A beloved San Francisco tourist attraction, the birds roost in two ancient 
cypress trees whose owner says he can no longer afford the liability risk should they topple or shed branches on spectators. The city is stepping in to spare the axe by taking responsibility for the chance of injury. (Charlie Goodyear, “Preserving perches for wild parrots”, San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 14; “Buzz saws threaten home of Telegraph Hill parrots”, CBC, Nov. 3, 2005). A 2004 film about the parrots is available here on DVD.
Archive for February, 2007
Prison rape
“We spend a fair amount of time talking about detainee treatment and Guantanamo. But there is no greater, or more common, human rights abuses in America than those occurring in our overcrowded, constantly expanding, jails.” – Ezra Klein on the new Human Rights Watch report on prison rape. Also: Glenn Reynolds; Tom Kirkendall; Stop Prison Rape; 2002 Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing.
“Dangerous When in Power”
A March 2007 Reason article is a must-read for its historical description of how so many mass torts arise from the plaintiffs’ bar blaming deep-pocketed private industry for health catastrophes caused by government policy:
The wider conventional view [treats] hazardous products as a sort of standing reproach to capitalism: Businesses foist such products on us in search of profit, the narrative goes, while government protects us from them. And there is much in the asbestos debacle that does reflect discredit on private companies’ actions.
Yet the government, our alleged protector, has done much at all levels to promote products later assailed as needlessly unsafe, from tobacco to lead paint, from cheap handguns to Agent Orange. Often the state is at least as aware of the risks as the businesses that distribute the product, and in at least as good a position to control or prevent them. But-shaped and propelled by the incentives provided by our litigation system-our process of organized blame hardly ever puts the government in the dock.
And, hey: it’s written by Walter Olson, so you know it’s going to be good. Read the whole thing. (Cross-posted at Point of Law.)
(P.S. by W.O.: Thanks, Ted — the piece is being linked and discussed at quite a few places around the blogosphere, including Glenn Reynolds, Reason “Hit and Run”, The Economist’s Free Exchange, Bill Childs, Byron Steir at Mass Tort Litigation Blog, David Hardy’s Arms and the Law, and Prof. Bainbridge).
Plus: And yet more, from business historian (and friend) John Steele Gordon at the American Heritage blog.
Calif. proposal to ban spanking, cont’d
Turns out there was a law professor behind the idea (Jan. 22):
As for what sparked [Assemblywoman Sally] Lieber’s decision to introduce a bill about spanking, it wasn’t a rash of emergency room visits from 3-year-olds with sore bottoms. The San Jose Mercury News, which first reported the no-spanking story, wrote that Lieber “conceived the idea while chatting with a family friend and legal expert in children’s issues worldwide.” That friend was University of San Francisco Law School professor Thomas Nazario, who fiercely opposes corporal punishment. “It was my idea and I was primarily responsible for coming up with the final draft,” he explains. (Which makes Lieber sound more like Nazario’s pawn than a legislative leader, but I digress.)
(Eilene Zimmerman, “Spanking mad”, Salon, Feb. 5). WryMouth (Jan. 29) has an account of Prof. Nazario’s appearance on the popular Los Angeles radio show “John & Ken” to discuss the idea. Orange County Register columnist Steven Greenhut writes: “I don’t advocate spanking as a rule, but it seems rather harsh to rip a child out of a happy home and put him in some nightmare foster-care scenario and put a parent in jail for doing something that has been widely practiced through the history of parenting.” (“Lawmaker deserves a spanking”, Jan. 28).
Kentucky fen-phen scandal, cont’d
It just keeps getting juicier:
The attorneys accused of misappropriating more than $64 million from Kentucky’s fen-phen settlement initially withheld another $27.7 million, which they turned over to their clients only after the Kentucky Bar Association began investigating the case, newly filed court records show.
The additional payments also came after one of the lawyers — Melbourne Mills Jr. — discovered in January 2002 that the settlement was for $50 million more than the other two lawyers, William Gallion and Shirley Cunningham Jr., had told him, according to the records.
Mills was so angry that when Gallion showed up at his birthday party on Feb. 6, 2002, Mills called him “a thief” and insisted that more money be given to the clients, according to a deposition from Mills’ administrative assistant, Rebecca Phipps.
(Andrew Wolfson, “Lawyers held 2nd cache of diet drug settlement”, Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 11; Beth Musgrave, “Fen-phen ruling could come soon”, Lexington Herald-Leader, Feb. 13). Earlier coverage: Mar. 6 and Aug. 25, 2006, Jan. 24, 2007, etc.
“Symbolic immolations”
Stuart Taylor, Jr., on draconian sentencing at both ends of the criminal justice system, from white-collar prosecutions to drug offenses (“Irrational Sentencing, Top To Bottom”, The Atlantic, Feb. 12 temporary link).
The Cesar Borja case gets more complicated
New York City police officer Cesar Borja died tragically young of lung disease last month. Advocacy groups (including a website that regularly accuses tort reformers of using oversimplified “pop” anecdotes) and Senator Clinton pushed his story to the media to promote a multi-billion-dollar taxpayer giveaway program (that, not incidentally, would provide contingent fees for attorneys) by claiming that Borja was sickened as a hero working “fourteen-hour days in the smoldering pit”, and was killed by alleged government lies about the safety of the air (though the government did call for respirators that they admitted Borja didn’t wear) and the media bought it in front-page tabloid stories. (That same website has been promising since it started to link “Ground Zero workers’ challenges to a larger critique of the tort reform movement”, but has yet to formally justify that non sequitur.)
Except more facts are coming to light about Borja, and as the New York Times reports, “very few of the most dramatic aspects of Officer Borja’s powerful story appear to be fully accurate”:
- On September 11, Borja reported for duty… at the tow pound in Queens where he spent most of his career.
- Borja did not work near the site until December 24, 2001, “after substantial parts of the site had been cleared and the fire in the remaining pile had been declared out.”
- Borja thus never worked in the smoldering pit.
- Borja never worked a 14-hour shift; rather, he worked a few shifts for a total of 17 days directing traffic to add to his overtime pay, most of which were in March and April 2002, and all blocks away from Ground Zero.
- Borja smoked a pack a day until the mid-1990s.
Of course, evidence may yet arise linking Borja’s death to his work near the site. The New York Police Department and doctors, however, have yet to do so. (Sewell Chan and Al Baker, “Weeks After a Death, Twists in Some 9/11 Details”, New York Times, Feb. 13). About 50,000 Americans are diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis each year; the fatal disease has no cure.
Update: David Nieporent has an amusing comment about Bizarro-Overlawyered’s shameless reaction to the revelation.
The post David responds to makes the mistake of making clear its political motivations for exaggerating health hazards from Ground Zero cleanup: a partisan smear of possible Republican presidential nominee Rudy Giuliani.
Calif. lawmaker’s less-than-incandescent idea
“Bill would fine parents who skip school conferences”
Truancy laws for grown-ups in Texas? “A Houston-area legislator wants to subject parents to criminal charges for skipping a scheduled meeting with their child’s teacher. Rep. Wayne Smith, R-Baytown, said it is time for the state to crack down on Texans who are shirking their parental responsibilities by failing to meet with the teacher when their child is having academic or disciplinary problems.” (Terrence Stutz, Dallas Morning News, Jan. 30)(via Bullwinkle Blog).
Who’s riding that snowplow?
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.