November 30, 2009
Ashen-faced was the way the press described Brooke Astor’s son when he heard the jury’s verdict convicting him of defrauding his mother of tens of millions of dollars as she lay dying of Alzheimer’s disease. Barring an appeal, Anthony D. Marshall, 85, will be sentenced in early December. He faces at least one and as many as 25 years behind bars. (Astor, a New York philanthropist, was 105 when she died in 2007.)
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D.J. Feldman was 11 weeks pregnant last year when she learned that her child had anencephaly, a fetal defect that left the baby with almost no brain. It is always fatal.
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DENVER — The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected another request by former Qwest Communications International Inc. CEO Joseph Nacchio to review his insider trading conviction.
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In the wake of the horrible massacre of four Tacoma, Wash.-area police officers, there’s been a lot of talk about the fallout for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican. While in office, Huckabee commuted the lengthy prison sentence of the main suspect, Maurice Clemmons, with the result that he got out of prison in 2000 after about 11 years. Huckabee, who might repeat his 2008 run for president in 2012, has faced criticism of his liberal use of the pardon power already; now he???ll face more. But the case really puts the U.S. Supreme Court on the spot. Here???s why: The court is currently trying to decide whether it is unconstitutional to sentence anyone under the age of 18 to life in prison without parole for a non-homicide crime. The basic issue is whether the constitution allows states the power to conclude that some teenagers are so irredeemable and violence-prone that they may be locked up forever — or whether youths are so inherently less culpable, and their personalities are still so malleable that it constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” to deprive them of all hope of release. Maurice Clemmons was never sentenced to life without parole, but he was given a total of 108 years behind bars for a string of armed robberies, burglaries and other offenses he took part in as a 17-year-old. Citing his tender age at the time of the crimes, Huckabee commuted Clemmons’ sentence to 47 years, which made him eligible for immediate parole. It’s not strictly true that Huckabee’s action put Clemmons directly on the path to his alleged crimes in the state of Washington. Clemmons committed another armed robbery in 2001, a year after his release, and went back to prison, but he served just three years of a ten-year sentence before being granted parole again — amazingly, considering his record. A few days before allegedly gunning down the cops, he made $15,000 bail in Washington on a child rape charge. Still, Huckabee’s charitable intuition toward Clemmons seems stunningly misplaced in hindsight. Yet this is essentially the same intuition that lawyers for Florida inmate Terrance Graham are asking the court to follow. Graham was sentenced to life without parole at 17 for an armed home invasion. He got the sentence partly because he had returned to crime after receiving a lenient punishment for an earlier attempted robbery. (In a companion case, another Florida inmate, sentenced to life without parole at 13 for raping a 72-year-old woman, asks the court to set the bar at age 14.) At oral argument, Justice Samuel A. Alito asked Graham???s counsel: You can imagine someone who is a month short of his 18th birthday, and you are saying that, no matter what this person does, commits the most horrible series of non-homicide offenses that you can imagine, a whole series of brutal rapes, assaults that renders the victim paraplegic but not dead, no matter what, the person is sentenced shows no remorse whatsoever, the worst case you can possibly imagine, cannot — that person must at some point be made eligible for parole. That’s your argument? To which the reply was: Your Honor, that’s correct. A life — yes. A life with parole sentence would be constitutional, and that may mean that person you describe still spends his entire life in prison, but life with parole gives some hope to the adolescent who has an inherent capacity to change. It gives him some hope that later in time he may be released. Clemmons’ history seems instead to reinforce the intuition of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who suggested at oral argument that the constitution and the court’s precedents merely require a more flexible standard: that a defendant’s youth be taken into account at sentencing on a case by case basis. As we all know, the court never considers anything except the constitution, the law and the arguments of counsel. Such matters as how the public might react if the justices were seen to take the side of a teenage career criminal, just after a former teenage criminal got back on the street and allegedly slaughtered four police officers in cold blood, do not enter into their decisions. Still, I can???t help thinking that, after the murder of the four cops, the chances that Terrance Graham is going to win his case just got a little bit slimmer.
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SAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court has reduced the punitive damages that McKesson Corp. must pay a former employee who claimed she was harassed because she suffered panic attacks and had body odor.
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VICKSBURG, Miss. - For the first time in Mississippi, a jury found in favor of a plaintiff in a silicosis case when a former foundry worker won a judgment on Nov. 9 against a sand supplier that failed to warn him of the dangers of working with its sand (Robert Eastman v. Mississippi Valley Silica Co., et al., No. 07-0132-CI, Miss. Cir., Warren Co.).
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TOPEKA, Kan. - The Kansas Supreme Court on Oct. 30 affirmed in part a lower court decision that a local municipality’s prohibition on large commercial wind farms is lawful and not preempted by federal law (Roger Zimmerman, et al., v. Board of County Commissioners of Wabaunsee County, Kansas, No. 98,487, Kan. Sup.; 2009 Kan. 1073).
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Case: Pennsylvania General Insurance Co. v. Park-Ohio Industries Inc., et al., No. 2009-0104, Ohio Sup.
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DENVER - An insurer has no duty to defend or indemnify an insured for an underlying legal malpractice suit because the claim against the insured was made before the inception of the policy period, a majority of a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals panel said Nov. 12 (Berry & Murphy P.C., et al. v. Carolina Casualty Insurance Co., No. 09-1004, 10th Cir.).
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Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices announced Nov. 12 that they have settled all outstanding antitrust and intellectual property disputes between the two companies, with Intel paying $1.25 billion to AMD and AMD and Intel entering into a five-year cross-licensing agreement.
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