The attorney’s multiple gigs representing Long Island school districts had touched off a furor and New York investigation. [ABA Journal] Update/related: Newsday.
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Long Island
“Parents and students at Tooker Avenue Elementary School bid a bittersweet adieu to home-baked goods Friday on the final day of class before a West Babylon district policy goes into effect that allows only prepackaged snacks.” [Newsday via Free-Range Kids; earlier]
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And Scott Greenfield has a word or two to pick with District Attorney Kathleen Rice:
Allowing a woman who lied about a heinous crime being committed against her to avoid prosecution, causing four men who committed no crime to be arrested, smeared throughout the media, sit in jail and have their names perpetually tied to a gang rape, has no rational connection whatsoever to encouraging real victims to come forward. It does, however, have a strong connection to encouraging false accusations, since the conditions of counseling and community services offer little disincentive to not take the risk.
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While our legal system is not much inclined to accord sanctions to the victims of meritless litigation, it does happen from time to time. [Vesselin Mitev, NYLJ; sanctions awarded against client John H. Libaire and Northport, L.I. attorney Mitchell A. Stein, who figured in 1990's "Lion Sleeps Tonight" case]
- Long Island man fails badly in bid to make his estranged wife compensate him for kidney he gave her [NYLJ, earlier]
- McDonald’s denies negligence in case of nude photos on customer’s left-behind cellphone [Heller/OnPoint News, earlier]
- Role of union corruption in NYC crane collapses. Best tidbit: strippers offered apprenticeships [New York Times]
- Because the Big Three need another millstone around their necks: states moving to entrench auto dealers’ nontermination/buyout rights yet further [Detroit Free Press via Mataconis, background]
- Microsoft claims former employee “applied for a job at the company under false pretenses and then used his role at Microsoft to gain access to confidential data related to patent litigation he is now waging” [Seattle P-I, Andrew Nusca/ZDNet]
- Settlement ends lawsuit by Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. against Mississippi’s Farese law firm and Ocala, Fla. attorney Bruce Kaster arising from leak of disparaging employee affidavit to press [Patsy Brumfield, NEMDJ, ABA Journal]
- Mule drivers at historic tourism park must register for antiterror biometrics as transportation workers [Ken @ Popehat]
- Lawyers advise defendant on trial for murder to go off his antipsychotic medication so he’ll come off as madder to the jury [nine years ago on Overlawyered]
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So Anthony Faggiani of East Islip, N.Y. is suing the Long Island Rail Road for “serious psychological injuries and distress.”
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The divorce between Dr. Richard Batista of Ronkonkoma, Long Island, New York, and his wife Dawn has taken an unfortunate turn with Dr. Batista’s demand that she return his left kidney, which he had donated to her in a transplant operation. (Or at least its fair market value) Experts predict that the court will be less than sympathetic to his request [SSFC; Sally Satel, Daily Beast] And in Nebraska, the essential level of trust and goodwill that one would hope to see in a divorce has been undercut by William Lewton’s discovery of a secret recording device concealed in his four year old daughter’s teddy bear [WSJ Law Blog]
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The American Tort Reform Association is out with its annual ranking of the jurisdictions where it thinks civil defendants are farthest from being assured a fair trial, and they are:
- West Virginia
- South Florida
- Cook County, Ill.
- Atlantic County, NJ
- Montgomery and Macon Counties, Ala.
- Los Angeles County, CA
- Clark County (Las Vegas), Nev.
The list reflects the views of big-company managers and lawyers as to tort lawsuits; a poll of, say, doctors might result in different nominations (Brooklyn, Bronx, Long Island*, Philadelphia) and one of class-action or patent-infringement defendants would likely produce yet other lists.
ATRA has a supplementary “Watch List”, nicknamed by some of us “Heckholes”, of toasty but not quite infernal jurisdictions, on which it places the Rio Grande Valley and Gulf Coast of Texas, Madison County, Ill., Baltimore, Md., and St. Louis city and county and Jackson County, Mo. It also offers side essays on notable scandals among high-rolling lawyers, trial lawyer-AG alliances, and pro-plaintiff’s-bar lobbying efforts.
Some coverage of the report: Pero, ShopFloor (with this and this on AG alliances), Ambrogi, Genova, CalBizLit (“We’re Number 6! We’re Number 6!), TortsProf, Miller (Baltimore), and Turkewitz (cross-posted from Point of Law; also note this recent post).
* Commenter VMS makes a case that Long Island does not belong on such a list.
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Father and son Fritz Mesadieu and Jonathan Mesadieu say they were in the crowd during the now-notorious Black Friday crowd-crush episode at a Long Island Wal-Mart. They say they were left with neck and back pain for which they want $2 million. (Wisecracks about a stampede to court are in extremely poor taste and should be avoided.) Their attorney, who gets a prominent mention in the CNN coverage, is named as Kenneth Mollins, apparently the very same attorney Kenneth Mollins whose skill in transforming seemingly minor or transient injuries into litigation Ted saluted in June (h/t commenter Don Parks). (“Customers injured in crush suing Wal-Mart”, CNN, Dec. 2). More: Eric Turkewitz has some thoughts on the underlying liability issues, the Mesadieu/Mollins claim aside.
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- Pajamas TV interviews me on Obama cabinet prospects (RFK Jr., Caroline Kennedy, Schwarzenegger, Gorelick, etc.) (Nov. 13, subscription-only)
- Federal court in New Orleans hits attorney with five-year practice suspension after “intentionally contemptuous” filing and other misconduct [Times-Picayune, Ashton O'Dwyer]
- Lawyer sues his straying wife for giving him herpes, but her lawyer says a test proves she doesn’t have the malady in the first place [Above the Law]
- Doctors (e.g.) being put through hostile depositions are often tempted to talk back sharply to the lawyer. Bad move, says Ronald Miller [Maryland Injury]
- It’s a shame most of the press remains incurious about that episode a few days ago in which talk of compulsory national service appeared, then vanished from the Obama site [K. Ryan James]
- Batting cage pitching machine without prompting hits customer in most sensitive part of male anatomy, he collects $1.2 million [The Big Lead]
- ACLU will defend preacher sent to prison on parole violation charge after writing “God will smite this judge” newspaper article (having earlier been convicted of election misconduct)[AP/FoxNews, western Michigan]
- On appeal, Long Island attorney beats charges of coaching clients to fake injury and using “steerers” to gain business [NYLJ]
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- “Energy independence is no more desirable than coffee independence, banana independence, or car independence.” [David Henderson, EconLog] #
- L.I.R.R.: a disability certification outfit disguised as a railroad [Bogdanich, N.Y. Times] #
- Even post-scandal, private attorneys for towns can still collar lucrative NY state pensions [Peddie, Newsday] #
- Lining up for bailout bucks: automakers and even mass transit [Carney] #
- Poll of worst law firm names (“Low, Ball & Lynch”) [Greatest American Lawyer; h/t @SCartierLiebel] #
- List of legal newsfeeds on Twitter, now updated [JD Scoop] #
- 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 sprang big for DAGA, hmmm [Alan Lange, YallPolitics]
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.
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* 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].
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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. …
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….
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.
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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.
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