A long-running controversy pits some elected officials and townspeople of Framingham, Mass., west of Boston, against a social service agency that has proposed the town as a site for halfway houses and other residential facilities for recovering addicts, the homeless and others. Two years ago things turned particularly unpleasant:
…[South Middlesex Opportunity Council] filed suit in federal court this week demanding damages not just from town officials, but from citizens who have dared criticize the agency and challenge its plans.
SMOC’s 99-page complaint [which alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act, federal Rehabilitation Act, Americans With Disabilities Act and Civil Rights Act -- ed.] piles up charges against selectmen and planning board members not just in their official capacity, but as individuals. It targets town employees, both named and unnamed. It calls for damages against four Framingham Town Meeting members and two citizens for comments made on a private Web site and e-mails distributed on a privately-operated mailing list.
The ACLU of Massachusetts expressed unease at the naming of private citizens as defendants over their advocacy efforts. While the lawsuit has been narrowed somewhat in the two years since then, it continues to engender much acrimony as it drags on:
Aggravating the ill will is a recent revelation that a man charged with shooting a local police officer had lived in a home run by the agency, the South Middlesex Opportunity Council, or SMOC.
American legal concepts crossing the Atlantic yet again: “A council suing its former managing director for £1m for allegedly lying on her job application is at risk of being accused of disability discrimination, an expert has warned.” Cheltenham Borough Council claims its former executive gave false answers on a medical history to conceal a history of depression, but an employment lawyer says employers should not assume they have a right to discipline workers for lying about their medical history during the application process.
Readers of my book on employment law, The Excuse Factory, may recall the somewhat similar case with which I started off Chapter 1. Incidentally, those who are curious what became of the Boston police officer cited in that account may be interested in following this link.
Now his Sokolove Charitable Fund is giving him a shot at new respectability with help from no less august an institution than Stanford Law School (thank you, Prof. Deborah Rhode), It’s bankrolling something called the Roadmap to Justice Project, which will push the much-criticized-in-this-space “Civil Gideon” idea (a newly invented Constitutional entitlement to taxpayer coverage of lawyers’ fees in civil lawsuits).
“The Boston Public Health Commission has just banned the sale of all tobacco products at colleges. Not high schools. Colleges.” [Saletan, Slate]
Sometimes the case caption seems to tell a little story all by itself [Lorraine Hodges v. Mt. Zion Temple d/b/a Zero Gravity Skatepark Oakland County, Mich., 12/1/2008 08-096435 NI Chabot (Pontiac), slip-fall on snow and ice]
Wiretapper Anthony Pellicano, helpful gnome behind the scenes for many powerful Hollywood lawyers, sentenced to 15 years behind bars [CNN, Patterico]
“Hungary’s Constitutional Court says it has annulled a law giving rights to domestic partners because it would diminish the importance of marriage”; now just watch how many folks on both sides flip their opinion of judicial activism [AP/WHEC]
No teaser rates for you! Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren wants new law empowering federal government to order withdrawal of “too-risky” consumer credit products [Consumer Law & Policy]
Cameras in the Neiman Marcus “loss security” (anti-theft operations) room? So unfair when they catch two employees making whoopee [Chicago Tribune via Feral Child]
Flipping their wigs: after three centuries judges in British civil and family courts today end tradition of horsehair wigs [Times Online]
The right number? $28 million to Boston victim of negligent Big Dig construction [Globe]
White collar advice: “Always commit crimes with people more important than you are, so you can turn them in” [Dershowitz, Forbes]
Injured while skylarking on freight trains, now want Oz taxpayers to pay for their injuries [The Australian]
That’ll spoil the fun: New Jersey high court bars judges from discussing future employment with lawyers who have pending cases before them [NJLJ]
Compromise on Capitol Hill lets Pandora survive a little longer to negotiate with music rights owners [ReadWriteWeb; earlier here, here]
Brian Hopkins, 25, of Astoria, Queens, New York City, “who survived an electric shock and fire two years ago when he climbed atop an empty, stopped Amtrak train after a night of bar hopping in Boston is suing the railroad – because Amtrak didn’t do enough to protect trespassers like him.” (Kathianne Boniello, New York Post, Aug. 31).
