• One for your “firefighter’s rule” file: firefighter perishes in blaze, his widow sues security alarm company [SF Chron, San Pablo, Calif.]
• And another: Nassau County, N.Y. cop injured by drunk driver while on duty is suing the county over Long Island Expressway design and signage [Newsday; Kenneth Baribault]
• Stop fighting over the $60 million in fees, judge tells feuding lawyers, your lawsuit has been over for four years now [Legal Intelligencer, corrugated paper antitrust class action]
• Public-health prof: red-light cameras “don’t work” and instead “increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop” [Bruce Schneier via Instapundit]
• Criminal prosecution of political attack ads? Time to rethink campaign finance law [Bainbridge]
• Teenagers send each other racy cellphone videos, and then their legal nightmare begins [Des Moines Register]
• Sounds interesting but haven’t seen a copy: “How To Get Sued: An Instructional Guide” by well-known blawger J. Craig Williams [Giacalone, Ambrogi]
• Mississippi AG Hood goes after MillerCoors over caffeinated alcohol drinks, but Anheuser-Busch hired Mike Moore and sprung big for DAGA, hmmm [Alan Lange, YallPolitics]/li>

On Long Island, even a teacher’s guilty plea and likely prison sentence for a fifth DWI arrest in seven years is not necessarily enough for termination. The teacher continues to draw paid leave at an annual salary of $113,559, with a disciplinary hearing coming up next month. (Frank Eltman, “Firing tenured teachers isn’t just difficult, it costs you”, AP/USA Today, Jun. 30). Related: Ray Fisman, Slate.

* New Jersey: “A federal judge in Camden last week dismissed a lawsuit filed by a band of American Indians seeking to reclaim land they said the state sold out from under them more than 200 years ago. The Unalachtigo band of the Nanticoke-Lenni Lenape Nation demanded the return of 3,044 acres of the former Brotherton Reservation, which sits mostly in Shamong Township in Burlington County.” [Philadelphia Inquirer; Camden Courier-Post/Red Lake Net News, 2006 (expensive law firm of Reed Smith was representing tribal band, which was angling for casino rights)].

* A new C$550 billion land claim launched by the Whitefish Lake tribe (or “First Nation”, to adopt progressive Canadian terminology) includes the entire city of Sudbury, Ontario [Timmins Press, Sudbury Star]

* Second Circuit panel due this week to hear appeal on upstate New York Oneida claim, in which ejectment of current landowners is apparently (for the moment) off table as option [Rome [N.Y.] Sentinel; earlier on Indian land claim litigation].

The Money Laundering Control Act of 1986 was meant to criminalize the practice of “smurfing”, or evading reporting requirements on the transfer of large sums of cash by breaking the sums down into transactions below the threshold. (”Smurfs” were low-level operatives who agreed to go into banks repeatedly making deposits slightly below the trigger amount.) Who’d've imagined the law would trip up the best-known white collar crime prosecutor of our era? Newsday has the story, which has a Long Island angle:

Spitzer last year had wanted to wire transfer more than $10,000 from his branch to what turned out to be the front for the prostitution ring, QAT Consulting Group, which also uses a number of other names, in New Jersey, the sources said.

But Spitzer had the money broken down into several smaller amounts of less than $10,000 each, apparently to avoid federal regulations requiring the reporting of the transfer of $10,000 or more, the sources said. The regulations are aim to help spot possible illegal business activities, such as fraud or drug deals.

Apparently, having second thoughts about even sending the total amount in this manner, Spitzer then asked that the bank take his name off the wires, the sources said.

Bank officials declined, however, saying that it was improper to do so and in any event, it was too late to do so, because the money already had been sent, the sources said.

The bank, as is required by law, filed an SAR, or Suspicious Activity Report, with the Internal Revenue Service, reporting the transfer of the money that exceeded $10,000, but had been broken down into smaller amounts, the sources said.

“The bank did the right thing,” said one source familiar with the situation. The name of the bank could not immediately be determined.

But the source added that “we then got lucky” in singling out Spitzer and the ring.

Millions of SARs are generated each week and flow into the Internal Revenue Service nationwide, but an analyst at the regional IRS office in Hauppauge [L.I.] noted Spitzer’s particular SAR and singled it out for attention to criminal investigators, the sources said.

The assumption, the sources said, was that Spitzer was being victimized either by a blackmailer or an impostor. The agents also speculated that perhaps the governor was involved in some sort of political corruption, the sources said.

Beldar (writing a day or two ago; note his update and caveats in an excellent post today):

If there were no other organized crime connections, that’s the kind of crime that might well result in a no-prison time recommendation and sentencing calculation for a first offender pleading guilty and cooperating.

