More than 450 current and former property owners at a Lake Whitney residential golf community, including dozens of locals, are suing Dallas-based developer Double Diamond, Inc., claiming they were charged exorbitant fees by a puppet property owners’ association that funneled the proceeds directly to the company. In some cases, the…
How does one explain the follicle-by-follicle perfection of Gov. Rick Perry’s imperturbable man-mane? Where does his mega-watt smile and its rows of pearly whites come from? Braces? No, silly. They come from God. God spoke, and Perry was born a man of uncommon comeliness. That, Friends of Unfair Park, is…
You may remember Bonnie Bradshaw, the woman who freed a raccoon she believed was overheated and dying in a live trap at a Richardson apartment complex. On that sweltering June afternoon, she thought she was doing the work of a Good Samaritan when she took the animal home, nursed it…
In July we told you about Dr. David Shorrman, author of The Exchange of Truth: Liberating the World From the Lie of Evolution and a member of the state biology panel making recommendations to the Texas Board of Education. Turns out, Shorrman (pictured to the left) was riding in the…
If a man spends 26 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit, you can bet he’s going to want every cent he can get through the state’s statutory compensation plan for the wrongfully imprisoned. We spoke with Johnnie Lindsey for this week’s cover story about the ongoing legal…
In the spirit of this week’s cover on the exoneree compensation scheme and the attorneys who’ve profited handsomely from it, we submit the case of Billy Frederick Allen — a man incarcerated for nearly 26 years for two apparently drug-related University Park murders. In February 2009, the Court of Criminal…
Speaking of the Trinity River … Perhaps I didn’t end up visiting the under-construction Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge on the best day for our ongoing Unfair Park series, “Sweaty Dispatches From a Sweltering City.” While I was out on the pavement girded with Italian steel early Thursday afternoon, there were…
Steven Phillips was about to boil over. This, the attorneys in the room must have known, wasn’t good for anyone. At 51, Phillips had a delicate drawl, but the rest of him was all rangy wildcat sinew. He was a bit of a genetic oddity. He didn’t lift weights, yet…
Tuesday night, the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council’s Task Force on Secure Communities (hold on, gotta catch my breath after that pithy title) held a pilot meeting at the Dallas County Community College’s Bill J. Priest Campus to discuss ICE’s controversial fingerprint screening program intended to snare dangerous undocumented…
Last we checked, a small Hispanic community center offering after-school activities to the kiddos, tutoring for teens and a support group for seniors was getting kicked out of its West Oak Cliff digs by God’s Emissary in Dallas, Bishop Kevin Farrell. A spokesperson for the diocese told Unfair Park that…
Call him Steven Phillips, collector of broken men. After all, he should know a thing or two about breaking. The man spent a quarter century in prison for a string of rapes in the early ’80s. In 2007, he was released on mandatory parole to ease overcrowding in Texas prisons…
That sure happened fast. Behold, the Three Stages of Lawyering Up: Stage 1: A perceived injustice occurs — in this case, a July 29 letter from attorneys representing the Diocese of Dallas and Kevin Farrell, the recently installed, Dublin-born Bishop imported from a titular see in Algeria, ordering the Calumet…
Here’s a moral conundrum for you, Friends of Unfair Park: Do personal property rights trump the exigency of a wild animal dying in a live trap? Apparently, they trump each other, because when certified wild-animal rehabilitator Bonnie Bradshaw loosed a raccoon from pest-controller Lon Menefee’s trap, each earned a trip…
We’re ahead of the curve here in Texas when it comes to our treatment of the wrongfully convicted. These days, instead of loosing them into a world they barely recognize with empty pockets, we hand them well-deserved golden parachutes worth $160,000 for each year they spent in prison for crimes…
KBR, Inc., the massive and controversial Houston-based wartime contractor that has landed billions in military contracts for erecting base camps and supplying fuel for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will have to convince a federal judge in Dallas that race and religion had nothing to do with the firing…
The State Board of Education met yesterday to debate which supplemental materials the state should use to update its outdated science textbooks. To make things easier, before the meeting, the board’s choices were narrowed down by allegedly reliable panels of stakeholders. But when it came to a biology panel making…
Haven’t you heard? There’s gas in them thar shale formations. And if the parking lot outside of the Intercontinental Hotel in Addison was any indication this morning, a goodly number of the players are in town, looking to make fat deals. You could tell because parking was spilling out into…
How often do federal appeals judges wade into the petty internecine struggles of high-school cheerleaders and their meddling mothers? We’re going to go out on a limb and say it’s rare. Rare and, when it does occur, deeply entertaining. In a recent decision, the stately jurists of the U.S. Court…
Mohammed squatted atop a five-foot pile of mulch, his shovel jabbed into the chaff somewhere out in the snake-infested, cedar-scrubbed hill country southwest of Dallas. Sweat darkened his black Reebok shirt and soaked his ankle socks and his coal-black hair. He was taking a breather from a community service project…
Now this is a response: Perhaps you’ve heard that a Wisconsin-based “state/church watchdog” group opposed to mixin’ government and religion today filed for a temporary injunction down in Houston, asking a federal court to put the kibosh on Gov. Rick Perry’s star-studded prayer rally scheduled for August 6 at Reliant…
An edict from the Justice Department to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives paved the way Monday for tighter regulation of repeat purchases of semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines in border states. The feds’ faces were liberally slathered with egg in May after a bunch of assault…
On Sunday the daily reported that Dallas County had some $35 million in outstanding bond forfeitures. Oh, but wait: Yesterday Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins shot back, calling the number a “gross misinterpretation of the true nature and totality of the bail bond forfeiture challenge facing Dallas County.” The “legally…
