Federal Court Protects Alimta Against Generic Competitor

Eli Lilly & Co. has won its case in Federal court in Delaware where it sought to protect its patent for the drug Alimta.  Alimta (pemetrexed for injection) now marketed by Eli Lilly & Co. (“Lilly”) was developed in clinical trials by Lilly in the early 1990s after it was discovered that disodium pemetrexed, the active ingredient of Alimta, was very effective when dosed in a concentrated liquid for treating mesothelioma and other forms of lung cancer.

Since its approval by the FDA in 2004, Alimta has been used in conjunction with another chemotherapy drug, Cisplatin, to treat patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma.  Malignant pleural mesothelioma (“MPM”) is a form of cancer that forms in the lining of the lung and is caused by exposure to asbestos fibers.  Symptoms of mesothelioma typically do not begin to develop until decades after exposure, and after the cancer has reached advanced stages.

Treatment options for any late stage cancer but particularly mesothelioma are limited and cannot be curative so therefore focus on palliative relief and improving quality of life.   Standard therapies for mesothelioma include surgery (when possible,) chemotherapy and radiation therapy.  Alimta is one of the most commonly used drugs in chemotherapy to treat mesothelioma.

The combination of Alimta and Cisplatin has been used to slow or shrink MPM in patients and has provided a treatment option in many cases where surgery was not an option due to the patient’s health or age.   Clinical trials offered through the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are constantly searching for new combination therapies or drugs that might help lengthen survival times and improve quality of life.

The Federal court found that Eli Lilly & Co.’s patent would be infringed upon if Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries, Ltd. was allowed to market a generic version of Alimta in the United States.  Eli Lilly & Co. claimed their patent does not expire until 2016.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 28th, 2010 at 10:26 am and is filed under Mesothelioma Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

View the original article here

Another Court Decision Against Health Care Reform

The Affordable Care Act that became law last year promises to make health care affordable and accessible for nearly all Americans, including Americans with mesothelioma. However, many people object to the law and want it repealed and replaced with something else. Several states have challenged the act in court, mostly on the basis that mandating that people must purchase health insurance, which the Affordable Care Act stipulates, exceeds the constitutional powers of Congress.

Today a federal judge in Florida ruled that the mandate for individuals to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. So far, two federal judges have said it is constitutional, and two have said it isn’t. About a dozen other federal judges have dismissed the suits against the Act.

Today’s ruling by Judge Roger Vinson of the Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla.,goes further than the other “nay” opinion, by Judge Henry Hudson of Virginia. Judge Hudson had ruled that only the individual mandate was unconstitutional, but that the rest of the law could stand. Judge Vinson, on the other hand, struck down the entire Affordable Care Act.

The law will stay in effect until all court challenges are resolved by the Supreme Court, which  probably will take a couple of years.

A few days ago a repeal of the Affordable Care Act was passed in the House. There is little chance such a law would pass in the Senate, however, and in any event it would certainly be vetoed by President Obama. That means it is unlikely the law will be repealed unless it is struck down by the Supreme Court.

Could that happen? Anything is possible. Louis Seidman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post that it will all come down to the Court’s “swing” voter, Justice Anthony Kennedy. Professor Seidman also found Judge Vinson’s reasoning to be flawed. The constitution’s “necessary and proper clause” provides for the regulation of anything that “has an effect” on interstate markets, Professor Seidman said.

A wrinkle in the repeal effort is that the insurance industry has signaled that it rather likes the individual mandate and doesn’t want it repealed. Insurance companies have been reworking their business models and preparing for millions of new customers. If the Affordable Care Act, or even just the individual mandate, is tossed out by the Court a couple of years from now, health insurance companies could see it as a big setback.

And, of course, the United States would go back to square one in reforming health care.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2011 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

View the original article here

Cop-Killers, Neil Boortz, and, Thank God for the Roberts Court

I get a lot of angry mail from people who are shocked and offended that anybody would deign to advocate for locking criminals up.  You know, using words.

