Real vote fraud

I wrote about the frivolous legal challenge to the Ohio presidential vote earlier today. But real vote fraud and voting shenanigans seem to be taking place in Washington state.

John Fund writes about a real threat to voting rights in Washington state — efforts to “find” votes for the gubernatorial candidates in what had been a close election, which became closer every time King County looked at its in-box.

UPDATE: And for more fun with voter intent and attempts to obtain executive office through fraud, check out the coverage of San Diego’s controversial mayoral election here.

Filed under: Ohio, politics, San Diego, Washington state

India Ebay criminal action

We’ve previously ridiculed suits against Ebay over items purchased there (e.g., Jul. 13, 2000); after all, if Ebay, as opposed to individual sellers, were to be held legally responsible for every transaction on the site, it would defeat the purpose of a low-transaction-cost Internet bazaar. But India has taken the illogic one step further by arresting and holding without bail Avnish Bajaj, the American head of the local affiliate website Baazee because a college student, in violation of the site’s policy, auctioned a (now-widely-available) two-minute amateur porn film made by a couple of teenagers from the prestigious Delhi Public School. (Saritha Rai, “EBay Fights India Arrest Over Sale of Sex Video”, New York Times, Dec. 21; Paul Watson, “Cellphone Sexcapade Fuels Scandal in India”, LA Times, Dec. 21; Rohit Wadhwaney, “From Baazee CEO to Jail No 3 of Tihar prison”, Times of India, Dec. 20).

Filed under: eBay

“The county had no neurosurgeon, and the boy died”

Chester County, Pennsylvania:

The boy [a 17-year-old who had sustained head trauma in an auto accident] could not be treated at Brandywine Hospital in Coatesville because the trauma center had closed, so he was transferred to Crozier-Chester Medical Center in Delaware County….

‘The last neurosurgeon in Chester County was Sam Lyness, a world-class neurosurgeon,” [Robert] Surrick said, but Lyness left Pennsylvania when his malpractice premiums reached $383,000. With no neurosurgeons, Brandywine shut down its trauma center in 2002.

(Paul Carpenter, Allentown Morning Call, Nov. 28).

Filed under: Delaware, hospitals, medical, Pennsylvania

Batch of reader letters

We’ve posted four more reader letters from our alarmingly backed-up pipeline, at our letters page. Among topics this time: Manhattan attorney Ravi Batra invites us to take a closer look at his lawsuit against the TV program “Law and Order”; can Texas exercise jurisdiction over out-of-state class action lawyers’ representation of Texas class members?; freeing innocent prisoners, and the other kind; and the continuum of disabilities.

Filed under: class actions, prisoners

Their own fault?

Sometimes, if a company ends up getting sued it’s its own blasted fault for failing to make a good product. That could be the case if Kia Spectra crashes start piling up.

The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety (home website here is a private organization funded by auto insurers that tests new and redesigned vehicles for crashworthiness. The IIHS tests are different than the ones that the National Highway Transportation Safety Authority (the agency within the US Department of Transportation) performs and have different rating systems primarily derived from the theoretical injury that the crash test dummy sustains in the IIHS test. IIHS ratings are Good, Acceptable, Marginal (in other words, barely meeting the test to keep the occupant safe) and Poor (read: car occupant will sustain injury in crash).

Read On…

Pop-Tart fire lawsuit

On June 1, 1998, Clark Seeley left the house while leaving Pop-Tarts heating in a toaster. Poor decision: there was a fire in the unattended toaster, and his house was damaged. Seeley blames not himself, but the toaster manufacturer. (The press doesn’t mention it, but Seeley’s insurance company initiated the suit before apparently settling.) The story is in the news now because (paging Peter Nordberg) the judge (probably correctly) held Wednesday that an expert’s study that a frosted-sugar pastry could conceivably start a toaster fire was admissible because it was falsifiable. The real question is why a court has let this case get to the stage where parties need to hire lawyers to supervise and submit reports from frosted-sugar pastry experts. (Michael Virtanen, “Judge Allows Expert on Pop-Tarts To Testify in Flaming Pastry Lawsuit”, AP/NY Sun, Dec. 17; Liberty Mutual Ins. v. Hamilton-Beach, 1:99-cv-01162-LEK-DRH (N.D.N.Y.)) The maker of Pop-Tarts was not sued, perhaps because the box warns consumers not to leave pastries unattended in the toaster. (Sean Carter, “Pop-torts”, November 2, 2001). Previous suit: Jul. 30, 2001. Update: New York Lawyer weighs in. (John Caher, “Engineer Ruled Expert Witness in Flaming Pop-Tart Case”, Dec. 21).

Filed under: Daubert, fires, insurers

Upholding democracy, frivolous election challenge thrown out

The Ohio Supreme Court’s Chief Justice threw out a lawsuit backed by Jesse Jackson and funded by a partisan Massachusetts election monitoring group. The lawsuit claimed that Pres. Bush unfairly won Ohio due to some indescribable fraud by his supporters as this excerpt from this article indicates:

The complaint questioned how the actual results could show Bush winning when exit-poll interview findings on election night indicated that Kerry would win 52 percent of Ohio’s presidential vote.

Without listing specific evidence, the complaint alleges that 130,656 votes for Kerry and John Edwards in 36 counties were somehow switched to count for the Bush-Cheney ticket.

The Ohio chief justice ruled that

Read On…

Filed under: John Edwards, Massachusetts, Ohio, politics

Clarence Thomas’s life and times

I’ve got a review in Sunday’s New York Post of Ken Foskett’s new biography “Judging Thomas”. (“Thomas’s Trials and Triumph”, Dec. 19). In his more than readable book Foskett concentrates on the remarkable life story of Clarence Thomas and makes next to no effort to evaluate his jurisprudence; but (contra Sen. Harry Reid) it’s not hard these days to find legal analysts who, while disagreeing with much of what Thomas stands for, acknowledge that he represents that viewpoint with much skill on the Court. For a sampling of such views, see David J. Garrow, “Saving Thomas”, The New Republic, Oct. 19, and, among bloggers, Gabe (“Unlearned Hand”) (Dec. 6) and Dispatches from the Culture Wars (Dec. 7). Also see Stephen B. Presser, “Touting Thomas”, Legal Affairs, Jan.-Feb. (more generally favorable view).

Filed under: Harry Reid, Supreme Court, WO writings

The New Highlanders?

From the ridiculous end of the sublime-to-ridiculous spectrum comes Curtis Blaine Storey, a man who lost his job and sued his employer for discriminating against him on the basis of national origin and religion. His employer gave him the sack for constantly displaying his Confederate flag at the workplace in violation of workplace rules.

Storey’s claimed national origin: Confederate Southern-American. His religion? The same. His lawyer’s rather inapt comparison, according to this article in the Legal Intelligencer, is that

Confederate Southern-Americans “endured a persecution similar to that suffered by the Highland Scots under English rule after the Jacobite uprising of 1745, or the Acadians of Canada.”

The district judge who heard this claim tossed it out. The Third Circuit agreed, upheld the dismissal but had a split vote.

Read On…

Filed under: workplace

Tenants who “know their rights”

And the lawyers who enable them: a horror story of New York City housing court. (Josh Barbanel, “A Landlord’s Worst Nightmare”, New York Times, Dec. 19).