as the legendary surgeons…
Hodge, who tried the case with partner Ryan Langley, said the jury's verdict proves Hawkins presented to White that he would be performing the surgery, but then allowed the lesser experienced Kissenberth to conduct the operation on Oct. 7, 2004.
"If (patients) think they are going to the greatest shoulder surgeon in the world, they have the right to be operated on by that surgeon," Hodge said. "That's part of making an informed decision."
Hodge said Hawkins was being paid $2 million a year by Triad Hospitals, the company that formerly owned Mary Black Health System, to do surgeries at a facility constructed adjacent to Mary Black Hospital. The attorney said fellows such as Kissenberth and John Franklin, who unsuccessfully operated on White on Aug. 24, 2004, made about $48,000 a year.
On the one hand, I applaud this guy for having the huevos to do this.
Google "Levinson Axelrod" and you find two addresses -- www.levinsonaxelrod.com and www.njlawyers.com -- that bring you to the Edison, N.J., personal injury firm's Web site.
But the query also pulls up www.levinsonaxelrod.net, and clicking that one makes clear that it's not run by the firm. The first words on the home page are "The truth behind the lies."
The site is the creation of Edward Harrington Heyburn, an associate at Levinson Axelrod from 1998 until he was let go in 2004. An audio clip dedicates it "to all the working class people that get stepped on by their rich bosses."
But on the other hand, I seriously question how good of a lawyer the guy can be when he talks about “law suits” and being “sileneced.”
But going back to the other hand… allegations that his former employers told sexually inappropriate jokes and dumped their loser cases on associates so they wouldn’t suffer the embarrassment of a loss does sound pretty plausible to me.
Whether they’re levied as fines, or by a jury as punitive damages, it’s going to be dollar amounts like these that make companies start taking safety as seriously as they should:
The suspected cause of the explosion that killed 15 workers at BP's Texas City, Tex., plant in 2005 was the escape of flammable hydrocarbons that were ignited by the backfire of a truck.
The fine is more than four times the size of any previous OSHA sanction.
My “just in case” kit includes: a full-size floor jack, a tarp, a bottle of water, jumper cables, and a small air compressor. I obviously don’t know how to party like now-former assistant AG Richard Corning:
Roland Corning, 66, a former state legislator, was in a secluded part of a downtown cemetery when an officer spotted him Monday, according to a police report obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.
….
He then searched the SUV, where he found a Viagra pill and several sex toys, items Corning said he always kept with him, "just in case," according to the report.
I for one have my fingers crossed that Congress will undo this oppressive decision.
On Wednesday, the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing called "Access to Justice Denied -- Ashcroft v. Iqbal," on the outsize effect the U.S. Supreme Court's May 2009 ruling has had on civil litigation. The ruling, you'll recall, requires plaintiffs to plead specific factual allegations in their complaints. It has already been cited in almost 3,000 lower court rulings in just five months on the books. (Check here, here and here for our previous coverage of complaints dismissed on Iqbal grounds.)
That’s the headline that I thought of after reading the oh-so-biased headline in the article below about lawsuits over the Yaz birth control pill.
A Newark, Calif., woman and her husband sued drugmaker Bayer in federal court in San Francisco on Monday, saying she suffered a debilitating stroke after taking the company's popular birth control pill Yaz for a month.
Her lawyer, Michael Danko, says he and co-counsel firm Girard Gibbs filed a similar suit last week and are preparing to file more. Hundreds of such suits filed around the country by Danko and other lawyers in the past month or so are just "the tip of the iceberg," triggered by the publication of two recent studies published in the BMJ, a British medical journal, added Danko, of The Danko Law Firm in San Mateo, Calif.
Why not say “Plaintiffs lawyers help girls injured by popular birth control pill,” or “Bayer’s popular birth control pill the subject of lawsuits,” or something else besides “evil plaintiffs lawyers TARGET big, helpful corporation.”