Most of this mail is weirdly personal and tendentiously riffs on a few themes:

I’m for enforcing the law, so I must want innocent people to rot in jail.I’m for locking up predators and thugs, so I must be a vengeful person who daydreams of pulling the switch on fuzzy puppies and other living things.I must hate men, or minorities, or human beings in general, or myself in particular.Furthermore, since I was a crime victim once, I cannot be trusted to express any opinion about the justice system, so I should just shut up, or dedicate myself to apologizing for existing, or make amends for existing by pretending to teach pretend literacy at some pretend prisoner education program.

My favorite angry letter was a recent screed from one of the many registered sex offenders who contact me whenever I write about . . . sex offender registration.  They have an on-line club or something, and there’s a big sign nailed to the door with my name crudely painted beneath a skull and crossbones.

So this sex offender guy writes to tell me that he is “ashamed” of me.  He says that I am a symptom of “a broken education system” because I have PhD. but my ideas suck and I should try to think harder (he clearly doesn’t know much about graduate schools).

He gave me a lot of advice about improving myself.  It’s nice to know that people care.

My least favorite letter arrived from a Ron Paul supporter in Colorado who wrote that he loves to hear about police officers getting killed because they don’t deserve to live.  He was writing in response to a post about several officers killed recently in the line of duty, including two young men killed in front of, or near, their own fathers, who are themselves cops.  None of this moved the letter-writer:

Cops ARE assholes, no doubt about it.  And IT IS ALWAYS a good thing when they get blown away. . . I’m fairly certain most assaults are carried out by police officers.  They are scum of the earth not by coincidence . . . only assholes apply to be cops.

And so on.  There was a lot more of it, fringy, pot-addled, paranoid, extremist rantings to be sure.  But far too many non-extreme people also feel far too comfortable treating cops like they are expendable, or inhuman, these days.

I don’t think the average person could endure very much of the crap that police must endure in their daily soak in the waters of whiny –and yet potentially deadly — criminality.  Imagine having to spend ten or twelve hours a day, every workday, stuck with that irritating, whacked out, stinky, unpredictable guy you avoided on the train this morning . . . and twenty more like him . . . all the while being brow-beaten by a bunch of self-important “criminal defenders” who fancy themselves Atticus Finch while playing a rigged system that flushes violent men back out onto the streets the moment you arrest them.

~~~

Which brings me to Neil Boortz’s unfortunate column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today. I like Neil Boortz, not sycophantically, but I’ve listened to him on the radio for some twenty years, and he’s one libertarian who doesn’t irritate like most people who subscribe to the weird church of libertarianism (aka — Of course everyone should build their own personal highways to get to work because that’s far better than government taking your money to build highways for everyone).

He, and I, and my sex offender pen pal all feel the same way about the blighted state of education these days, for example.

But today, Boortz published one of those non-argument arguments in defense of the existence of defense attorneys, as if anyone really thinks they shouldn’t exist.  And, quite unfortunately, to illustrate his example of why society (allegedly) doesn’t appreciate defense attorneys enough as they valiantly defend us against the rampant false accusations imposed by the blue meanie police state, he jokingly mentioned the horrific case of Larry Davis (aka Adam Abdul-Hakeem), which ought to instead be remembered as a watershed injustice of the degree of the un-prosecuted murder of Emmett Till or the un-prosecuted murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

Only, it was cops who got shot.  Six cops and at least four other men who Davis likely assassinated.  The police were risking their lives trying to arrest Davis when he shot them.  And then, in just one of the innumerable injustices that made much of the late Sixties to early Nineties such a bloodbath, defense attorney William Kunstler not only got Larry Davis off on multiple murder charges and the shooting of six cops but degraded the victims by making Davis a cultural hero — not using superior wit and legal skills, as Boortz implies, but by exploiting a twisted system of government protection that no libertarian should espouse.

Here is Boortz, describing the trial:

Davis hires William Kunstler who, in his closing argument at trial, tells the jury that if they don’t acquit Davis of these murder charges they will one day wake up at 3 a.m. — screaming. Larry Davis kills [sic] six police officers; Kunstler gets him off. Davis goes on to become known as “Hood Hero,” and later as Adam Abdul-Hakeem. Quite a guy. Eventually, as you would expect, the Hood Hero murdered again, and this time was convicted. The prosecutors got it right the second time.

How does Boortz know the prosecutors “got it wrong” the first time?  He doesn’t even barely get the facts straight.  The police weren’t killed, for instance, though several were badly wounded.  The rest of the editorial is a similar flight of fancy: set up defense attorneys as misunderstood victims of society, then praise them for standing up to a government hell-bent on framing and convicting perfectly innocent people for some unknown reason:

The question is not whether or not you did it; it’s whether or not the government can prove you did it.  Trust me, you don’t want to live in a country where your life, liberty or property can be taken away because of political whim or the passions of the majority.

Never mind that six innocent public servants got shot trying to protect the life, liberty and property of people who went on to make a hero of the unrepentant shooter.

Never mind that Kunstler used both politics and passions — pure mob mentality — to win his cases in the highly politicized courts of his era.

Never mind that he valued some types of people over others.  That he unabashedly celebrated the murder of people who were cops.  That he defended leftist and Muslim terrorists while heaping contempt on the “life, liberty and property” of ordinary citizens.  That he refused to defend people whose politics clashed with his own, while pretending to stand for transcendent legal values.

That’s why people hated him, not because he was a defense attorney.

But here is the part of Boortz’ editorial that really makes no sense, coming from a libertarian: William Kunstler was actually for big government standing between jurors and the facts of any case.  He believed the people could not be trusted with the truth, and he shamelessly used an activist system of technicalities to get brutal killers off free — free to deprive other people of their rights.

Above all else, Kunstler represented a system of increasing bureaucratic intrusion into the justice system, not the defense of the boring little people from state power.

