Courts

In March 2011, the Exciting Greater New St. John Primitive Baptist Church closed on a modest white clapboard building on 56th Street in South Oak Cliff. The church, led by the Reverend Vincent Davis, appointed three trustees to handle the financing of the purchase and later put Sandra Diamond Taylor…

In the course of reporting the recent Observer feature on wrongful convictions based on wrongdoing by prosecutors and police, an interesting tangential point surfaced multiple times. It was the reminder by several lawyers that wrongful convictions are all cases that went to trial, but that there are many other defendants,…

Oscar Price files suit against Fairview, claims he was fired in retaliation

As Governor Rick Perry vows not to take any of that filthy federal money to expand Medicaid in Texas, state lawmakers may also have to find another $39 million next year to keep the Medicaid Women’s Health Program alive. These days, the WHP has been going through some prolonged death…

Last May, Texas joined the growing roster of states with a voter ID law requiring those seeking to exercise their most fundamental civic duty to present a state-issued ID before casting a ballot. Like a driver’s license or, this being Texas, a concealed handgun permit. And that was that, at…

A family of Johnson County landowners is suing Chesapeake, the country’s second-largest natural gas company, for allegedly cheating them out of royalties. Their lawyer, Dallas-based attorney James Holmes, says they can thank endlessly indulgent Texas laws and a taxing authority more inclined to look the other way. The complaint filed…

View Larger Map Harry Engel loved his home right up to the day it killed him. The retired minister had grown up as an orphan, so he took particular pride in the modest Grand Prairie house he had shared with wife Wanda for 22 years. In February 2010, the couple…

Paul Green was not in the best of health in 2009 when he was hired as a bus monitor by Dallas County Schools. He had been battling colon cancer for more than a decade and, several years before, had been diagnosed with hypertension and congestive heart failure. As a result,…

Pedro Hermenegildo didn’t have insurance, so he paid Dr. Ricardo Rocha in cash to repair a hernia, a fairly routine, outpatient procedure. But according to a lawsuit filed against Rocha in a Dallas County district court last week, Hermenegildo lost much more than his hernial bulge. The surgery was performed…

Every year, when temperatures in Texas inevitably hit triple digits, the inside of the state’s prison cells heat up like an ovens. Only 21 of 111 units in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice system are fully air conditioned; the rest have some AC but mostly not in the inmates’…

In April 2009, assistant Denton County District Attorney Cary Piel walked into the office of his colleague, assistant DA Nadiya Williams-Boldware, to discuss a case he was preparing for trial. He had just watched video of the crime that showed a black woman drive drunkenly through a cemetery, then fought…

Trouble seems to follow Fairview Police Chief Granver Tolliver wherever he goes. Back when he was a Dallas cop, soaring through the ranks to deputy chief, he became mired in an internal controversy over a vehicle accident in 1996. Department brass accused him of favoritism and of pulling the strings…

Update at 5:26 p.m.: Just kidding. Great Clips sends word that they are in the process of dismissing the lawsuit. “We have come to an amicable resolution with Mr. Ross,” the company said in a statement. You may not have noticed, but the hair-styling landscape in Dallas is shifting beneath…

First, it was the president of Mongolia, Elbegdorj Tsakhia, who cried foul when Dallas’ own Heritage Auctions auctioned off a rare Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton for a bit over $1 million. Said that there was no way the specimen could have come from anywhere but Mongolia and that, since there are…

It must be codified somewhere in the Conservative’s Guide to Crisis Management: Ensnared in scandal? Come across like an uninformed buffoon? Or are you a judge whose campaign fliers dispelled any appearance of impartiality in a really important case? Just blame it on the media. Sarah Palin became a journo-castigating…

Back in July, Benino Perez was working at a cement plant on Corinth Street in Dallas when he lost his balance. He fell from a height of several feet and was knocked unconscious from the impact. And according to a lawsuit filed in Dallas County District Court by his family…

Last June, things got pretty busy around Joe Bankson and Gena Charlton’s farmhouse in Hardin, what with the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI, DPS and a half-dozen media outlets stopping by, as you see in the AP video above. What were they looking for? A mass grave containing 25…

It’s been almost a month since renowned car maker Carroll Shelby died in Dallas at the age of 89, but he’s not exactly at rest. According to TMZ, his body remains on ice in the medical examiner’s office while his estranged wife and children fight over who has control of…

Last month, five families sued the crime-scene cleanup company Aftermath Inc. and three of its north Texas employees. Three families had hired Aftermath to clean up after the suicide of a loved one, while the two others brought in the company after their family members were found dead several days…

Update on June 4 at 1:45 p.m.: If this post had you wondering, “This James Dondero sounds like a badass, but what kind of music does he like?” Daniel Hopkins will satisfy your curiosity at DC9 at Night. Short answer: Steve Winwood. Original post: To catch you up in case…