One is co-written by Alan Lange of YallPolitics blogging fame. [Freeland] More: Joe Palazzolo, “Scruggs Prosecutor Writes Tell-All Book”, Main Justice.
{ 0 comments }
Posts tagged as:
Mississippi
- Proposed Costco fuel settlement: $0 for class, $10M for attorneys. [CCAF]
- Senator Specter’s latest attempt to curry favor with trial lawyers. [Ribstein; see also Corporate Counsel]
- The Frank-Gryphon paper on the game theory of medical malpractice settlements is now posted. Comments welcome. [SSRN]
- Heritage panel on tort reform in the states features Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. [Summary at Point of Law]
- Liability waivers ignored and Texas Motor Speedway on the hook for $12 million after a 12-year-old driver strikes 11-year-old in the pit area. [Fort Worth Star-Telegram; id. on pre-trial]
- Martha Raye turning over in her grave, as trial lawyers target denture cream as next mass tort. [AP/Washington Post]
- Lawyer blames “fine print” for overstepping solicitation rule on Buffalo air-crash victims [NJLJ, New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Watch]
- “Music Industry Takes Aim at Publishers of Online Lyrics” [ABA Journal]
- Prosecuting energy producers when their operations accidentally kill birds? Well, sometimes [WSJ Law Blog, Stossel, Adler at Volokh]
- Ninth Circuit rejects “litigation factory” approach to CAN-SPAM enforcement [California Civil Justice, Spam Notes]
- The semantics of saying “illegal” vs. “undocumented” alien [Volokh]
- “The crime of passing through town without an adequate explanation” [Freeland, Mississippi, on MotorhomeDiaries.com case]
- Report vague suspicion of child abuse, or not? Trust your instincts, says a public service ad. Bad advice [Free Range Kids, Common Room]
- “Plaintiff on Troll Tracker: ‘Let’s Get This [Blog] Shut Down’” [Mullin, IP Law & Business, earlier] More: SE Texas Record.
{ 3 comments }
- It’s almost as if Arizona wants to encourage broken-windshield fraud [Coyote]
- “They are so greedy that — how awful! — they are selling food cheap.” [Ann Althouse takes out after Michael Pollan]
- Tom Freeland examines “Clarksdale sugar daddy” prosecution [Northern Mississippi Commentor; cf. Radley Balko]
- “Fire-safe” cigarettes are apparently not pleasurable to smoke, which may be part of their appeal to backers [Sullivan]
- “Justices: Bags of cash, guilty plea merit Seattle lawyer’s disbarment” [Seattle Times]
- Facebook plays a revenge prank on TechCrunch, and there’s a lesson there for the thin-skinned [Ken at Popehat]
- “The Rubber Room: The Battle Over New York City’s Worst Teachers” [Steven Brill, The New Yorker; Joanne Jacobs]
- One trial lawyer’s anything-but-supportive view of “runners” and “chasers” [Turkewitz]
{ 3 comments }
A major development in the still-developing Scruggs judicial influence scandals. Coverage: Patsy Brumfield/Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Tom Freeland and more, guestblogger S. Todd Brown (Buffalo lawprof) at Point of Law.
{ 2 comments }
In Mississippi Litigation Review blog, Philip Thomas argues that Kim Strassel’s article (which we discussed Sunday) overemphasizes the role played by U.S. Silica’s CEO. I think that’s more the doing of the WSJ headline writers (which do pitch the story of one guy standing alone against the plaintiffs’ bar) than Strassel; as Thomas himself acknowledges, Ulizio doesn’t try to take undue credit, and Strassel merely (and correctly) notes that lawyers alone couldn’t defeat the silica lawsuits without the support of the business community willing to stand up against the tort bar.
Thomas also objects to Ulizio’s characterization of the victory as “luck,” but luck definitely played a huge role. The scandal came to light solely because Judge Janis Jack held mass Daubert hearings at an abnormally early stage in the litigation. In fact (and I seem to be the only person who has ever made this point), Jack’s ruling was especially abnormal, because she made the Daubert ruling before she made a jurisdictional ruling—and her jurisdictional ruling found that 99% of the cases in front of her lacked complete diversity and needed to be remanded. In other words, Judge Jack’s famous condemnation of plaintiffs’ experts was largely an ultra vires advisory opinion (which is why her sanctions order was for only a couple of thousand dollars).
The luck of the MDL draw had everything to do with that result. Another judge might not have held Daubert hearings at such an early stage; another judge might not have actually applied Daubert even if she had held the hearings; another judge might have preferred to empty her docket immediately, rather than stalling on the eventual remand.
