Year: 2014

The refusal by a Georgia judge to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit against General Motors means that discovery can proceed in the case of a 29-year-old woman who died as a result of the deadly ignition switch that led the company to recall 2.6 million of its cars.

On Saturday the judge ordered the automaker to start turning over documents by September 26 to lawyers for Kenneth and Mary Melton, whose daughter Brooke died in 2010 after the ignition switch on her 2010 Chevrolet Cobalt failed.

The Meltons settled their lawsuit for $5 million last year but in May announced that they would return the money, charging that the company fraudulently hid information.

Lance Cooper, a lawyer for the Meltons, told the Times that he wants to depose Michael Millikin, GM’s general counsel, as well as other employees of both GM and Delphi, which manufactured the ignition switch.

GM expressed disappointment in the court’s ruling. “We continue to believe that the parties reached a good-faith settlement last year,” spokesman Greg Martin told the Times.

After the family renounced the settlement and sued GM again, the company had the case removed to federal court in an attempt to combine the lawsuit with other litigation that it could stay under an order that governs GM’s 2009 bankruptcy.

The Meltons won an important procedural victory in July, when a federal judge remanded the case to the state court in Cobb County, just north of Atlanta.

The news that the death of James Brady was ultimately caused by the 1981 shooting that left him permanently paralyzed reminds us that murder has no statute of limitations.

According to reports on Friday, a medical examiner in Northern Virginia has determined that gunfire that hit the former White House press secretary during an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan led to Brady’s death.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington told Bloomberg that prosecutors are reviewing the coroner’s ruling, which could lead to homicide charges against Brady’s assailant, John Hinckley, Jr., 33 years after the shooting that also injured the president, a police officer and a Secret Service agent.

Under most modern statutes, to be guilty of murder a defendant must cause another person’s death, which can occur at any time. That differs from the common law, which held that death had to occur within a year-and-a-day of the homicidal act.

Hinckley, now 59, was found not guilty by reason of insanity of charges tied to the shooting, including attempted assassination of the president and assault on a federal officer.

“There is probably a basis to charge him,” Thomas Zeno, a former federal prosecutor, told Bloomberg. Zeno spent nearly 20 years opposing Hinckley’s attempts to win more privileges at Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, where he has been held since the jury verdict.

Hinckley’s lawyer, Barry Wm. Levine, rejected the idea that prosecutor’s could charge his client. “It’s not very complicated,” said Levine. “The act was prosecuted and he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The only difference between what was charged then and this conclusion is that Mr. Brady died.”

A Detroit-area jury has convicted a man of murdering a young woman who banged on his door early one morning last November, in a case that tested limits on the use of deadly force to defend a dwelling.

Theodore Wafer, 55, was found guilty on Thursday of second-degree murder, manslaughter and a felony-firearm charge in the murder of Renisha McBride, 19, according to news reports.

Under Michigan law, second-degree murder is an intentional killing that does not qualify as first-degree murder.

Wafer, who faces life in prison, testified that he killed McBride in self-defense after she pounded on his front and side doors at about 4:30 a.m. He claimed that he reached for his shotgun and later fired through the locked screen door because he feared that someone was trying to break into his suburban Detroit home.

McBride, who toxicology tests showed was intoxicated at the time of her death, had been involved in an automobile accident earlier that morning.

The killing raised racial tensions in Detroit. Wafer is white. McBride was black.

Prosecutors said Wafer’s self-defense claim was contravened by his failure to call 911 when he first heard the pounding. He testified at trial that he did not even look to see who was outside before firing.

Under Michigan law, a person may use deadly force only if he reasonably believes that it is necessary to prevent imminent death or serious bodily harm, the Times reported. However, there is no requirement that a person retreat inside his home.

By contrast, New York requires that a person retreat from his doorway before using lethal force.

A jury in a suburban Detroit murder trial is weighing a man’s use of deadly force that he claims was justified.

Prosecutors hope to have persuaded jurors that Theodore Wafer, a 55-year-old homeowner in Dearborn Heights, Mich., murdered Renisha McBride, 24, when he shot and killed McBride while she stood at his front door early one morning last November.

Prosecutors charged Wafer with second-degree murder and manslaughter. Under Michigan law, there is no duty to retreat in your own home, according to news reports. But the jury is confronting a more complex question.

Wafer, who testified that he shot McBride through the locked screen door, says he had justification to use deadly force. He testified that he “shot in fear,” but did not shoot at a particular target, and that he fired his shotgun after he woke to the sound of someone banging on his door, according to news reports. Wafer did not call 911.

McBride’s knocking “kept getting louder and louder,” according to Wafer, who testified that he noticed the screen door was tampered with and that he saw a figure emerge from the side of the house. McBride, who was shot in the face, had crashed her car earlier that night about a half-mile from Wafer’s house. At the time of her death her blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit. Wafer is white. McBride was African-American.