His libel suit against the Boston Herald may have been a lucrative success, but the “fascinatingly repellent” letters he sent to the paper’s publisher drew the adverse attention of the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct. [WSJ law blog, Aug. 21]. Full saga here.
More: Globe (Murphy, “who has said he suffers from post-traumatic stress because of his legal battle with the Boston Herald and the newspaper’s stories about him, has been on a paid leave of absence since July.”). The Herald’s coverage includes side stories on Murphy’s wish for a taxpayer-provided lawyer and the question of whether his cases will need to be reopened, as well as an unsparing Howie Carr column on the ins and outs of “involuntary disability” pensions for judges (“ask yourself this: If you or I wrote ‘allegedly threatening’ letters to somebody, would we get a disability pension, or a visit from the cops?”).
Now banned in Boston, perhaps because of the risk that they might bring too much happiness to the humans involved. (WSJ, Newsweek, FindingDulcinea, Globe, Herald).
If you’re claiming benefits for “total and permanent” disability it’s probably best not to enter bodybuilding competitions [Boston Globe and more, firefighter Albert Arroyo] More: GruntDoc;
From 1884 Montreal: actionable to snub a parishioner while taking collection in church? [Volokh]
Follow the bouncing venue in lawsuits against Rick Frenkel and Cisco over Patent Troll Tracker blog [Texas Lawyer "Tex Parte" blog]
Individual liberty was one reason Bill Gates was free to earn his billions, too bad he’s not doing more to advance it with his philanthropy [NYTimes, Bloomberg and "tobacco control"]
Andrew Giuliani, son of the mayor, is suing Duke University for kicking him off its golf team [Newsday, Henican] More: complaint at Popehat;
Dr. Anna Pou, New Orleans cancer surgeon whose prosecution after Katrina roused intense controversy, recounts her experience [AP via Folo]
“Unreal world of greed”: California appeals court throws out $88 million fee-arbitration award to Milberg Weiss and other firms following challenge to “smog impact fees” [six years ago on Overlawyered]
High school graduation got rained out in Gilbert, Ariz., and a dad wants $400 from the school district for that [Arizona Republic]
Happens all the time in one-way fee shift awards, but still worth noting: lawyer in police-misconduct case “billed 22 hours at $480 an hour — a total of $10,560 — just to figure out how much his fees are going to be” [Seattle Times]
We get to decide and that’s that: New York judge orders that salaries of New York judges including his own be raised [PoL, Bader] Also at Point of Law: white-shoe Clifford Chance throws a party for New York lefties, should anyone be surprised? outsourcing of interrogation to profit-minded private contractors is bad when it’s Blackwater, good when it’s Motley Rice; tax break for trial lawyers said to be blocked for now.
One firefighter killed in Boston restaurant blaze had sky-high .27 blood alcohol level, the other traces of cocaine, which probably won’t impede the inevitable lawsuit against the restaurant and other defendants [Globe, background]
Writing again on U.S. exceptionalism, Adam Liptak contrasts our First Amendment with Canadian speech trials; James Taranto thinks he’s siding with the Canadians, but the piece looks pretty balanced to me [NYTimes, WSJ Best of the Web]
Milberg said to be on verge of deferred prosecution agreement deal with feds involving $75 million payment and admissions of wrongdoing [NLJ]
Courts in Australian state of Victoria, emulating a model tried in Canada, will resort more to mediation of intractable disputes [Victoria AG Rob Hulls/Melbourne Age]
Great moments in international human rights: KGB spy on the lam sues British government for confiscating royalties he was hoping to make from his autobiography [five years ago on Overlawyered]
As we’ve had occasion to mention before (Sept. 24, 1999; Reason, Dec. 1999; Jan. 17, 2001), the supposedly progressive position in employment law has for many years been that employers should not be at liberty to take into account job applicants’ criminal records; the only conceded exception comes when a past conviction is closely related to a high risk of serious re-offense, as when an embezzler released from prison seeks a job handling money at a bank. Very much in the spirit of that progressive stance, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino “authorized a new policy two years ago eliminating questions about criminal convictions on all city job applications and dispensing with criminal background checks for applicants for jobs that don’t involve working with children or the elderly or accessing residents’ homes.”