By the way, if you’d like to see additional copies of Yaz lawsuits, follow the prior link to my other site where I’m publishing Yaz documents.
Five times? Would it really be a bad thing if some of these quacks quit practicing medicine due to a big jury verdict?
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Health officials are investigating how a surgeon at Rhode Island Hospital mistakenly operated on the wrong part of a patient's hand, the hospital's fifth wrong-site surgery since 2007. Hospital President Timothy Babineau said in a letter that the mistake Thursday happened on a patient scheduled for surgery on two fingers. A joint on one finger underwent a procedure meant for another.
Perhaps Congress will do just that. Considering that Iqbal allows judges to determine which cases have merit based on their own subjective opinion, I hope Congress gets rid of this decision.
The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold the first congressional hearing on the far-reaching May ruling, which raised the pleading standard for most civil complaints, making it more difficult to keep cases from being thrown out.
Remember a few days ago that I said climate change would be the Achilles heel for the Chamber of Commerce and the anti-consumer, anti-lawsuit hacks who run it?
The White House and environmental groups are turning up the heat on the Chamber of Commerce, and some of its member companies are feeling the burn.
At a National Press Club event last week, seven different reporters tried to ask the chairwoman of Royal Dutch Shell how her oil company could push for climate legislation while maintaining its membership in the Chamber.
Toyota has been inundated with calls and e-mails from Prius owners, pushed by MoveOn.org to demand an explanation of how the automaker’s membership in the Chamber squares with the green vibe it wraps around its hybrid cars.
And New York-based Mohawk Fine Papers — “the largest premium paper manufacturer in North America” — pulled out of the Chamber this week. It was the seventh company to resign over the business lobby’s opposition to climate change legislation.
I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly stupid it would be of trial lawyers not to take advantage of this situation to drive members and membership dollars away from the Chamber. Look, the Chamber is already blaming defections of companies like Apple on trial lawyers anyway. So instead of standing on the sidelines and playing the scapegoat, why not go on the offensive and hit them where it hurts?
Put the pressure on. Make them spend their dollars defending their (outlandish) position instead of advocating for the dismantlement of the civil justice system.
I am so out of touch with the world of evangelism.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- A fugitive accused of beating two teenagers on evangelist Tony Alamo's orders must pay $3 million in restitution, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Harry F. Barnes awarded $1.5 million each to Spencer Ondrisek and Seth Calagna, who were both raised in Alamo's church in Fouke in southwestern Arkansas. The teens accused Alamo's alleged enforcer, John Kolbek, of battery, false imprisonment, outrage and conspiracy.
Some of the women I know (like, the ones I hang out with) could make sailors blush. I thought of them when I saw this.
A plaintiff in a hostile work environment case who claims that her boss' sexual innuendo was offensive and humiliating cannot block the jury from hearing about the dirty jokes found on her own workplace computer, a federal judge has ruled.
In such cases, U.S. District Judge Gene E.K. Pratter found, the plaintiff's own sense of humor -- in her e-mails with co-workers and friends -- may be relevant to the jury's inquiries about whether she would be offended by her boss' attempt at salty humor.
In her 17-page opinion in Seybert v. International Group Inc., Pratter denied a motion asking that all of plaintiff Susan Seybert's e-mails be deemed inadmissible.
Since a sexual harassment plaintiff must satisfy both an objective and a subjective test when aiming to show a hostile work environment, Pratter said, the defense lawyer must be given the right to explore the plaintiff's own workplace speech habits in an effort to undermine her claim that she was offended.
As a result, Pratter found that IGI and its lawyer, William T. Wilson of MacElree Harvey in West Chester, Pa., are "entitled to pursue the argument that the e-mails are relevant to Mrs. Seybert's possible appreciation of this type of humor, and specifically, whether she was subjectively offended by [her supervisor's] comment."
Cocaine was so prevalent in Bernard Madoff’s office that it was once called the North Pole, according to an expanded lawsuit that alleges a culture of “sexual deviance” and drug use.