In a majority of states, a person may use deadly force to protect his dwelling only if he reasonably believes he is threatened or to prevent a felony inside.

Prosecutors in Wafer’s case argued that a person who claims self-defense must reasonably believe that he is in imminent danger of either losing his life or suffering great bodily harm, and that the use of deadly force is necessary to prevent that harm. Wafer does not satisfy that test, prosecutors charged.

Here in New York, a person must retreat before using deadly force unless the person is in his own home. Even there, a person has a duty to retreat from his doorway.

Based on the testimony presented at trial, Wafer’s claim that he feared for his safety seems to be undermined by his failure to give ground or to call the cops. It sounds like he had less deadly options.

The case belongs to the jury, which deliberated Wednesday afternoon without reaching a verdict. There are four black jurors and eight white jurors, ABC News reported.

The Times on Sunday published two stories about the law that juxtapose a tension that tugs at legal education in the current economy.

The first story looks at how a weak market for legal hiring is inspiring some educators to think anew about training the latest generation of lawyers. The second, a Q&A, has two professors answering real-life questions about the law.

For the story, the Times traveled to the Entrepreneurial Lawyering Startup Competition, a program sponsored by Michigan State University’s law school that aims to spur students to think of themselves as entrepreneurs. The competition, part of the university’s so-called Reinvent Law Laboratory, aims to equip them to navigate a legal marketplace that, like most marketplaces, is being upended by technology. Pitches presented at the competition include a service to help people claim property and another to help immigrants file their taxes.

The school sees the program as part of an effort to give students an assist in a job market that remains gloomy. Daniel Martin Katz, an associate professor and a founder of the laboratory, described the goal as helping students develop knowledge of the law and a broader set of abilities. “Analytics plus law gets you into a niche,” Katz told the Times.

Other schools reportedly are blazing similar paths. The University of Colorado law school runs a four-week summer camp to equip students with training in such tools as Adobe and NetApp. Northwestern University Law School is using faculty members with experience in technology and business to teach in what Daniel Rodriguez, the dean, describes as “the law/business/technology” interface.

The efforts by law schools, especially those outside the top tier, to give students a leg up is understandable. The number of law school applicants dropped this year for the fourth year in a row and is down more than 37% since 2010, according to figures compiled by the National Law Journal. The academic institutions need some way to differentiate themselves in the competition for applicants.

The second piece features six questions about the law drawn from everyday life, with answers provided by Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, and Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law.

The first question, from Dershowitz, reportedly comes directly from his classroom.

Attorney Goodheart is asked by Badact to represent him. Badact asks for and receives a promise of confidentiality, then tells Goodheart that he committed a murder for which another man has been convicted and is awaiting execution. Can Goodheart break his promise to save the life of a stranger but at the possible cost of his own client’s life?

The short answer is yes. Law students learn that a lawyer may not reveal confidential information that she receives from her client, except in limited circumstances, which include to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm. But Dershowitz goes on to highlight the difficulty that legal education trains lawyers to confront:

There is still considerable controversy over what “reasonably certain” and “substantial bodily harm” mean. What if the innocent person is serving life imprisonment? Ten years? Five years? Another difficult question: Should a lawyer now advise his client that disclosure is permitted in certain circumstances? If so, will the client tell him the truth? There are no easy answers.

There are no easy answers. The combination of an issue, a rule and its application comprises the core of legal training and, it seems, the essential learning of a lawyer. Lawyers learn a way of thinking that, while sometimes maddening to non-lawyers, distinguishes the profession. Legal thinking also separates law school from business school, where managers deconstruct case studies of business problems in an effort to boost profits at the company the case profiles.

While both methods tie to the world of modern business, they represent different ways of thinking about the world. That’s why I wonder whether add-ons to the law school curriculum make sense. What makes a lawyer valuable is his or her ability to identify legal issues, know the law and apply that law effectively on behalf of a client. Find yourself in need of a lawyer – whether to defend you in court, to draw up your will or to handle your divorce – and my guess is that you’ll value those skills above all.

That’s to say that we value the skills that law schools have taught for years and that the practice of law reinforces. Adobe’s system for managing documents may change or the cloud at NetApp may expand, but the legal method is the legal method. It evolves but it remains basically what it was for the past 600 years. Business tends to profit from the future, if for no other reason than that’s where opportunity lies. The law has no comparable currency.

In attempting to advance its approach, Michigan State’s law school touches on the tension. “Legal education has been stronger on tradition than innovation,” Joan Howarth, the school’s dean, told the Times. “What we’re trying to do is to educate lawyers for the future, not the past.” Law schools will do their best to conceive legal education for a digital age. As for the merits of that strategy, as with many things legal, we’ll have to await the verdict.