Here at Unfair Park, we’re suckers for “people trying to take shit from Asians” stories. The latest installment takes place in Carrollton, Texas, where the town’s seven hotels are each owned by Asians, and where the city is coming down on them. Hard. Some are more rundown than others, but…
Voters up in Parker County must not have thought much of district Judge Trey Loftin’s campaign mailers bragging about how his “decision regarding deceptive actions by environmental extremists made the EPA reevaluate its national policy.” That’s pretty grandiose, and it sounded like he was referring to the case of Steve…
Frisco High School’s only black coach says he was fired earlier this year for complaining of racial discrimination. Former Frisco world history teacher and basketball coach Alvin Jackson claims in a May 22 lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court that school and district administrators began retaliating against him after he…
Update at 2:30 p.m.: Just got off the phone with Jim Halperin, Heritage Auction co-chairman who confirms that the Observer is a force for peace and good in the world and that it was indeed our blog post that prompted him to reach out to Painter. As for what happens…
Politics is politics, and incumbents running for re-election in conservative Parker County, Texas, where the local economy is fueled entirely by shale-gas production, want to look like champions of the industry. But what if you’re a judge? And what if, at the very moment you put up fliers of Rush…
Tricky work deciding who gets the protections of a journalist in court. In the case of a natural gas production company suing a Parker County man who blames it for contaminating his water well, state district Judge Trey Loftin attempted to suss it out in a recent order compelling fracking…
Billy Frederick Allen served 26 years in prison for two drug-related murders in University Park. In February 2009, the Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin freed him, citing ineffective lawyering and “newly discovered evidence” that gave them “no confidence in the outcome of the trial.” In March 2010, Allen filed…
The practice of law is a subtle art, one which requires finesse, tact, and skill. Sometimes too, we’ve learned, it necessitates calling the other guy’s lawyer a pansy, an asshole, an ignorant slut, and threatening, not very subtly, to sodomize him. (What’s with lawyers and threatening to sodomize people?) Martin…
My 3-year-old son is crushed. Yesterday, his dad was about $1,052,480 shy of purchasing a 75 percent complete fossil skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, sold by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions. Or at least I would have been had I put in a bid. It’s just as well, though, because whoever purchased…
It’s been three years, almost to the day, since 12 people were injured — one of them permanently paralyzed — after the Dallas Cowboys’ 88,000-square-foot, steel-and-fabric practice facility collapsed under high winds. Since then there have been lawsuits, federal investigations and detailed engineering explanations. Today, we’re reminded that it wasn’t…
Stephen Benavides, the Occupy Dallas protester arrested on suspicion of assaulting a police officer during a scuffle at the November Bank of America protest, has signed a plea deal that reduces the felony to a misdemeanor resisting-arrest charge and keeps him out of jail. Benavides pleaded no contest to the…
Dallas black activist the Reverend Ronald Wright went home last Friday expecting to be greeted happily by his 2-year-old German shepherd Sadie. When he opened the door, the house was silent. He immediately knew something was wrong. When he went to the backyard, he saw his dog lying on the…
Aftermath Inc. refers to itself as a “biohazard restoration company”, more commonly known as crime-scene cleanup: The company’s employees go in after murders, suicides, injuries, hoarding cases and other seriously unpleasant situations. But now three of their Texas employees are being sued in Dallas County district court, where five families…
The Nasher Sculpture Center and the developers of the Museum Tower project are continuing to hammer out their white light, white heat debacle behind closed doors. They recently hired a mediator in lawyer Tom Luce, who promptly asked both sides to quit talking to the media already. Above, however, you…
Earlier this week, Judge Jerry Smith of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a preliminary injunction that kept Texas from kicking Planned Parenthood out of the Women’s Health Program. It looked as though that was the first step toward a decision allowing Texas to keep Planned Parenthood out of…
Well, last week was pretty bad too, as he physically fought with his estranged wife in front of his kids and then tweeted a photo of his two boys filling out police reports. A picture speaks way more than 140 characters, and that tweet was one in a series of…
There are few certainties in life, but this is one of them: If a person offers you a thousand percent return on an investment, you have on your hands a scam. And there’s about a thousand percent chance someone will end up in court. Yet two brothers, Terry Wiese of…
When we said yesterday Planned Parenthood could remain part of the Texas’s Medicaid Women’s Health Program “for now,” we didn’t know “now” would last less than 24 hours. A Fifth Circuit appeals judge has overturned yesterday’s preliminary injunction blocking Texas from kicking Planned Parenthood out of the WHP. In his…
This morning, two men stood in the same courtroom where they were convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to life in prison for a rape and shooting that happened almost 30 years ago. This time, both were smiling, as they were one step closer to exiting the criminal justice hell…
The scuffle between Texas and the feds over women’s healthcare was supposed to get real tomorrow, when Planned Parenthood was scheduled to be barred from being a provider for the state’s Medicaid Women’s Health Program. But earlier today, Federal District Judge Lee Yeakel granted the non-profit its requested preliminary injunction…
Several weeks ago, two area theaters refused to show an ad for atheism, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason’s new campaign, “Our Families Are Great Without Religion.” Now the American Humanist Association, which supports DFWCoR’s parent organization, the United Coalition of Reason, has gotten involved, and they’ve brought…
A Royse City mother is claiming discrimination after being kicked out of the Grapevine Mills Mall Legoland for her body art, and she’s using social media to win support from noted activists Travis Barker, Yelawolf and, of course, Busta Rhymes. As Mr. Rhymes would say, here’s the scenario: On Sunday,…
