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Officer David Northway, spokesman for TPD, said officers didn’t show favoritism during the first incident. When asked whether it was a lapse in judgment given the crash a week later, he replied, “We did arrest her that evening. And officers could not possibly predict the future behavior of Ms. Brown.”
DUI charges later filed
Several weeks later on June 8, Meggs filed informations charging Brown with DUI in the Whataburger incident and DUI with property damage for the other.
Meggs said his office decided to up the charge in the Whataburger stop after reviewing the evidence, which included a video taken from inside the squad car of Brown yelling, cursing and crying over about half an hour.
“My instructions to our people was you handle this like you do every other case,” Meggs said. “If it’s DUI, you file a DUI. If it’s reckless, you file a reckless.”
The cases were given to Desmond, then chief of the misdemeanor division. A note in the file says Mutz was not to prosecute because of his relationship with Brown, whom he met when
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Article source: http://www.tallahassee.com/article/20111023/NEWS01/110230333/Fiancee-prosecutor-gets-DUIs-no-jail-time
Federal prosecutors said Munizaga was arrested in East Windsor after driving to the grocery in a car he rented with a counterfeit credit card based on a stolen credit account.
FBI agents soon learned that Munizaga had been arrested in Herndon, Va., in May 2010 after trying to steal cash from a drawer at a motel check-in counter. When police in Virginia searched the car he was driving then, they learned that it had been rented in New Haven under a stolen identity. In the car, they found 47 fraudulent Visa and American Express gift cards and pages that had been torn from the grocery section of the local yellow pages.
Further investigation showed that Munizaga had been using stolen identifies to manufacture phony credit cards and steal money from Alabama to Illinois to Rhode Island since November 2000. He was arrested and convicted of credit card fraud charges seven times from 2000 to 2008 and served short sentences of between a day and eight months.
“He has probation violations for almost each and every conviction and, even at present, he has open cases in Chicago and Florida for stealing identities and possessing counterfeit credit cards,” federal prosecutors
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Article source: http://articles.courant.com/2011-10-21/news/hc-id-theft-1022-20111021_1_credit-cards-gift-cards-identity-theft
CSD Staff | Oct 21, 2011 | Comments 0
“Even though we won this trial, we continue to believe that the Engle trial structure is fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional,” says Philip Morris spokesperson.
A Fort Myers jury today decided in favor of Philip Morris USA and other tobacco companies in the first Engle case to be tried in Lee County 
(Szymanski). This marks the 10th win for the company in its last 14 Engle trials, including a defense verdict returned earlier today in a Miami-Dade case.
“The jury listened to the facts, recognized that the plaintiff was responsible for his own smoking decision and appropriately found in favor of Philip Morris USA,” said Murray Garnick, Altria Client Services senior vice president and associate general counsel, speaking on behalf of Philip Morris USA. “Even though we won this trial, we continue to believe that the Engle trial structure is fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional. In September, a Fourth District Court of Appeals’ decision questioned the constitutionality of the Engle trial structure.”
Today’s verdict came in a trial of a so-called Engle progeny case following a
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Article source: http://www.csdecisions.com/2011/10/21/philip-morris-wins-first-engle-trial/
For nearly two years, a Miami bankruptcy lawyer has methodically tried to recover as much money as possible for victims of convicted Ponzi schemer Nevin Shapiro, who took them for $83 million.
So far, trustee Joel Tabas has recovered about $19 million, but he has struggled to collect from one particular party: the lawyers who once defended Shapiro, the rogue University of Miami booster who reportedly gave cash and other gifts to Hurricane athletes.
A real sore point in the bankruptcy battle has been Tabas’ claim to recover the value of a 58-foot Riviera yacht that Shapiro used not only to party with UM football players, but also to pay his lawyers, Guy Lewis and Michael Tein, when he ran short of money in 2008.
The trustee has sued Lewis, a one-time U.S. attorney, and Tein, a former federal prosecutor, claiming they should return their legal fees totaling $912,536 because their firm was only representing Shapiro — not his bankrupt company, Capitol Investments USA, which Tabas now controls. Tabas claims Shapiro improperly used the company’s money to pay his personal legal bills.
Capitol Investments was not
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Article source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/11/2449217/um-booster-shapiros-bankruptcy.html
PHOENIX — A federal judge Friday dismissed Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s lawsuit that accused the Obama administration of failing to enforce immigration laws or maintain control of her state’s
border with Mexico.
The dismissal by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton comes in a counter-lawsuit filed by Brewer as part of the Justice Department’s challenge to Arizona’s controversial immigration enforcement law.
