Posts Tagged ‘Connecticut’

“Court bars rapist from suing victim”

Connecticut:

A Superior Court judge in New London Friday permanently barred a convicted rapist who had harassed his victim with a series of legal actions from filing further lawsuits without the permission of a judge. Judge Clarance J. Jones issued a permanent injunction against Allen Adgers, who is serving a 13-year sentence for kidnapping and raping his former wife at knife-point, said Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, whose office sought the order….

[The wife] moved six times, but Adgers was able to learn her new address each time by filing a legal action that resulted in her being served with a subpoena. As part of the subpoena process, Adgers would get a receipt recording the address where service was made. He sent her harassing letters, which has added four years to his original 13-year sentence. But he still was allowed to force his former wife into court. Acting as his own attorney, the rapist was able to question and taunt his victim….

Blumenthal said that Adgers, in addition to harassing his victim, also filed 16 frivolous lawsuits against government officials since 2001. That will end with the order issued Friday.

(Mark Pazniokas, “Judge Halts Rape Victim’s Ordeal”, Hartford Courant, Feb. 25). Jonathan B. Wilson, who spotted the case, says one lesson — given that it took a situation this extreme to trigger an injunction — is that the system is likely to allow a great deal of litigation abuse in less facially outrageous cases: “So long as plaintiffs have the capacity of filng suit and engaging in discovery without satisfying any minimal standard of justification, unscrupulous plaintiffs will be able to use the compulsive power of the courts to impose frustration and costs on defendants.” (Feb. 26).

Filed under: attorneys general, Connecticut, crime and punishment, prisoners, Richard Blumenthal

Mom locks kid in car, sues firemen and police

Guita Sazan Silverstein accidentally locked her toddler son in her car on a hot day. A recording of her 911 to a Stamford, Connecticut, dispatcher shows her arguing against breaking the window of the Audi to rescue her son, preferring that police “watch” the boy while she runs over a mile home for a second key. (Silverstein’s explanation is that she feared shattered glass would injure her child.) The window was broken, the boy was rescued, and Silverstein was arrested for child endangerment (allegedly when she tried to leave the scene against police orders while the rescue was pending), and now she wants to sue the city’s police and fire department over the arrest and resulting publicity. “Her attorney, Matthew Maddox said Silverstein should not have been arrested after the July 25 incident. Maddox said police and fire officials should take the blame for any delay or difficulties extracting the boy.” (Tobin A. Coleman, “Lawyer: Officials to blame for baby in car incident”, Stamford Advocate, Jan. 24; AP/Boston Globe, Jan. 24).

Filed under: Connecticut, personal responsibility

Colleagues to Pattis: knock it off

As readers may recall (Dec. 9), Connecticut attorney Norm Pattis has lately written a series of powerful commentaries at Crime and Federalism suggesting that some of his fellow plaintiff’s attorneys are too often tempted to take on the causes of vengeful, deluded or disturbed complainants, especially during “the periodic lull in cases of merit”; he further argued that society’s interest calls for strong measures against the filing of meritless cases. It seems, however, that these commentaries have not sat well with many of his colleagues. On Dec. 20 Pattis described one wave of reaction:

The other day, a newspaper called to ask for permission to run an old item. I granted permission, and now my email box is replete with messages from new readers, in this instance members of the plaintiff’s bar, not at all happy that I wrote about my sense that not all cases have merit.

And three days later (Dec. 23) he has further thoughts in response to being verbally pummeled on a listserv of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association:

…All I am saying is that a significant percentage of plaintiffs bring deep-seated psychological injury to their cases that is not caused by a defendant’s misconduct, and these clients transfer all their anger and disappointment onto the first available target, whether it be defendant or lawyer. I suspect any lawyer practicing more than a couple of years can draw this distinction with ease.

Was I suggesting that defendants are somehow devoid of the same sociopathy? Not at all. I suspect many defendants are disturbed as well. But there is a crucial difference — the defendant did not choose to be in court….

I haven’t lost the will and zeal to fight, far from it. But I do get to choose not to become more than the blunt instrument of those clients whose cases lack merit, and whose psyches bring nothing but hatred and rage to a courtroom.

Filed under: Connecticut, ethics, federalism

FedEx Sued In Child Sex Assault Case

Paul Sykes had a criminal record when he was hired by FedEx Kinko’s; FedEx says their background check didn’t turn it up. Sykes solicited Kinko’s customers for work for his outside computer repair business; one family hired Sykes and his disturbingly-named “Facts and Fantasy” service, and Sykes went on to (allegedly) molest their eight-year-old son, a crime for which he has been arrested, charged, and has pled not guilty. The family is suing FedEx. (Bloomberg News, “FedEx Sued In Child Sex Assault Case”, Dec. 15; AP/Newsday, Dec. 14).