~~~

In any case, William Kunstler is dead and buried, and the little people have been winning real victories recently. In a little-noticed trend, the Roberts court has begun to chip away at excessive Kunstler-era exclusionary rules that keep evidence from being heard and considered.  Of course, news organs like the New York Times don’t like this provide jurors and judges with actual evidence and trust their judgment thing, but it is a sign of balance returning to a system in which defense attorneys — you know, those under-appreciated freedom fighters — have managed to tilt the playing field for far too long.

View the original article here

Cop-Killers, Neil Boortz, and, Thank God for the Roberts Court

I get a lot of angry mail from people who are shocked and offended that anybody would deign to advocate for locking criminals up.  You know, using words.

Most of this mail is weirdly personal and tendentiously riffs on a few themes:

I’m for enforcing the law, so I must want innocent people to rot in jail.I’m for locking up predators and thugs, so I must be a vengeful person who daydreams of pulling the switch on fuzzy puppies and other living things.I must hate men, or minorities, or human beings in general, or myself in particular.Furthermore, since I was a crime victim once, I cannot be trusted to express any opinion about the justice system, so I should just shut up, or dedicate myself to apologizing for existing, or make amends for existing by pretending to teach pretend literacy at some pretend prisoner education program.

My favorite angry letter was a recent screed from one of the many registered sex offenders who contact me whenever I write about . . . sex offender registration.  They have an on-line club or something, and there’s a big sign nailed to the door with my name crudely painted beneath a skull and crossbones.

So this sex offender guy writes to tell me that he is “ashamed” of me.  He says that I am a symptom of “a broken education system” because I have PhD. but my ideas suck and I should try to think harder (he clearly doesn’t know much about graduate schools).

He gave me a lot of advice about improving myself.  It’s nice to know that people care.

My least favorite letter arrived from a Ron Paul supporter in Colorado who wrote that he loves to hear about police officers getting killed because they don’t deserve to live.  He was writing in response to a post about several officers killed recently in the line of duty, including two young men killed in front of, or near, their own fathers, who are themselves cops.  None of this moved the letter-writer:

Cops ARE assholes, no doubt about it.  And IT IS ALWAYS a good thing when they get blown away. . . I’m fairly certain most assaults are carried out by police officers.  They are scum of the earth not by coincidence . . . only assholes apply to be cops.

And so on.  There was a lot more of it, fringy, pot-addled, paranoid, extremist rantings to be sure.  But far too many non-extreme people also feel far too comfortable treating cops like they are expendable, or inhuman, these days.