How well did this new policy work out, you ask? Well, when Joseph M. MacDonald, a 26-year-old resident of South Boston, applied for a job with the Boston public works department, city officials never checked his criminal record because of the new “second-chance” policy. So they never found out about his long rap sheet (three drug convictions, seven drivers’ license suspensions) until Feb. 3, when police say MacDonald, riding his city snowplow, ran down a 64-year-old woman as she crossed a street, then fled the scene. (Donovan Slack, “Hit-run suspect had long record”, Boston Globe, Feb. 7; “Records show history of offenses”, Feb. 7).
So a hard lesson has now been learned, right? You must be kidding. Although the city has admitted that it slipped up in not checking MacDonald’s driving status, Mayor Menino and one of his human resources deputies continue to defend the broader policy on ignoring criminal records (“The mayor believes firmly in giving people a second chance,” said a spokeswoman after the incident.) And both Menino and newly elected Gov. Deval Patrick intend to press ahead with a previously announced plan to limit private employers’ access to job applicants’ criminal records, the better to enforce those obligatory second chances. (Andrea Estes, “Patrick seeks to limit background checks”, Boston Globe, Feb. 12)(via No Looking Backwards). More: Coyote Blog.
It’s filed lawsuits against “Fox Channel 25, the Boston Herald, and 14 other private citizens and organizations for having conspired to defame the organization.” Its critics aren’t easy to silence, though. (Dean Barnett, “A Mosque Grows in Boston”, Weekly Standard, Dec. 14; Mark Jurkowitz, “Trial and terror”, Boston Phoenix, Nov. 18-24; Jeff Jacoby, “Questions the Islamic Society should answer”, Boston Globe, Jan. 1 (via Dan Kennedy)).
That’s what media critic Dan Kennedy (Dec. 21) calls an excerpt from one of the handwritten letters that Boston judge Ernest Murphy sent to Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell following Murphy’s securing of a libel judgment of more than $2 million against the newspaper (Dec. 8). One of the letters proposes to Purcell an “AB-SO-LUTE-LY confidential and ‘off the record’” meeting which he is not to tell Brown Rudnick, the newspaper’s chief legal counsel, about.
So here’s the deal. I’d like to meet with you at the Union Club on Monday, March 7….You will bring to that meeting a cashier’s check, payable to me, in the sum of $3,260,000. No check, no meeting.
And Dan Kennedy comments:
This much is certain: If Murphy’s letters are typical of what takes place between parties in a lawsuit, then the legal sausage-making process is a lot uglier than many of us realize.
(via Romenesko, who has links to the Boston press coverage). Boston Phoenix media critic Mark Jurkowitz also covers the story here and (Murphy’s lawyer’s response) here. A Jurkowitz commenter observes: “Settlement discussions are frequently unsightly — they often have a ‘Surrender, Dorothy’ flavor.”
Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy, having won a libel judgment of more than $2 million against the Boston Herald, smaller of the city’s two big newspapers, is now demanding that a court order the paper’s assets frozen to guarantee payment of the judgment. (Jonathan Saltzman, “Court is asked to freeze Herald’s assets”, Boston Globe, Nov. 29). Dan Kennedy at Media Nation (Nov. 29) says that the Herald’s original article criticizing Murphy was anything but a model of good journalism.
But free-press advocates ought to be concerned that a sitting judge can have some influence over the Herald’s future — and possibly its very survival — because of reporting that amounted to criticism of how he performed his public duties. That, more than anything, is what the First Amendment was designed to protect.
(via Romenesko). For the chilling effects of libel awards won by judges in Pennsylvania, see Mar. 16, 2004, etc.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has ordered the city to seize T-shirts that say “Stop Snitchin.” “‘It’s wrong,’ Menino said. ‘We are going into every retail store that sells the shirts and remove them.’”
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