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Court fines woman in Berlusconi 'bunga bunga' case
Law Firm News |
2012/12/19 00:07
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A Milan court fined a Moroccan woman at the center of Silvio Berlusconi's sex-for-hire scandal €500 ($650) on Monday for failing to appear as a witness twice at the former premier's trial. It ordered her to testify in January.
Karima el-Mahroug, also known as Ruby, is the last witness to be called in the sensational trial that accuses Berlusconi of having paid for sex with el-Mahroug when she was 17, and then trying to cover it up. Both deny having had sex.
The court ordered el-Mahroug, who is in Mexico on vacation, to testify on Jan. 14, confirming the necessity of her testimony.
Prosecutors have accused the defense, which called el-Mahroug as a witness, of engaging in a strategy to delay a verdict — which has included calling witnesses who have failed to show. Italian law does not carry particularly strict penalties against witnesses who fail to appear, and in some cases the court may decide their participation is not essential. |
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High Court to decide how logging roads regulated
Headline News |
2012/12/10 23:02
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The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to switch gears on more than 30 years of regulating the muddy water running off logging roads into rivers.
At issue: Should the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency keep considering it the same as water running off a farm field, or start looking at it like a pipe coming out of a factory?
The case being heard Monday in Washington, D.C., was originated by a small environmental group in Portland, the Northwest Environmental Defense Center.
It sued the Oregon Department of Forestry over roads on the Tillamook State Forest that drain into salmon streams. The lawsuit argued that the Clean Water Act specifically says water running through the kinds of ditches and culverts built to handle storm water runoff from logging roads is a point source of pollution when it flows directly into a river, and requires the same sort of permit that a factory needs.
"We brought this out of a perceived sense of unfairness," said Mark Riskedahl, director of the center. "Every other industrial sector across the country had to get this sort of permit for stormwater discharge," and the process has been very effective at reducing pollution.
The pollution running off logging roads, most of them gravel or dirt, is primarily muddy water stirred up by trucks. Experts have long identified sediment dumped in streams as harmful to salmon and other fish.
The center lost in U.S. District Court in Portland, but won in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The Oregon Department of Forestry and Georgia Pacific-West appealed to the Supreme Court, and 31 states threw in with them. |
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Fed. court orders resentencing in Arkansas bombing
Topics |
2012/12/10 12:58
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An Arkansas doctor sentenced to life in prison for a 2009 bombing that nearly killed the head of the state medical board should be resentenced on some convictions, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
A jury convicted Randeep Mann, 54, in 2010 of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and other charges. The Feb. 4, 2009, bomb attack took away Dr. Trent Pierce's sense of smell and left him blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.
Mann's attorneys appealed his convictions and sentences, arguing there wasn't enough evidence to convict him.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Thursday that Mann shouldn't have received a sentencing enhancement based on allegations that he ordered the assault of an inmate. The panel said the allegation was never brought up in court and was improperly referenced in a pre-sentencing report.
"The only reference in the record to Mann ordering the assault of a federal inmate is contained in a bench conference that occurred at trial between the district judge and the attorneys," the appeals court opinion said. |
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Firm settles with W.Va. AG over mortgage case
Lawyer News |
2012/12/03 18:43
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A Texas law firm has reached an agreement with West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw to resolve a case stemming from a national mortgage settlement.
Officials said Wednesday that Murray LLP has agreed to stop offering services in West Virginia to help homeowners receive benefits from a settlement between lenders and states.
Claim forms already were sent to more than 5,000 West Virginians who lost their homes to foreclosure eligible for payments under the settlement.
McGraw had sued the company earlier this month for allegedly charging fees to consumers for completing the claim form.
Officials say the company has agreed it would not represent or collect payments from West Virginia consumers in relation to the settlement. |
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Kline lawyer wants probe of research attorneys
Law Firm News |
2012/11/27 22:13
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An attorney representing Phill Kline against ethics charges is alleging that the court record may have been tainted by a research attorney who was later fired for posting disparaging Twitter comments about the former Kansas attorney general.
In a letter to Stan Hazlett, disciplinary administrator for the state's judicial branch, Kline's attorney Tom Condit asks for a review of all research attorneys working for judges and justices to determine whether there was bias.
"It's the only way to resolve these concerns, when there is so much at stake for Mr. Kline, is to conduct a thorough vetting of the process," Condit wrote in the letter sent Tuesday.
Sarah Peterson-Herr was fired Nov. 19, four days after she posted comments about Kline as he appeared before the Kansas Supreme Court over alleged misconduct during his investigation of abortion providers. |
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Court won't hear appeal in witness tampering case
Headline News |
2012/11/15 12:25
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The Supreme Court won't review a decision to throw out sanctions and a $600,000 award against Miami prosecutors in a witness-tampering investigation where members of the defense team had allegedly been secretly recorded.
The high court on Tuesday refused to hear an appeal from Dr. Ali Shaygan, who has been acquitted of 141 counts of illegally prescribing painkillers. A federal judge said publicly that three prosecutors and a Drug Enforcement Administration agent acted "vexatiously and in bad faith" for failing to obtain permission before authorizing two witnesses to record conversations with Shaygan's attorney and his investigator.
But a federal appeals court threw out the sanction and award, saying the judge violated the prosecutors' due process rights in 2009 when he issued a public reprimand for their alleged misconduct.
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