I don’t think the average person could endure very much of the crap that police must endure in their daily soak in the waters of whiny –and yet potentially deadly — criminality.  Imagine having to spend ten or twelve hours a day, every workday, stuck with that irritating, whacked out, stinky, unpredictable guy you avoided on the train this morning . . . and twenty more like him . . . all the while being brow-beaten by a bunch of self-important “criminal defenders” who fancy themselves Atticus Finch while playing a rigged system that flushes violent men back out onto the streets the moment you arrest them.

~~~

Which brings me to Neil Boortz’s unfortunate column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today. I like Neil Boortz, not sycophantically, but I’ve listened to him on the radio for some twenty years, and he’s one libertarian who doesn’t irritate like most people who subscribe to the weird church of libertarianism (aka — Of course everyone should build their own personal highways to get to work because that’s far better than government taking your money to build highways for everyone).

He, and I, and my sex offender pen pal all feel the same way about the blighted state of education these days, for example.

But today, Boortz published one of those non-argument arguments in defense of the existence of defense attorneys, as if anyone really thinks they shouldn’t exist.  And, quite unfortunately, to illustrate his example of why society (allegedly) doesn’t appreciate defense attorneys enough as they valiantly defend us against the rampant false accusations imposed by the blue meanie police state, he jokingly mentioned the horrific case of Larry Davis (aka Adam Abdul-Hakeem), which ought to instead be remembered as a watershed injustice of the degree of the un-prosecuted murder of Emmett Till or the un-prosecuted murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

Only, it was cops who got shot.  Six cops and at least four other men who Davis likely assassinated.  The police were risking their lives trying to arrest Davis when he shot them.  And then, in just one of the innumerable injustices that made much of the late Sixties to early Nineties such a bloodbath, defense attorney William Kunstler not only got Larry Davis off on multiple murder charges and the shooting of six cops but degraded the victims by making Davis a cultural hero — not using superior wit and legal skills, as Boortz implies, but by exploiting a twisted system of government protection that no libertarian should espouse.

Here is Boortz, describing the trial:

Davis hires William Kunstler who, in his closing argument at trial, tells the jury that if they don’t acquit Davis of these murder charges they will one day wake up at 3 a.m. — screaming. Larry Davis kills [sic] six police officers; Kunstler gets him off. Davis goes on to become known as “Hood Hero,” and later as Adam Abdul-Hakeem. Quite a guy. Eventually, as you would expect, the Hood Hero murdered again, and this time was convicted. The prosecutors got it right the second time.

How does Boortz know the prosecutors “got it wrong” the first time?  He doesn’t even barely get the facts straight.  The police weren’t killed, for instance, though several were badly wounded.  The rest of the editorial is a similar flight of fancy: set up defense attorneys as misunderstood victims of society, then praise them for standing up to a government hell-bent on framing and convicting perfectly innocent people for some unknown reason:

The question is not whether or not you did it; it’s whether or not the government can prove you did it.  Trust me, you don’t want to live in a country where your life, liberty or property can be taken away because of political whim or the passions of the majority.

Never mind that six innocent public servants got shot trying to protect the life, liberty and property of people who went on to make a hero of the unrepentant shooter.

Never mind that Kunstler used both politics and passions — pure mob mentality — to win his cases in the highly politicized courts of his era.

Never mind that he valued some types of people over others.  That he unabashedly celebrated the murder of people who were cops.  That he defended leftist and Muslim terrorists while heaping contempt on the “life, liberty and property” of ordinary citizens.  That he refused to defend people whose politics clashed with his own, while pretending to stand for transcendent legal values.

That’s why people hated him, not because he was a defense attorney.

But here is the part of Boortz’ editorial that really makes no sense, coming from a libertarian: William Kunstler was actually for big government standing between jurors and the facts of any case.  He believed the people could not be trusted with the truth, and he shamelessly used an activist system of technicalities to get brutal killers off free — free to deprive other people of their rights.

Above all else, Kunstler represented a system of increasing bureaucratic intrusion into the justice system, not the defense of the boring little people from state power.

~~~

In any case, William Kunstler is dead and buried, and the little people have been winning real victories recently. In a little-noticed trend, the Roberts court has begun to chip away at excessive Kunstler-era exclusionary rules that keep evidence from being heard and considered.  Of course, news organs like the New York Times don’t like this provide jurors and judges with actual evidence and trust their judgment thing, but it is a sign of balance returning to a system in which defense attorneys — you know, those under-appreciated freedom fighters — have managed to tilt the playing field for far too long.