AP also covers the smurfing charges, while Scott Greenfield has thoughts on the gradual erosion of financial privacy; I opined on some related matters in Reason a while back. WSJ law blog and Andrew McCarthy @ NRO discuss other charges that prosecutors might conceivably deploy against the governor. McCarthy, incidentally, contends that “innocent people in legitimate cash businesses have no concern” from the reporting requirements, which is not what I’ve heard.

More details from Wednesday’s NYT: It appears bank Suspicious Activities Reports separately directed investigators’ interest to Spitzer’s transactions and to the escort service front, QAT Consulting, and then the two investigations converged. “When he was New York State’s attorney general, Mr. Spitzer himself used the reports [SARs] to make his cases.”

Earlier here.

Looks like some have found ways to game the state’s employment rules:

Five Long Island school districts falsely reported to the state that a part-time private attorney was a full-time employee in each district, enabling him to earn a public pension of nearly $62,000 and health benefits for life.

At the same time, the districts paid his law firm more than $2.5 million in fees, records show.

The attorney, Lawrence W. Reich, was listed as full time by five different school districts at once - Baldwin, Copiague, East Meadow, Bellmore-Merrick High School and Harborfields, according to records supplied by the New York State comptroller’s office. In 2000, for example, he was credited with working 1,271 days in one year. The year before, he was credited with working 1,286 days….

Under Internal Revenue Service rules, a person cannot be paid both as an independent contractor and employee for the same job.

“Clearly, it’s an attempt to manipulate the system so that a person can receive Cadillac fringe benefits that a person in the private sector would otherwise not be entitled to,” said Paul Sabatino, a municipal lawyer who is also former Suffolk chief deputy county executive. …

“I followed essentially a practice that was very common among my colleagues in the industry,” [Reich] said.

(Sandra Peddie, “Five districts falsely reported lawyer job status”, Newsday, Feb. 15).

An instruction sheet for doctors providing defense-side “independent” medical exams in injury cases reads in part as follows:

# Point out whatever findings or claims are not related [to the sued-over incident]. Otherwise be silent on causal relationship.

# If prognosis appears good, then state that - otherwise be silent

# If you can state that plaintiff can participate in all normal activities, do so. If not, be silent

Eric Turkewitz, who brings this story to public attention (Feb. 12), wonders what ethical questions might be posed for both lawyers and doctors when expert witnesses are coached in this way to give partial and incomplete (to say no more) testimony. I don’t know what New York legal and medical authorities would do, but in the mother of all witness-coaching scandals in recent years — the inadvertent release of Baron & Budd’s “Preparing for Your Deposition” memo in asbestos litigation in Texas — nothing at all wound up being done by established authorities to discipline or punish the plaintiff’s lawyers involved. In fact, even more incredible, Baron & Budd succeeded in hiring more than one well-known academic ethics specialist to sign affidavits attesting that the coaching practices were in no way objectionable — details here and here (see pp. 161 et seq. of Brickman’s Pepperdine article). So if Integrated Risk Services, Inc., of Long Island, New York, which bills itself suggestively as a firm providing “Attorney Managed Independent Medical Consultation Services”, finds itself in hot water, perhaps it should give Prof. Silver in Austin a ring.

P.S. Jane Genova at Law and More doubts it works well before juries — though of course persuasiveness to a jury might not be the only objective for those who engage in coaching.

• This tale of a class-action settlement over male, uh, enhancement products sure looks like a parody, and yet…. Please let it be a parody [Magill/DirectMag, Levine/CircleID, LEMSettlement.com]
• Big law firm partners say million a year really isn’t enough to keep up social status in Manhattan or Silicon Valley [ABA Journal]
• Clerical error results in Disney characters’ getting subpoenaed in Italian criminal case [USA Today]
• We’ve slipped to second place in this Blawg 100 contest thing, don’t you like us? [vote here]
• Update on Miami’s fire-fee scandal (Sept. 19): law firm of Adorno & Yoss, which once sought $2 million fee, will now pay taxpayers $1.6 million; bar probe continues [Miami Herald, Florida Masochist]
• Wife had begged him not to go kite-surfing in Long Island Sound in winter, but still sues town over its failure to warn against taking such risks [Conn. Post]
• “I don’t do any medmal,” lawyer hastens to make known as he’s being stitched up in ER [GruntDoc]
• Very expensive speech: “beyond cruel” shock-jock comments ridiculing Albany, N.Y. burn victim end in $1 million settlement, spoliation also raised as issue [ABA Journal]
• Hassle of dealing with regs in charming Old Town Alexandria is one that only chain outlets may be up to shouldering [Balko, Reason]
• Turkish lawyer sues Italian soccer team, deems its “Crusader-style” red crosses “offensive to Muslim sensibilities” [Times Online, UK]
• Plaintiff’s lawyers tend to throw the most opulent holiday parties in Texas, but our readers knew that already [Houston Chronicle via Lat]
• Two men shot in suspected drug deal win $1.7 million in negligent-security suit against hotel [eight years ago on Overlawyered]

Immigrant advocacy groups are filing a complaint with the New York attorney general’s office naming 16 pharmacies in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, claiming “that federal civil rights law and state health regulations require pharmacies to provide linguistic help” to “people who speak little or no English”. “That assistance should include interpreters at pharmacies and written translations of medication instructions, the advocates say.” The advocacy groups are New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, the New York Immigration Coalition and Make the Road New York.

