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Ex-owner of Pa. youth lockups gets 18 months
Headline Legal News |
2011/11/04 08:58
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The former owner of two juvenile detention facilities was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison for his role in a kickback scheme that led the state Supreme Court to vacate the convictions of thousands of juveniles who appeared before a now-jailed Pennsylvania judge.
Robert Powell pleaded guilty in 2009 to concealing a felony and an accessory charge in the so-called "kids for cash" scandal.
Powell testified earlier this year that he was forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to former Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan in return for their support of his two private juvenile detention facilities.
Powell said the judges extorted more than $725,000 from him after they shut down the county-run detention center and instead sent juveniles to his new lockup outside the city of Wilkes-Barre.
Sentencing guidelines call for a punishment of between 27 to 33 months in prison, but Powell was given credit for cooperating with the government.
When Powell became aware he was a target of the investigation, he approached prosecutors and offered to provide details of the scheme. |
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Court tosses $43M award against Ford in crash case
Legal Interview |
2011/11/04 08:58
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The Illinois Supreme Court has thrown out an Illlinois jury's $43 million award against Ford Motor Co. in a product-liability lawsuit linked to a fiery 2003 crash that killed a Missouri man and disfigured his wife.
The high court, in a Sept. 22 ruling made public Wednesday, among other things found that the lawsuit on Dora and John Jablonski's behalf did not give sufficient evidence for a jury to conclude Ford negligently "breached its duty of reasonable care" in designing the Lincoln Town Car involved in the wreck.
Justices also found that Illinois law does not require a company to warn of defects undetected before the product left the manufacturer.
Pinning the tragic wreck on the distracted motorist who hit the Jablonskis from behind at 60 mph, Ford said in an emailed statement Thursday it was "gratified" by the Illinois Supreme Court's ruling that "recognized and corrected the substantial efforts and deficiencies in the earlier proceedings."
The automaker said the 1993 Town Car exceeded all federal crash safety standards and received a five-star safety rating — the highest possible — from the U.S. government. |
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Police investigate Texas judge over video beating
Topics in Legal News |
2011/11/03 09:12
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Police launched an investigation Wednesday into a Texas family law judge whose daughter posted a YouTube video of him savagely beating her with a belt during a tirade several years ago when she was a teenager.
The nearly 8-minute video, viewed more than 950,000 times as of late Wednesday, shows Aransas County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams lashing his then-16-year-old daughter in the legs more than a dozen times and growing increasingly irate while she screams and refuses to turn over on a bed to be beaten. The video was uploaded last week.
"Lay down or I'll spank you in your (expletive) face," Adams screams. His daughter, Hillary, wails and pleads for him to stop.
Tim Jayroe, the police chief in William Adams' hometown of Rockport, a Gulf Coast community about 200 miles south of Houston, said Wednesday that he's asked the Texas Rangers to assist in investigating whether the video shows anything criminal happened. He said his department began investigating after receiving phone calls from several concerned people who watched the secretly recorded 2004 video.
No one answered the door at William Adams' home in Rockport on Wednesday, and repeated calls to his office rang unanswered. However, the 51-year-old judge told Corpus Christi television station KZTV on Wednesday that the video "looks worse than it is," and that he doesn't expect to be disciplined or punished because of it. |
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Appeals panel sides with CBS over Super Bowl fine
Headline Legal News |
2011/11/03 09:12
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In the latest court battle over the steamy 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that CBS should not be fined $550,000 for Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction."
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals held its ground even after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a review in light of the high court's ruling in a related Fox television case. In that case, it said the Federal Communications Commission could threaten fines over the use of even a single curse word uttered on live TV.
But Circuit Judge Marjorie Rendell said the Fox case only "fortifies our opinion" that the FCC was wrong to fine CBS over the halftime show.
The three-judge panel reviewed three decades of FCC rulings and concluded the agency was changing its policy, without warning, by fining CBS for fleeting nudity.
"An agency may not apply a policy to penalize conduct that occurred before the policy was announced," Rendell wrote.
CBS argues that the FCC had previously applied the same decency standards to words and images — and excused fleeting instances of both.
Rendell said that long-standing policy appeared to change without notice in March 2004 — a month after the act at the Super Bowl, held in Houston. |
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High court considers Ga. suit over false testimony
Legal Business |
2011/11/03 08:48
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The Supreme Court wrestled Tuesday with whether government officials are protected from civil lawsuits, even if they tell lies that lead a grand jury to vote for an indictment.
The justices heard arguments in an appeal from Charles Rehberg, an accountant who was indicted three times involving charges that he harassed doctors affiliated with a south Georgia hospital system.
After the third indictment was dismissed even before a trial, Rehberg sued local prosecutors and their investigator, James Paulk. Rehberg argues that he was placed under investigation because of the hospital's political connections and that Paulk's false grand jury testimony led to the indictments.
At issue in the high court is whether grand jury testimony could make a person liable in a civil lawsuit. A key question is whether the justices consider such testimony to be more like an affidavit or a trial. Witnesses are protected from civil lawsuits over what they say in trial testimony.
Paulk argues that the grand jury is part of the judicial process, and testimony there should be afforded the same protection it gets at trial. |
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