Filed under: Connecticut, third party liability for crime, workplace

Seriously Bad Elf beer

The Ridgeway Brewery in England brews a bitter winter ale which it calls Seriously Bad Elf, complete with a drawing of a gnomic figure on the label. Now officials in Connecticut, including Attorney General and bete-noire-of-this-site Richard Blumenthal, have banned imports of the ale on the grounds that an elf drawing might entice minors to drink the beer. (“‘Seriously Bad Elf’ Beer Banned In CT”, CBS4Boston, Oct. 28; “Connecticut looks to ban British beer with elf label”, AP/USA Today, Oct. 29).

Filed under: attorneys general, beer and brewers, Connecticut, labels, Richard Blumenthal

Batch of reader letters

More reader correspondence appears on our letters page. Among topics this time: how to remove all the liability risks from a hotel shower; don’t blame all the woes of the litigation system on jury verdicts; after the Mississippi judicial bribery trial; and a rising political star in Connecticut.

Filed under: Connecticut, Mississippi, politics

Around the blogs

Philadelphia lawyer/blogger “Eh Nonymous”, who has been reading this site since law school without necessarily agreeing, now offers some more than generous comments about us (Aug. 17). Nobody’s Business has a picture of an overprotective warning sign which we can only assume is a parody and which in any case is funny (Aug. 15). Dozens of blogs, including Gypsy Speaks and Rev. Marge, are onto the sequel of the Kelo v. New London eminent-domain case: the city of New London, having won its case against the homeowners, now is charging them back rent for the five years it took to kick them out of their homes, not unlike the foreman in the old labor song who, after an on-the-job explosion, docked the worker for the time he spent up in the sky. And Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty (Aug. 15) explores the question of “Why the [New York] Times likes Kelo so much”. More: Gunner at No Quarters has identified (Aug. 17) a provision in Connecticut law that might prove unexpectedly helpful to the Kelo “tenants”.

Filed under: about the site, Connecticut, Philadelphia

Connecticut: a little favor for Koskoff, Koskoff and Bieder

The Bridgeport law firm of Koskoff, Koskoff and Bieder, which accounts for many of Connecticut’s high-profile settlements against doctors and other defendants, isn’t shy about throwing its political weight around in Hartford. Consider what happened after the firm got hit with a legal-malpractice suit from a former client, a widow who allegedly hadn’t been properly advised by attorney Rosalind Koskoff to file for workers’-comp benefits for her late husband, and was later ruled to have waited too long. As the widow’s malpractice suit against the law firm headed toward trial, two friends of the trial bar in the state senate, deputy majority leader Andrew McDonald and Sen. Edith Prague, tacked onto an unrelated bill an amendment which would have the state fork over the benefits the widow was suing for — not as a general rule, just in that one case — which would have the probable effect of knocking out the malpractice case by mootness. The bill became law, and the influential law firm can now presumably breathe a bit easier, glad it has cultivated so many friends in high political places. (Meir Rinde, “A Legislative Rat? The Koskoff Clause”, Hartford Advocate, Aug. 4).

Filed under: Connecticut, medical, politics, statutes of limitations

Dept. of gratitude

Last October the rescue squads of the town of Old Saybrook, Ct., were hailed as heroes for their work in attempting to save Barbara Connors, 75, of Medfield, Mass., from a Ford Explorer that had plunged into the Connecticut River. Connors’ son-in-law, who had been at the wheel and who managed to escape from the vehicle on his own, later told police he accidentally hit the SUV’s accelerator, propelling it through a chain-link fence and into the water below. But now Connors is suing a long list of officials of the town (population 1,962) on the grounds that they should have maintained or funded a specially dedicated and equipped dive rescue team; had they done so, she would have been rescued from the submerged vehicle in less than the 29 minutes it actually took, avoiding serious injury. Through her attorney, Robert Reardon Jr. of New London, she’s also suing the son-in-law. “‘I find it extraordinary the town is being sued in these circumstances,’ First Selectman Mike Pace, one of the defendants, said at Thursday’s selectmen’s meeting.” (Claudia Van Nes, “Town Sued Over River Rescue”, Hartford Courant, Aug. 5; Walt Platteborze, “Woman ‘critical’ after being pulled from submerged SUV”, New Haven Register, Oct. 15, 2004).

Filed under: Connecticut, personal responsibility

“Affordable housing” lawsuits

In Connecticut as well as some other states, land developers have teamed up with low-income housing advocates to promote laws which impose on towns a duty to boost their level of so-called affordable housing and give homebuilders willing to include such housing in their developments a cause of action to go to court to overturn local building restrictions. Norm Pattis of Crime and Federalism (May 9) isn’t buying the idea that the resulting litigation, with its tendency to replace the formerly diverse land-use practices of different towns with homogeneous sprawl, really should count as progressive.

Filed under: Connecticut, environment, federalism