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Top court orders Italian marines tried in India
Legal Opinions |
2013/01/15 11:17
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India's Supreme Court ruled Friday that two Italian marines accused of killing a pair of fishermen off the coast of India last year will be tried in a special court to be set up by the Indian government. Italy had argued that the shootings should be dealt with by an Italian court and said the killings took place in international waters, which India disputes. The trial is expected to further strain ties between Italy and India that have been frayed by the yearlong fight over the marines' fate. Top Italian officials have visited the marines, Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone, at a guesthouse in the southern state of Kerala to lend their support and the Indian government allowed them to go home for two weeks to celebrate Christmas with their families. The marines were part of a military security team aboard a cargo ship when they opened fire on a fishing boat last February they said they mistook for a pirate craft and killed two Indian fishermen. The court ruled Friday that the trial should take place in India in a special court to be set up by the central government in consultation with the chief justice, according to the Press Trust of India. The order removed the case from the jurisdiction of the southern state of Kerala, near where the shooting took place. |
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Court sides with NJ judges in pension dispute
Legal Opinions |
2012/07/25 15:51
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New Jersey's Supreme Court dealt a partial defeat to one of Gov. Chris Christie's signature legislative accomplishments Tuesday when it ruled that the state's judges don't have to contribute more to their pensions and health benefits. A leading state lawmaker immediately said the battle over the matter would continue.
The narrow 3-2 decision sided with a legal challenge filed last year by a state Superior Court judge in Hudson County who argued that the law imposing the pension and health care benefits changes violated a part of the state constitution that set judges' salaries and said they cannot be reduced.
The justices noted in their ruling that without a corresponding salary increase, the increased contributions would eventually cost judges at least $17,000 annually in take-home pay, amounting to a pay cut of more than 10 percent.
Christie, a Republican, had worked with the Democratic-controlled Legislature to pass the law last year. It affects hundreds of thousands of government workers around the state in addition to between 400 and 500 sitting judges and justices. |
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Feds: Man to plead guilty in 1983 Conn. robbery
Legal Opinions |
2012/06/15 11:23
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The U.S. attorney's office in Connecticut says a Puerto Rican nationalist who's one of the last people charged in a $7 million armored car depot robbery in 1983 has agreed to plead guilty.
Federal prosecutors didn't give details Thursday of the deal with Norberto Gonzalez Claudio. His attorney hasn't responded to requests for comment.
The U.S. attorney's office says a hearing is scheduled for Friday in U.S. District Court in Hartford.
Gonzalez is not accused of directly participating in the West Hartford heist. He has pleaded not guilty to charges including bank robbery, conspiracy and transportation of stolen money. He was captured in Puerto Rico last year.
The robbery was orchestrated by Los Macheteros, a group that claimed responsibility for robberies, murders and bombings in the 1970s and '80s in the name of Puerto Rican independence. |
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Disgraced ex-journalist fights for CA law license
Legal Opinions |
2011/12/26 16:34
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A former journalist who became the subject of a Hollywood movie after he was caught fabricating articles in the late 1990s is fighting to become a lawyer in California over the objections of a state bar committee.
Stephen Glass, whose ethical missteps at The New Republic and other magazines were recounted in the film Shattered Glass and an autobiographical novel, has challenged the bar committee's decision to deny him a license to practice law, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.
Glass attended law school at Georgetown University and passed California's bar exam in 2007. His application for an attorney's license was turned down by the state's Committee of Bar Examiners, which judged him morally unfit for his new profession.
But an independent state bar court ruled in Glass's favor in July and the California Supreme Court has since agreed to hear the committee's appeal. No date for oral arguments has been set.
The bar association's lawyers said in written filings that even though Glass' transgressions occurred when he was in his 20s, his attempts at atonement were inadequate and in some cases coincided with the publication of his novel. They faulted him for never compensating anyone who was hurt by his falsehoods. |
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Is the iPhone Ready for Law Firms?
Legal Opinions |
2009/10/02 16:14
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pIt used to be that the only thing lawyers tried to recruit was new clients. But these days, seemingly every firm has a group of attorneys pushing to bring aboard something else entirely: iPhones. And they want them badly./ppI have probably 15 people who continue to e-mail me about it, says the IT director at an Am Law 100 firm who asked not to be identified. This one attorney, he goes out and finds someone who says he can solve any iPhone problem for $175, he says. These attorneys, they want this thing so much, they are off trying to solve my problems. God bless them, but they don't know what they're doing. /ppThe issue isn't technical. It's relatively simple to hook an iPhone into a corporate network, since it can use the same Microsoft Exchange Server that most firms already use for their BlackBerrys. Instead, IT directors' reluctance boils down to this: The BlackBerry was designed from the ground up to do one thing: transmit e-mail securely. Other features have been tacked onto newer models, but robust, secure, immediate e-mail was -- and is -- at the BlackBerry's core. The iPhone, on the other hand, is more of a consumer device with e-mail tacked on. Law firms shied away from the iPhone because it couldn't match the BlackBerry on security. And security -- well, that's at the core of a law firm IT director's job. The original iPhone and the later 3G model had no local encryption, which meant that everything on the device was stored in clear text, says the IT director. The simple passcodes many users had -- if they used any passcode at all -- could be hacked, and then everything would be viewable. We told our attorneys this was a deal-breaker.
But with the release of the latest iPhone, the a href=http://www.apple.com/iphone/ target=new3GS/a, along with the new iPhone 3.0 operating system, the platform is looking more business-friendly. Forget about the consumer-oriented enhancements (like the upgraded camera on the 3GS, capable of shooting video). The real story, at least for law firms, is the vast array of enterprise-focused improvements. The 3GS phone now has local encryption along with more memory (up to 32 gigabytes) and a faster processor. And with the 3.0 OS, law firms running Exchange can require the use of strong passwords (the complicated ones, with numbers and letters, that no one except IT administrators want to take the time to create and use) and remotely wipe devices that have been lost or stolen. Users get a long-awaited, cut-copy-paste feature (a glaring omission on the iPhone until now), a landscape keyboard option for easier typing, and the ability to search the from, to, and subject headers (but not, alas, the body) on their e-mail, as well as their iPhone contact list, calendar and notes.
/p |
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