“It might be DWI”

On January 20, a Hoboken City Councilman was pulled over for running a red light in New York City. Before arresting him for DWI, the NYC officer who pulled him over calls the Hoboken police department, asks “hypothetically” whether he should arrest the councilman. The Hoboken officer (who clearly realizes the call is being taped) tells him to do his job; the NYC officer persists, asking whether the Council has treated the police department well.

Courtesy of the Jersey Journal: Transcript and MP3 of call.

The City Councilman denies he asked for special treatment.

Want to be on my jury? Let’s see your handwriting

Oh well, at least it’s not as intrusive as driving around their neighborhoods and interviewing their acquaintances:

[Bob] Marx, a personal injury attorney at The Law Offices of Robert Marx in Hilo, Hawaii, regularly hires a handwriting expert to help him select a jury.

“I feel like it’s a significant competitive edge,” he said. “It’s not 100 percent accurate, but if you know some history or a little bit more about a potential juror together with this analysis, it helps a whole lot more.”

Since the mid-1990s, Marx has paid an expert to analyze jurors’ handwriting for all of his big trials. The findings help paint a picture of the jurors and point out characteristics such as whether they are likely to be leaders or followers, if they are analytical or visual, or toward which side they are likely to be sympathetic.

Marx’s last three juries awarded a total of $31 million, and he said handwriting analysis helped him.

(Vesna Jaksic, “Looking for Clues in a Juror’s ‘John Hancock'”, National Law Journal, Feb. 27).

“Teens prosecuted for racy photos”

16-year-old A. and her 17-year-old boyfriend J. took risque photos of the two of them cavorting and emailed them from A.’s home computer to J’s email account. “Neither teen showed the photographs to anyone else.” The photos nonetheless somehow came to the attention of Florida police, both teens were prosecuted on child porongarphy* charges, and by a 2-1 vote, a Florida appeals court in January dismissed A.’s constitutional claim (Declan McCullagh, CNET/News.com, Feb. 9). Discussion: Lippard Blog, Feb. 10. (* = deliberate misspelling)

Coca-Cola promotion tweaks client-chasers

Let’s just hope no one tells the Kentucky bar about the new Coke Zero campaign, with its reference to a supposed law firm by the name of Covet & Yourminy. (Stuart Elliott, “Can’t Tell Your Cokes Apart? Sue Someone”, New York Times, Mar. 5). The Times misses the chance to mention the similarity of the widely noted AllTel campaign last year (Jul. 6, Aug. 3).

Inadequate sanctions

As I’ve previously mentioned, one of my pet peeves is the claim by the trial lawyer crowd that tort reform is unnecessary because judges already have the power to punish lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits. Technically, this claim is true. But it relies upon an extremely narrow definition of “frivolous” — the vast majority of absurd cases covered here on Overlawyered are not considered frivolous by current legal standards — and those who practice know how rare it is for judges to actually issue sanctions.

Take John Aretakis. He’s a New York attorney who has carved a legal niche for himself suing the Catholic Church over sexual abuse by priests. Well, to be more precise, the legal niche he occupied, according to a federal judge’s ruling last month, was filing a series of “utterly baseless” lawsuits against the Church, in which he ignored the law, misrepresented the law to the court, filed cut-and-paste complaints without proofreading them, and filed and publicized the suits for the improper purpose of embarrassing and humiliating Church officials. (AP, North Country Gazette).

Although this was not the first such lawsuit filed by Aretakis — or the second, or the third — and even though his suits have been uniformly rejected, this is the first time a judge has sanctioned him for his behavior. The court described the suit harshly as follows:

Taking Mr. Aretakis’s behavior in this case as a whole, it is clear that his conduct is sanctionable because it is sloppy and unprofessional; the pleadings are so far removed from adequate that they cannot be said to have been filed in good faith or after a reasonable inquiry; the bulk of the allegations dealing with sexual abuse are wholly irrelevant to the RICO claim, and; the Title VII claim is admittedly without basis in law.

But despite this harsh description, the Court still declined to make the victims of this frivolous lawsuit whole; Aretakis was fined just $8,000 — far less than the defendants asked for — and told not to do it again.

And it wasn’t because Aretakis made such a good argument in his defense:

Not surprisingly, Mr. Aretakis’s response to the Motion for Sanctions does not respond in a meaningful way as to why sanctions are not appropriate here. Instead, Mr. Aretakis recounts an irrelevant action in Tucson, Arizona, and another regurgitation of thrice-told tales of sexual abuse, plus non-sequiturs concerning a drunken process server with felony convictions attempting to serve process, among other wholly irrelevant topics.

The text of the decision can be found here (PDF).

Read On…

March 6 roundup

  • NY trial lawyers furious over state medical society’s plan to put informational posters and postcards in docs’ waiting rooms re: Topic A [Kingston Daily Freeman]

  • But can you sue Spider-Man? “Superheroes” linked to multiple pediatric injuries [BlogMD]

  • By reader acclaim: German farmer’s suit claims teenagers’ fireworks scared his ostrich Gustav right out of the breeding mood [AP/Jake Young]

  • Doug Weinstein is a fan of Edwards, but many of his commenters aren’t [InstaLawyer first, second posts]

  • Former Georgia legislator, author of bill that resulted in Genarlow Wilson’s 10-year sentence (see Feb. 8), says he’s sorry [Towery @ TownHall]

  • A lesson for grabby New Orleans Mayor Nagin? “In the massive floods of 1993, levees broke up and down the Mississippi — and no one sued. They rebuilt.” [Surber]

  • “Defamation of religion” soon to be regarded as contrary to int’l law? [Brayton channeling Volokh](more: Stuttaford)

  • Wouldn’t you just know: Bertolt Brecht’s sly legal dodges, at expense of Kurt Weill and other collaborators, still keep litigators busy long after his death [National Post]

  • U.K.: “Rectorial liability is a time bomb under every enticing glebe” [Guardian]

  • NYC subway system didn’t own or control access stairs, but can be sued over slip-fall anyway [Point of Law]

  • Grocery worker with Down’s Syndrome couldn’t follow basic sanitary rule, but that didn’t mean supermarket could fire him [three years ago on Overlawyered]

“Jury rules for girl in bike-skate crash”

Updating yesterday’s post about a widely discussed New Jersey case: “Deliberating just 15 minutes, a Morris County civil jury at 4 p.m. today declared that a Chester Township teenager was not to blame in 2003 when she collided with a bicycling physician while riding her in-line skates.” (Peggy Wright, Morristown Daily Record, Mar. 5). Earlier, it was reported: “The girl was knocked to the ground in the collision and bruised, but her parents have not filed a countersuit.” (“Bicyclist sues child roller-skater over accident”, AP/CourtTV, Mar. 1).