Posts on ‘November 11th, 2008’

The Supreme Court on Monday denied review in two California cases in which defendants claimed that multimedia victim impact presentations prejudiced jurors against them. But the justices who indicated that they would have granted review in the cases explained their reasoning and, in an unusual step, referred to the victim video in one of the cases, which had been put up on the Court’s Web site. It’s not the first time the Court has gone multimedia on its site.

Acting Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael R. Ambrecht, who presided over two criminal matters in which his personal attorney appeared, acted in a “manifestly improper” manner and should be publicly censured, the state Commission on Judicial Conduct has recommended. But the commission dismissed a charge that Ambrecht issued a politically motivated decision about the local DA. In so doing, the commission rejected a recommendation that Ambrecht be removed from office.

An attorney who worked for indicted Broadcom co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III has pleaded guilty to evading a banking law and will cooperate with the federal government in a sweeping stock options backdating probe involving his former boss. Craig Gunther could face up to two years in prison. Nicholas has pleaded not guilty and is free on bail pending trial next year.

Morgan Lewis & Bockius got an energy boost this week with the addition of 17 attorneys from disbanding Thelen. The attorneys, all of whom focus largely on capital markets and transactions in the electric, gas and nuclear sectors, will join Morgan Lewis’ New York office, where they will be members of the business and finance team. The firm said this latest addition will solidify its position as a full-service resource for the utilities industry.

Monday’s Supreme Court oral argument in was dense with debate over rules of grammar and statutory interpretation aimed at figuring out what Congress meant when it passed a statute expanding the scope of a federal gun control law. One bright spot in the colloquy came when the government attorney supplied an obscure and almost whimsical term for sections of the statute to which the justices had been referring, awkwardly, as “little eye” and “little eye eye.”

A San Francisco federal jury on Nov. 10 ordered the NFL Players Association to pay a total of $28.1 million to retired players after finding the union failed to properly market their images on their behalf for use in video games, trading cards and other sports products. The figure includes $21 million in punitive damages, just short of the $21.9 million award that the players’ lawyer had asked of the jury to reflect roughly 10 percent of the union’s net worth at the start of the year.

The Supreme Court on Monday considered a case involving whether a defendant’s failure to report for confinement after conviction constitutes a “violent crime” under the Armed Career Criminal Act. The justices weighed arguments concerning whether failure to report is an aggressive or a passive act, and contemplated hypotheticals involving a defendant shirking jail time in order to relax in his armchair or to create holiday memories with his family.