Posts Tagged ‘zero tolerance’

May 22 roundup

Teacher’s ordeal began when cops found two pills in her car

59-year-old Melinda Herrick, an art teacher who had been a Teacher of the Year honoree in the Houston schools, was charged with violating the “drug-free zone” law after cops found two Xanax pills in her car; the drug is often prescribed for panic disorder. Herrick protested that the car had been in the shop for repairs for more than a month before the incident; her daughter also drove the car. Students rallied on her behalf and the charges were finally dropped after she underwent a drug test which indicated that she did not use drugs. [Houston Chronicle via Obscure Store]

February 9 roundup

  • Court declines to dismiss stripper’s suit blaming her DUI crash on club that made her drink with customers [Heller/OnPoint News, earlier]
  • Served 23 years in Wisconsin prison, then cleared by DNA evidence [Innocence Project]
  • Headlines we didn’t make up: “Grad Student Threatens to Sue Over Destruction of Rare Lizard Dung” [ABA Journal, U.K. case]
  • Wisconsin middle school suspends teacher Betsy Ramsdale because her Facebook photo shows her with gun [Never Yet Melted] http://is.gd/iQaj
  • David Ogden, now up for a high Department of Justice post, assisted in Clinton-Reno era’s ghastly RICO suit against tobacco companies (maybe on-orders-from-superiors, given the extent to which the whole thing was wired by hotshot outside lawyers suing the industry) [Carrie Johnson, WaPo]
  • You’d think they’d learn: appliance energy-use mandates led to lousy clothes-washer and dishwasher designs, but more of the same on the horizon [Kazman, CEI “Open Market”]
  • Walks out of psychiatric hospital and kills himself, state of New Jersey ordered to pay $600K to survivors [Newark Star-Ledger]
  • Why there was a market for burned out light bulbs in the former Soviet Union [Tyler Cowen]

December 9 roundup

  • Go vote for Overlawyered now, please, in the ABA Journal best-blogs contest; some details on contestants in other categories;
  • Update on “Got Breastmilk?” trademark dispute [Giacalone; earlier]
  • Trauma patient is bleeding while you fumble to get the IV equipment out of its blister pack. Soon it’ll be even more complicated. Thanks OSHA! [Throckmorton] And where are the stand-up medical comedy routines?
  • Arkansas Supreme Court’s handling of school finance litigation suggests it’s making it up as it goes along [Jay Greene]
  • “Linux Defenders” is tech-firm consortium’s new effort to create “no-fly zone” protecting open-source system from patent trolls [Parloff, Fortune]
  • Zero tolerance roundup: 10 year old who took $5.96 Wal-Mart cap gun to school arrested, fingerprinted, faces expulsion [11alive.com, Newton County, Ga.] Harford County, Md. mom, acting as chaperone on school field trip, “reached out to tap” third grader to shush him, now faces ten years if convicted of assault [ABC2News.com, Baltimore] Related: we’re too afraid of touch [Times Online] Teasing is bad for children and other living things. Really? Are you sure? [Althouse, NYT]
  • Columnist has opposed bailouts and favored free market liquidation of uneconomic firms. Now that his newspaper faces bankruptcy, has he changed his mind? [Steve Chapman]
  • Good way to suffer reputational damage: file a lawsuit claiming characters in movie “Dazed and Confused” were based on your own teenage selves [four years ago on Overlawyered]

November 3 roundup

  • M.D.s and J.D.s in cahoots: when neuroradiologists over-read MRIs in search of “disc herniations” and “cord compression” [ER Stories]
  • Lawyer burns his Harvard law diploma, and stop with that joking in the back row about whether there’s some way to burn all of them [ABA Journal]
  • Latest lawsuit arising from fad for photos of “Hot Chicks with Dorky Men” (that’s a paraphrase) [TMZ, QuizLaw, earlier]
  • Kid draws scary Hallowe’en mask, and next thing you know the police are called [Savannah Morning News]
  • Great moments in international human rights: “Modern European navies are now so mindful of the legal loopholes they face in tackling pirates that they often instruct commanders to simply let them go.” [Telegraph; earlier here, here]
  • China has four times the number of people we have in the U.S., while we have seven times the number of lawyers [Elefant]
  • “Vaccine injury” lawyer Clifford Shoemaker fails in effort to curtail public access to fee information, so we get to learn more about his $211,663.37 bill to the government [Seidel, Neurodiversity; related here and here]
  • More about that Milberg basketball team and its 6′ 8″ ringer [Supreme Dicta]

School scenarios, 1958 vs. 2008

This doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a bit of unattributed circulating email humor, but it still made me laugh:

Scenario: Jack goes quail hunting before school, pulls into school parking lot with shotgun in gun rack.
1958 – Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack’s shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack.
2008 – School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers. …

Full thing at Never Yet Melted.

June 9 roundup

  • Florida trial lawyers have funneled millions to Gov. Charlie Crist and GOP state legislators; now guess why Orlando isn’t going to get commuter rail [Bousquet/St. Petersburg Times; Sentinel]
  • What his ex-law firm told the world was “extremely inappropriate personal conduct” was in reality no more than a “brief, consensual kiss” with co-worker, charges attorney in $90 million defamation suit; Kasowitz Benson says it was following zero tolerance policy [American Lawyer]
  • SCOTUS, 9-0, Thomas writing, narrows scope for money-laundering charges over hiding unexplained cash — but will that curb forfeiture abuse? [Grits for Breakfast, Greenfield]
  • After West Virginia high court refuses to review $405 million royalty dispute jury verdict against Chesapeake Energy and another defendant, company scraps plans to build $30 million headquarters in the state [PoL]
  • Even after discounting anti-corporate rhetoric, there does seem to be a story here about aggressive seed patent litigation tactics used by agri-giant Monsanto, a firm known to our readers [Barlett & Steele, Vanity Fair; earlier]
  • Medical liability consequences of much-promoted concept of hospital “never events” [Buckeye Surgeon]
  • Cellphone rage update: Judge Robert Restaino ousted for jailing 46 people after one of the annoying devices rang out in his Niagara Falls, N.Y. courtroom [Buffalo News, earlier]

Annals of zero tolerance: empty bullet casing

In Winchendon, Mass., ten-year-old Bradley Geslak brought to school an empty bullet casing he’d brought home from the town Memorial Day celebration, in which blanks were fired. Although an empty casing is, of course, empty, he was charged with a weapons offense and after his five-day suspension may be assigned a probation officer. (Gail Stanton, “Souvenir rifle shell gets 4th-grader suspended”, Worcester Telegram, May 29; “Silence on lock and load”, May 30)(via Zincavage).

April 24 roundup