“Jesus didn’t want us to have a trial this close to his birthday,” Steven Phillips’s attorney, Tom McKenzie, said yesterday. He was joking, we’re pretty sure. His point: That the prospect of an ex-wife now 20 years divorced from Phillips cutting a slice out of the roughly $4 million paid…
Steven Phillips spent 25 years in prison as an innocent man for a string of rapes he didn’t commit. He was exonerated in 2008 based on DNA evidence. He has always said life is much more complicated outside prison walls. Better, sure, but complicated. Add around $4 million dollars in…
Yesterday’s massive drop-off at the Earle Cabell is but a pit stop. Sooner than later, more than likely, it will head back to Oakland, where, in July 2009, former UCLA basketball great Ed O’Bannon filed the shot heard ’round the sports world: the antitrust suit alleging that the NCAA steals…
A years-long dispute between a woman who runs a dog rescue out of her home and her increasingly annoyed neighbors has resulted in hundreds of phone calls to Animal Control, a felony robbery conviction, one dead dog and, we’re guessing, some pretty awkward block parties. “This has been going on…
On August we told you that the Dallas Independent School District had been hit with a $40-million breach of contract lawsuit filed by a technology vendor with whom the trustees had agreed to do business till, out of nowhere, district officials just decided to go with someone else. In May…
A little more than nine months after those aggrieved ticketholders left out in the Arlington cold during Super Bowl XLV brought their lawsuits, U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn — she of tough sentences and no nonsense — has refused to dismiss the breach-of-contract case. But: Lynn did remove the Dallas…
Why, what good timing: Just last week we got back up to speed on the legal doings brought in March by Arnold Leon Schroeder Jr., son of the late Wendy Reves, namesake of that estimable art collection at the Dallas Museum of Art. To rererecap the case that made national…
Every decent-sized courthouse in the country has its own serial pain in the ass, the guy who thinks nothing of suing the kids who threw a ball over his fence or the cat who pooped in his yard. But there’s a special subset of filing addicts: the inmates who while…
About a month ago we noted that the Department of Justice was very unhappy with how state legislators redrew Texas’s congressional districts — something to do with how the new map “actually reduced minority electoral power” in Dallas-Fort Worth, for starters. Hence the ongoing litigation in San Antonio and D.C…
Every week I get two, three emails asking: What’s up with the federal lawsuit over The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art? You remember the one: Wendy Reves’s son Arnold Leon Schroeder Jr. is suing the Dallas Museum of Art, claiming they done took his…
A lawsuit filed by three Dallas exonerees against their high-powered personal injury lawyer has finally come to an end after more than two testy years. The dispute was over fees charged for more than tripling state compensation for the wrongfully imprisoned. According to Lubbock attorney Kevin Glasheen, who represented a…
The property rights law of adverse possession is normally a dry topic, a chapter covered in law school to be forgotten immediately after final exams. This will not be the case for about 100 SMU law students who attended a Wednesday evening lecture by Ken Robinson, the Flower Mound man…
In August, we broke the news that Lewisville-based Delcom Group filed a $40 million suit against the Dallas Independent School District over a massive technology contract awarded by the board in May and then yanked, without explanation, a month later. Turned out, according to a subsequent filing, that former DISD…
On May 10, 2010, Hillwood Investment Properties’ Ross Perot Jr. got the bright idea to sue Mark Cuban in Dallas County District Court, hoping to prove that the “reckless and careless” Dallas Mavericks owner had put the team $200-and-some-odd million in debt and “in imminent danger of insolvency.” Perot, who…
Wrestling fans ’round these parts remember the song “Badstreet U.S.A.” — and if you don’t, you will. Riiiight — it was the theme song for Michael Hayes (who handles the, um, vocals?) and The Fabulous Freebirds, hated rivals of Kevin, David and Kerry Von Erich back in the glory days…
It’s been more than a decade since the federal suit first surfaced: Betty Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the sexual discrimination lawsuit that would eventually lead to a class-action suit and the book Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker’s Rights at Wal-Mart, whose author often compared the lead…
Maybe you remember: Back in June of last year, Vince Young — former Longhorn great, current Eagles not-great — got into it with a gentleman named Creiton Kinchen at the strip club Onyx off of Northwest Highway. At the time, story was Young didn’t take kindly to Kinchen’s flashing him…
Johnnie Lindsey, a Dallas man who spent 26 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit, dropped his lawsuit against Texas Comptroller Susan Combs Monday after she agreed to pay him for nearly five years’ worth of compensation she initially shorted him. Under state law, the wrongfully imprisoned are…
Next time you roll into a gentleman’s establishment, ask yourself one question: Is this place in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938? That’s the law that established a national minimum wage and overtime pay. But the women who dance in topless and nudie joints don’t make minimum…
A hearing this morning at the Earle Cabell could have been a First Amendment showdown over Occupy Dallas’s right to remain in Pioneer Park in downtown. Instead, it became a simple formality after protesters came to a late-night agreement to move to a plot of city-owned land at Akard and…
For Dallas-based EPA investigator Keith Phillips, the visits to a Louisiana oil refinery started in the late ’90s, and came, it seems, with dual purposes: business and pleasure. It started as an investigation into the refinery’s waste storage methods and refinery manager Hubert Vidrine, who was eventually prosecuted. But court…
On the night of September 18, as heavy thunderstorms blew through Dallas, neighbors on West Woodin in Oak Cliff heard a “heavy, muffled boom,” they told a CBS 11 crew. A small apartment behind a house — little more than a converted, detached garage just a stone’s throw from R.L…