It seems a creative reinterpretation of “national origin discrimination” has been going on for some time:

Health advocates have increasingly used federal civil rights law to push hospitals, nursing homes and clinics to provide language services. Language barriers to health services constitute discrimination based on national origin, they argue, a violation of federal civil rights law, which applies to hospitals because they receive federal funds through Medicare and other programs.

The latest effort aims to expand similar requirements to pharmacies.

As of the year 2000, according to one report, 138 languages were known to be spoken in the borough of Queens alone. (Anne Barnard, “Non-English Speakers Charge Bias in Prescription Labeling”, New York Times, Oct. 31).

$54 million would pay for 216 years worth of claims for damaged pants on the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro-North Railroad combined.

In 1995 the Taubman Centers announced a plan to redevelop a defunct copper wire factory site in Syosset, just off the Long Island Expressway, into a high-end mall. Twelve years of grueling legal battles later, Taubman has spent $100 million, won most of the rounds in court, and signed up Neiman Marcus and other elite retailers, yet an end is nowhere in sight. And it happens that the civic coalition that has been so successful at running up Taubman’s costs has gotten some help from Simon Property Group, the large mall developer that currently dominates the local market and doesn’t welcome competition. On TimesDelete, unfortunately (Peter Applebome, “A Mall Plan, a Call to Arms, a Plot of Land Still Empty”, New York Times, May 13). Earlier coverage, not behind screen: Dawn Wotapka Hardesty, “For Taubman, no choice but to fight”, Long Island Business News, Dec. 29.

No, this case isn’t going to get messy: in 2004, a Long Island couple went to a fertility clinic to help them get pregnant with a biological child. Apparently, the clinic botched the procedure by using the wrong sperm (Oops!); the couple figured it out when they noticed that the child was black and they weren’t.

So they sued the clinic for malpractice and infliction of emotional distress. (Just for good measure, they sued their obstetrician, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual fertilization; the court dismissed that claim. Gee, I wonder why medical malpractice insurance rates are so high.) The court rejected the emotional distress claim, ruling that (as most courts do) a baby being born is not an injury to the parents, but it allowed the malpractice claim to proceed.

Speaking of emotional distress, the judge handling the case quoted the parents as saying things every child wants to hear from her parents:

“[W]e are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her.”

and

“We are conscious of and distressed by this mistake each and every time we appear in public.”

Continue Reading »

So, a Long Island school provides John Cave Jr., a hearing-impaired ninth grader, with a sign-language interpreter and student note taker for each of his classes and a daily, one-on-one lesson with a hearing instructor. Cave’s teachers are also given radio transmitters that amplify their voices. And he gets extra time to take exams. All to make sure that his partial deafness (he has 69%-70% hearing, thanks to cochlear implants) do not negatively affect his education. The school’s reward for this accommodating behavior?

A $150 million (!) lawsuit. (Relax. Cave is only claiming to be damaged to the tune of $50 million. The $100 million balance is for punitive damages.)

Why? Because the school drew the line at allowing Cave to bring his “service dog” (Simba, in case you were wondering) to school. Although the suit alleges that Simba assists Cave by alerting him to “cars, fire alarms, and bell rings” (Incidentally, I am not an expert on cochlear implants, but wouldn’t 60% hearing be sufficient for really loud sounds such as fire alarms?), the student’s primary complaint does not seem to be that he cannot hear these things at school. Rather, he complains that spending the school day away from Simba impairs their bonding and Simba’s effectiveness.

Fortunately for taxpayers, the federal judge handling the case declined last week to grant an injunction ordering the school to admit Simba, on the grounds that “John Jr. is well served by the East Meadow School District” and also on the grounds that the family seemed more interested in suing than resolving the situation:

But Spatt in his decision faulted the teen’s parents for rebuffing offers to attend a district hearing on the matter and ultimately failing to “exhaust” all the administrative processes of local and state educational agencies.

“Instead, they proceeded with this lawsuit,” Spatt said, noting that Nancy Cave invited a news crew to show up with her and her son on Jan. 4 as they tried unsuccessfully to get a principal to let Simba inside the building with his owner.