The suit filed by plaintiffs lawyer Joseph Cotchett paints a stark contrast between Madoff’s former life and his new routine in prison where he sleeps on the bottom bunk and eats pizza cooked by a child molester, the Los Angeles Times reports. Stories also ran in ABC News, the Associated Press and the New York Post.
If I hear my BB go off at 2:00 in the morning, I reply immediately if it’s a work thing. For me, an order to check my email hourly would be permission to slack off.
After doing a great job on a rush project, a relatively new associate at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges made a mistake. He didn't check his e-mail.
As a result, he missed a senior partner's instruction that he should send out a draft document for client review before calling it a day. Partner A. William Urquhart notes the mistake in an e-mail he sent the next morning to firm attorneys, which is reprinted in Above the Law, and exhorts the troops to pick up the pace as far as electronic message review is concerned.
Lawyers should be checking their e-mail hourly, unless they have a very good excuse for not doing so, Urquhart says, such as being in court, in a tunnel or asleep.
It may be bad for your boss. Blurring the line between work and friendship works best in smaller companies, imho.
Bosses who "friend" their subordinates on social networking sites may seem warm and harmless, but they've got liability risk written all over them. So warn employment lawyers.
Managers sending friend requests to staff via Facebook, Twitter and other sites constitute a growing trend in the workplace. And it's one that needs to stop, the lawyers stress, because online relations between boss and employee can trigger or exacerbate a host of legal claims, including harassment, discrimination or wrongful termination, as well as touch off cries of favoritism if the boss friends only a select few subordinates.
It’s a cruel irony that so much tort “reform” is directed at protecting nursing homes from their residents, when what we need to do is protect nursing home residents from nursing home negligence.
During the four months that followed the initial notice of the wound, Bradley's genitals essentially broke apart bit by bit, the complaint contends, while the elderly man steadily lost weight. The injury was not treated until Bradley was taken to the Providence Medical Center on March 13, 2008.
Initially diagnosing Bradley with pneumonia, doctors there found only an infected, open wound on the man's groin, according to the complaint. Doctors later determined that Bradley was afflicted with penile cancer; Bradley died two weeks later.
If these allegations are true – that a man was neglected while his penis rotted off over a period of months – I’d like to see someone do some jail time.
This is the house they've built: an insurance market where plans are written for the healthy and all legal efforts are made to exclude the sick. That's meant premiums are somewhat lower than they'd otherwise be, but only because the people who most need health-care insurance aren't able to afford it, or in some cases, aren't able to convince anyone to sell it to them. Now that arrangement is ending and they're scared that they can't provide an affordable product to the people who need it. They may be right, but it's evidence of how deeply perverse their business has become, not of what's wrong with health-care reform. When they say that the individual market would be cheaper in the absence of health-care reform, they're saying the individual market would be cheaper if they could continue refusing to sell affordable insurance to people who need health-care coverage
Could the Chamber of Commerce be any more full of it? To claim that Apple’s opposition to the Chamber’s policy on climate change is really just due to trial lawyers and unions?
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has seen a handful of member companies quit over its opposition to pending climate-change legislation, fired back Friday with a letter saying its critics were organized by "our normal adversaries-- trial lawyers, activist unions [and] environmental extremists."
The letter from David Chavern, the chamber's chief operating officer, was sent out to local chambers of commerce before noon Friday, with the idea that it would be passed on to member companies.
In it, Chavern stands by the confrontational stance that led companies like Pacific Gas and Electric, Apple and Levi Strauss to resign their memberships.
If you define pre-existing condition as a condition you had prior to buying a policy, then yes, being a woman is a pre-existing condition. Other than that little logical error, I’m with them.
Is having a uterus a pre-existing condition? The insurance companies seem to think so, says the National Women's Law Center, an advocacy group for women's legal rights that is on a mission to end unfair insurance company practices toward women. And it believes it's making some headway
