Posts on ‘March 2nd, 2010’

A defendant who says he is afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder cannot suppress statements he made in the throes of a purported “brain freeze” triggered by his arrest that stripped him of his ability to waive his rights, a New York state judge has held. David Martz had challenged the admissibility of a signed statement that he gave after a nearly two-hour interrogation, arguing that his OCD was “so exacerbated” by the circumstances of his arrest that he was unable to process any information.

Lawyer Montgomery Blair Sibley, one-time attorney for the “D.C. Madam,” has been a continuing gadfly at the Supreme Court, challenging it on a range of issues and then suing the Court itself when it does not rule in his favor or does not take up his case. His suits cause recusal problems for the Court, because the justices tend to recuse when they are named targets. Sibley’s latest suit named all the justices he claims improperly refused to hear an earlier case, leaving only the Court’s newest justice to rule on it.

A former secretary at Drinker Biddle & Reath has sued the firm over overtime pay. In the complaint, filed last week, Shawn Havrilla claims she was required to work more than 40 hours per week without proper compensation. Drinker Biddle allegedly knew Havrilla was working extra hours, and “required this extra work as a condition of her employment,” the complaint states.

In a ruling that defines the scope of individual liability under the Family and Medical Leave Act, a federal judge has refused to dismiss claims against a trio of human resources executives and a manager who allegedly set out to find a reason to fire a worker after learning he needed a leave for a surgery. The judge concluded that all five individuals named in the case were properly considered defendants because each is alleged to have had the power to fire and to have had a role in the decision to oust the plaintiff.

A bankruptcy judge on Monday upheld a trustee’s method of adjudicating the claims of investors who fell prey to Bernard Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme. Under Trustee Irving Picard’s “cash-in/cash out” approach, investors who withdrew more money from their Madoff accounts than they deposited will not be compensated while investors who withdrew less than they put in would be compensated. The method has been hotly contested by numerous investors. The decision is likely to be appealed — possibly directly to the 2nd Circuit.

After a written legal hold notice issues, the organization needs to enforce it, say Howett Isaza partner John Isaza and Goldberg Segalla partner John J. Jablonski. And that means taking affirmative steps to discharge the duty to prevent the destruction of relevant ESI and other documents.

Large U.S. law firms became less diverse last year. That’s the key finding to emerge from the latest version of The American Lawyer’s annual Diversity Scorecard, which counts attorneys of color in the U.S. offices of some 200 big firms. In each of the Scorecard’s prior nine years, the percentage of minority attorneys at all participating firms increased, rising from less than 10 percent in 2000 to 13.9 percent in 2008. In 2009, for the first time, that proportion dipped, to 13.4 percent.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday struggled with just how bad a lawyer must be to warrant stopping the clock on the time for filing a prisoner’s federal habeas petition. In Holland v. Florida, the justices confronted two issues: whether the one-year deadline for filing habeas petitions under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act can be tolled for equitable reasons, and whether a lawyer’s gross negligence is one of those reasons for halting the clock.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in the third of a series of challenges to the “honest services” fraud statute, this time in the context of the prosecution of former Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling. But most of the justices’ attention focused instead on the other major issue in Skilling’s case: whether the local jury pool in Houston was so poisoned by rage against Enron that it was impossible to pick an impartial jury — even when potential jurors said they could be fair.