The family, of course, plans to appeal. (Newsday; Daily News)

• Divorcing Brooklyn couple has put up sheetrock wall dividing house into his and hers [L.A. Times, AP/Newsday]


• Boston Herald appeals $2 million libel award to Judge Ernest Murphy, whom the paper had portrayed as soft on criminals (earlier: Dec. 8 and Dec. 23, 2005) [Globe via Romenesko]


• Updating Jul. 8 story: Georgia man admits he put poison in his kids’ soup in hopes of getting money from Campbell Soup Co. [AP/AccessNorthGeorgia]


• Witness talks back to lawyer at deposition [YouTube via Bainbridge, %&*#)!* language]


• Prominent UK business figure says overprotective schools producing generation of “cotton wool kids” [Telegraph]


• State agents swoop down on Montana antique store and seize roulette wheel from 1880s among other “unlicensed gambling equipment” [AP/The Missoulian]


• “You, gentlemen, are no barristers. You are just two litigators. On Long Island.” [Lat and commenter]


• Some Dutch municipalities exclude dads from town-sponsored kids’ playgroups, so as not to offend devout Muslim moms [Crooked Timber]


• As mayor, Rudy Giuliani didn’t hesitate to stand up to the greens when he thought they were wrong [Berlau @ CEI]


• Australia: funeral homes, fearing back injury claims, now discouraging the tradition of family members and friends being pallbearers [Sydney Morning Herald]


• Asserting 200-year-old defect in title, Philly’s Cozen & O’Connor represents Indian tribe in failed lawsuit laying claim to land under Binney & Smith Crayola factory [three years ago on Overlawyered]

In two separate cases, federal judges have rejected high-profile but long-shot claims by Indian tribes asserting ownership of land tracts in the Northeast. U.S. District Court Judge Thomas C. Platt said the Shinnecock tribe of Long Island, New York (see Jun. 13, Jun. 19 and Jun. 27, 2005), had forfeited its potential claim on 3,600 acres of high-value land in the Hamptons by waiting more than 140 years to assert possession. (John Moreno Gonzales, “Ruling aside, tribe plans to build casino”, Newsday, Dec. 5; “Judge cites passage of time in Shinnecock land claim”, Indianz.com, Dec. 6; ruling in PDF format courtesy Indianz.com). And in New Haven, U.S. District Court Judge Janet Bond Arterton brought homeowners’ ordeal nearer an end Nov. 29 by ruling against the federally unrecognized group that calls itself the Golden Hill Paugussetts, which has been asserting land claims in various Connecticut towns for 14 years. (Gale Courey Toensing, “Golden Hill Paugussetts will appeal rejected land claims”, Indian Country Today, Dec. 11).

“That is how much the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro-North Railroad have paid over the last four years to customers who have torn clothing” on the armrests of their M7 trains. I’ve torn pants pockets on armrests that weren’t on M7 trains, but never thought to ask for compensation for something that was my own damn fault. I’m apparently a sucker, but at least no one is seeking to add this claim of damages to the obesity lawsuits. Yet. (William Neuman, “M.T.A. Gets Bill When Armrests Chew Up Pants”, NY Times, Dec. 6 (h/t W.F.)).)

Mark DelCore, 39, says in his federal lawsuit that he has a medical need to sunbathe at the Fire Island nude beach because of a skin condition. The beach rules allow for seeing-eye dogs, but DelCore’s is an “emotional support” dog (see May 14, etc.) who assists with post-traumatic stress he says he’s suffered since the 9/11 attacks. One big problem: it’s feared a greater dog presence at water’s edge would interfere with the doings of the piping plover, an endangered shorebird whose protection has already been cited as reason to suppress many human activities on Long Island beaches. (The Smoking Gun, Jul. 13). More: Ann Althouse, who has covered service-dog accommodation controversies in the past, is on this one too. Update: Jul. 22 (DelCore thinking of dropping suit).

Diners who order shellfish, such as mussels, assume the risk of encountering broken pieces of shell, ruled a New York judge who threw out a Long Island woman’s lawsuit against the Blue Moon restaurant in Rockville Centre attempting to recover for injuries arising from her encounter with the allegedly defective plate of mussels marinara. (”Judge Shucks Shellfish Suit”, WCBS, undated, about Jun. 7). More: Lattman, Jun. 12.

Reader Matt Manor sums up this Newsday article about a controversy in Hewlett Harbor, Long Island: “Golf club loses suit on errant balls, faces injunction to end them, erects large net to comply, and is promptly sued by homeowners who think the net is ugly. You can’t win.” (William Murphy, “Golf course can’t seem to hit straight”, May 24). More on errant golf balls: May 24, Oct. 6, 2004 (Australia).