The Republican governor was seeking a court order that would require the federal government to take extra steps, such as more border fencing, to protect Arizona until the border is controlled.
Bolton said Brewer’s claim that Washington has failed to protect Arizona from an “invasion” of illegal immigrants was a political question that isn’t appropriate for the court to decide.
Hot-grease murder case faces obstacles in Texas
HOUSTON — A woman with an oxygen tank next to her sat in a Texas courtroom Friday after her four-decade run as a fugitive accused of murdering her husband by dousing him with hot grease came to
an end.
Mary Ann Rivera made her first court appearance since being returned to Houston this week from Georgia, where she had been living since fleeing a murder charge in the October 1970 death of her husband, Cruz Rivera.
The
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Article source: http://www.kansas.com/2011/10/22/2072139/judge-dismisses-arizona-lawsuit.html
October 21, 2011, 7:34 AM EDT
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By Elizabeth Amon
(Adds LyondellBasell in Lawsuits section, Louis Berger in New Suits and Mattel and Le-Nature’s in Verdicts.)
Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) — Kweku Adoboli, the trader accused of costing UBS AG $2.3 billion by making unauthorized trades, falsified records on exchange-traded-fund transactions, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors amended two of the four charges against Adoboli to indicate that records he allegedly falsified were on ETF trades. A London magistrates court yesterday transferred the case against the 31-year-old to a criminal court where he will be expected to enter a plea on the accusations at a Nov. 22 hearing.
The charges, which also include two counts of fraud and date back to 2008, cover “a large number of transactions,” prosecutor David Williams said at the hearing yesterday. “He exposed the bank to risk of large losses.”
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Article source: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-21/ubs-commercial-bank-microsoft-wal-mart-in-court-news.html
A Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge, apparently angry that details of a controversial — and closed — child custody hearing had been disclosed to a reporter, required dozens of state child welfare workers to appear before her to sign statements swearing that did not leak to the newspaper.
The appearances — like the hearing itself — were kept secret from the public.
Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Maria Sampedro-Iglesia, one of five judges who preside over child welfare cases at the county’s Children’s Courthouse, required 33 investigators, caseworkers and supervisors to appear before her privately to sign sworn statements declaring they did not leak confidential information to The Miami Herald, sources have told the newspaper. The appearances were not part of a formal hearing, and no notice was given publicly that the meetings were to occur. An attorney for court administrators told The Herald Sampedro-Iglesia has not issued any subpoenas in the case since Aug. 1 — meaning the workers could not have been subpoenaed.
Only one of the 33 people compelled by the judge to appear, DCF’s former regional administrator, Jacqui Colyer, refused to sign an affidavit.
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Article source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/20/v-fullstory/2464173/barahona-judge-goes-after-gag.html
October 20, 2011, 7:26 AM EDT
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(Updates with BofA in Top section, Iberiabank in Verdicts, KV Pharmaceutical in New Suits, Madoff and ATT in Lawsuits and Rambus in Trials.)
Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) — Bank of America Corp.’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement with mortgage-bond investors must be considered in federal court and not in New York state court where it was first filed, a U.S. judge said.
“The settlement agreement at issue here implicates core federal interests in the integrity of nationally chartered banks and the vitality of the national securities markets,” U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan said in a decision filed yesterday. “A controversy touching on these paramount federal interests should proceed in federal court.”
The proposed agreement would settle claims from investors in Countrywide Financial Corp. mortgage bonds and is a move
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Article source: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-20/bofa-citigroup-jpmorgan-at-t-galleon-in-court-news.html
MIAMI —
A legal challenge to a new Republican-backed Florida election law was dismissed Tuesday by a federal judge, but that doesn’t end the case.
Under the federal Voting Rights Act, certain sections of the law must still be approved, or precleared, by a court in Washington. The act applies to five Florida counties – Collier, Hardee, Hendry, Hillsborough and Monroe – because of past racial discrimination. State elections officials contend the act is unconstitutional as it applies to those counties and should be struck down.
The law’s contested portions would reduce early voting days, impose new rules on voter registration drives, make it tougher to get citizen initiatives on the ballot and require voters changing out-of-county addresses at polling places to cast provisional ballots.
In his order, U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore ruled that no harm was being done because the law had not yet been implemented or enforced in those five counties while the Voting Rights Act preclearance process continues. Moore disagreed with the American Civil Liberties Union and others challenging the law that implementation should
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Article source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/18/2460137/fla-judge-drops-election-suit.html
The Associated Press
9:08 a.m. EDT, March 25, 2010
A Florida jury has awarded $20 million in punitive damages and $10 million in compensatory damages to the widow of a longtime smoker who died of lung cancer.
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