And these aren’t purely hypothetical musings: in the welding fumes MDL in Ohio, there has been plenty of evidence of mass tort fraud, yet the judge has refused to throw out cases, so they slowly continue to proceed to trial.
In that sense, Ulizio is absolutely right: “When you have an entire system that condones these lawsuits, that does nothing to police its own, where there are no consequences, right or wrong has nothing to do with it. It’s a coin flip.” The lawyers who brought these fraudulent cases are still practicing law; thousands of fraudulent mass tort lawsuits continue to be brought since Judge Jack’s ruling without consequence to the unethical lawyers who bring them.
{ 1 comment }
Eugene Volokh discovers a Mississippi statute that appears to criminalize students’ possession of scissors in many instances, and a South Carolina statute that goes even further.
19-year-old Sidney Odom happily went along when 20-year-old Travis Kirby and 18-year-old Riley Strickland asked “Who wants to go to the Beacon?”—a bar in Terry, Mississippi. A long night of drinking and driving came to an end at about 3 am when Kirby’s Camaro hit a tree at about 90 mph. As none of the three were wearing seatbelts, all were ejected from the vehicle. Kirby, whose blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit at 0.25%, died at the scene; the other two were injured.
Since we’re talking about the case, you can guess that the three blamed everyone except the underage drunk drivers: in this case, the car seller, the tire installer, and the tire manufacturer, Goodyear Tires. The car seller settled for about half a million dollars; a Copiah County jury found the other defendants liable for an additional $2.1 million. Goodyear appealed, complaining about various prejudicial statements made by the plaintiffs’ attorneys, such as introducing evidence from other lawsuits about other types of tires, but the Mississippi state appellate court affirmed. (Holbrook Mohr, “Miss. court agrees tire, not alcohol caused crash”, AP/Washington Post, Apr. 22; Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. v. Kirby (Miss. App. 2009)).
{ 17 comments }
Our item on the lawyer who “lies so much he had to hire someone to call his dog” reminded Tom Freeland of a lawyer who flourished during the boom years in early Mississippi that began in the 1830s, one Ovid Bolus, Esq., as portrayed in a book of the 1850s:
Bolus was a natural liar, just as some horses are natural pacers, and some dogs natural setters. What he did in that walk, was from the irresistible promptings of instinct, and a disinterested love of art. His genius and his performances were free from the vulgar alloy of interest or temptation.
Accordingly, he did not labor a lie: he lied with a relish: he lied with a coming appetite, growing with what it fed on: he lied from the delight of invention and the charm of fictitious narrative.
The much longer passage of which that is a sample is well worth reading in its entirety, if only for its historical flavor (and not because any lawyers like that still walk among us, of course).
Freeland, incidentally, is well known to many readers as longtime contributor “NMC” at Folo, a blog that for years shed invaluable light on Mississippi politics and law and in particular the state’s judicial scandals; that blog and its editor Lotus have lately gone on hiatus, but Freeland has set up with his own Mississippi-focused blog.
- 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]
{ 3 comments }
Dickie Scruggs pleads guilty in a second Mississippi judicial-corruption case, and prosecutors say more indictments will be unveiled shortly. [NE Miss. Daily Journal, Alan Lange/YallPolitics, NMC/Folo]
“Loss of consortium” claims are familiar when the underlying claim of injury is physical in nature. But for defamation and other verbal entanglements? The wife of Ole Miss basketball coach Andy Kennedy is advancing those claims in a suit against a Cincinnati taxi driver who charged Kennedy with assault, and a valet driver who backed up his claims. [Deadspin, NMC @ Folo]
{ 1 comment }
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday upheld the conviction of Vicksburg lawyer Robert Arledge, convicted of bilking the drug company Wyeth of more than $6.7 million over the diet drug Fen-Phen….
U.S. District Judge David Bramlette sentenced Arledge to six years in prison for knowingly allowing clients to make claims of about $250,000 each for health complications although they had no legitimate reason.
Seems it was a clergy scandal as well as a lawyer scandal:
Regina Reed Green of Fayette, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion involving false Fen-Phen claims, testified Arledge knew about the scheme to defraud the drug company. She said he told her every resident of 9,740-population Jefferson County would get $1 million.
“The evidence showed that when Green became concerned that she might be caught fabricating the prescriptions and expressed a desire to stop her illegal activity, she contacted (the Rev. Gregory) Warren,” the appeals court wrote. “Warren tried to convince Green to continue fabricating the prescriptions, but Green was not assuaged.”
Green testified Arledge persuaded her to continue: “And he said … I wasn’t going to get in any trouble because like (Warren) said, they were going to box all those files up, put them away, and never be seen again.”
Ed Peters, the former Hinds County (Jackson) prosecutor who’s been a central figure in the still up-in-the-air Peters-DeLaughter branch of the Scruggs scandals, has turned in his law license (via) amid much Mississippi speculation that he is cooperating with prosecutors and that other developments are imminent. NMC at Folo tries to sort things out. And, just in time to be helpful, Alan Lange of YallPolitics has an article summarizing the scandal as it’s developed thus far.
Let’s say you’re a lawyer, drafting a complaint over some institutional squabble at a public university. You’re bound by the codes of professional conduct and general ethics, which among other things require that a lawyer avoid demeaning or humiliating language in describing witnesses or adverse parties. Do you insert this paragraph?
Instead of defending the integrity of excellence of scientific work at UM, all individual Defendants, as administrators, participated in jeopardizing the reputation of the institution.
Or this one?
Instead of defending the integrity of excellence of scientific work at UM, all individual Defendants, as corrupt administrators, participated in jeoparding [sic] the reputation of the institution for personal gain and aggrandizement: something that the ALUMNI and the MISSISSIPPI LEGISLATURE may find of interest.
Apparently, if you’re the attorney for Dr. Robert Speth, formerly of the University of Mississippi school of pharmacy, you choose the second paragraph. Legal ethics codes also bar extortion and threats (outside the context of the litigation, which is always threatening) and while this isn’t extortion, the language dances rather close to the edge of a threat, doesn’t it?
In any event it is, as folo from which I found this, points out, some of the most unprofessional and abusive language you’ll find in any complaint. And while the Bar of the Great State of Mississippi likely won’t take action (Mississippi has bigger issues), this may come back to haunt its drafter, Christian Goeldner, in the event that the case is dismissed.
The lawyer defending disgraced Mississippi plaintiff’s lawyer Joey Langston asked that the hundreds of letters pleading for leniency in his sentencing be kept off limits to the general public — seems they were too personal in tone. Nonetheless, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal has a list of the letter-senders, a group more local in flavor than the cadre of national big-namers who wrote letters on behalf of Master of the Universe and judge-briber Dickie Scruggs. One of the nearly 340 letters was from Langston’s “longtime friend and business partner”, U.S. Rep. Travis Childers, who wrote, “I only wish that every town and county in America had someone like Joey Langston.” (Patsy R. Brumfield, “Hundreds of Langston letters asked for leniency”, NEMDJ, Dec. 11; YallPolitics, Dec. 10). “Langston faces up to three years in prison after he pleaded guilty to conspiring to influence a circuit judge to help resolve a legal-fees lawsuit against then-Oxford attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs.” (related, same day). Because he has cooperated with prosecutors, Langston is expected to be given a reduced sentence; some of his supporters, including Rep. Childers, asked that he be let off with probation.
“Dr. Steven Hayne, the man who performed most of Mississippi’s autopsies for 20 years, has filed a defamation lawsuit against The Innocence Project.” (Howard Ballou, WLBT, Oct. 30).
Hayne has been criticized because he said he conducted about 1,500 autopsies a year, much higher than the recommended standard [of fewer than 250 -- ed.].His testimony in two murder cases from Noxubee County turned out to be inaccurate and both men convicted in those cases were released from prison earlier this year.
One of the men had spent 15 years on Death Row for a crime he didn’t commit.
A third man has confessed to both slayings.
(”Investigation changes are needed”, Hattiesburg American, Oct. 22). As part of its campaign against Hayne, the Innocence Project sent more than 1,000 pages of material documenting its complaints to the Mississippi state medical licensure board and also denounced him to the national College of American Pathologists. (Jerry Mitchell, “Embattled doc suing Innocence Project”, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Oct. 31). Radley Balko at Reason has been a longtime critic of Hayne (”Hit and Run”, Nov. 7), as has Lotus @ Folo. On Jun. 6, we reported on charges that Dr. Hayne’s forensic work has been of extensive assistance to plaintiff’s lawyers in Mississippi liability suits.
Alabama, Mississippi and Texas all host hotly fought races with a strong plaintiff-vs.-defendant dimension tomorrow: Democrat Deborah Bell Paseur vs. Republican Greg Shaw in Alabama, three challengers vs. three incumbents on the Mississippi Supreme Court, and Democratic challengers Jim Jordan, Linda Yanez and Sam Houston in races for the Texas Supreme Court. (Tom Baxter, Southern Political Report, Nov. 3).
{ 2 comments }