View the original article here

Cop-Killers, Neil Boortz, and, Thank God for the Roberts Court

I get a lot of angry mail from people who are shocked and offended that anybody would deign to advocate for locking criminals up.  You know, using words.

Most of this mail is weirdly personal and tendentiously riffs on a few themes:

I’m for enforcing the law, so I must want innocent people to rot in jail.I’m for locking up predators and thugs, so I must be a vengeful person who daydreams of pulling the switch on fuzzy puppies and other living things.I must hate men, or minorities, or human beings in general, or myself in particular.Furthermore, since I was a crime victim once, I cannot be trusted to express any opinion about the justice system, so I should just shut up, or dedicate myself to apologizing for existing, or make amends for existing by pretending to teach pretend literacy at some pretend prisoner education program.

My favorite angry letter was a recent screed from one of the many registered sex offenders who contact me whenever I write about . . . sex offender registration.  They have an on-line club or something, and there’s a big sign nailed to the door with my name crudely painted beneath a skull and crossbones.

So this sex offender guy writes to tell me that he is “ashamed” of me.  He says that I am a symptom of “a broken education system” because I have PhD. but my ideas suck and I should try to think harder (he clearly doesn’t know much about graduate schools).

He gave me a lot of advice about improving myself.  It’s nice to know that people care.

My least favorite letter arrived from a Ron Paul supporter in Colorado who wrote that he loves to hear about police officers getting killed because they don’t deserve to live.  He was writing in response to a post about several officers killed recently in the line of duty, including two young men killed in front of, or near, their own fathers, who are themselves cops.  None of this moved the letter-writer:

Cops ARE assholes, no doubt about it.  And IT IS ALWAYS a good thing when they get blown away. . . I’m fairly certain most assaults are carried out by police officers.  They are scum of the earth not by coincidence . . . only assholes apply to be cops.

And so on.  There was a lot more of it, fringy, pot-addled, paranoid, extremist rantings to be sure.  But far too many non-extreme people also feel far too comfortable treating cops like they are expendable, or inhuman, these days.

I don’t think the average person could endure very much of the crap that police must endure in their daily soak in the waters of whiny –and yet potentially deadly — criminality.  Imagine having to spend ten or twelve hours a day, every workday, stuck with that irritating, whacked out, stinky, unpredictable guy you avoided on the train this morning . . . and twenty more like him . . . all the while being brow-beaten by a bunch of self-important “criminal defenders” who fancy themselves Atticus Finch while playing a rigged system that flushes violent men back out onto the streets the moment you arrest them.

~~~

Which brings me to Neil Boortz’s unfortunate column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today. I like Neil Boortz, not sycophantically, but I’ve listened to him on the radio for some twenty years, and he’s one libertarian who doesn’t irritate like most people who subscribe to the weird church of libertarianism (aka — Of course everyone should build their own personal highways to get to work because that’s far better than government taking your money to build highways for everyone).

He, and I, and my sex offender pen pal all feel the same way about the blighted state of education these days, for example.

But today, Boortz published one of those non-argument arguments in defense of the existence of defense attorneys, as if anyone really thinks they shouldn’t exist.  And, quite unfortunately, to illustrate his example of why society (allegedly) doesn’t appreciate defense attorneys enough as they valiantly defend us against the rampant false accusations imposed by the blue meanie police state, he jokingly mentioned the horrific case of Larry Davis (aka Adam Abdul-Hakeem), which ought to instead be remembered as a watershed injustice of the degree of the un-prosecuted murder of Emmett Till or the un-prosecuted murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

Only, it was cops who got shot.  Six cops and at least four other men who Davis likely assassinated.  The police were risking their lives trying to arrest Davis when he shot them.  And then, in just one of the innumerable injustices that made much of the late Sixties to early Nineties such a bloodbath, defense attorney William Kunstler not only got Larry Davis off on multiple murder charges and the shooting of six cops but degraded the victims by making Davis a cultural hero — not using superior wit and legal skills, as Boortz implies, but by exploiting a twisted system of government protection that no libertarian should espouse.

Here is Boortz, describing the trial:

Davis hires William Kunstler who, in his closing argument at trial, tells the jury that if they don’t acquit Davis of these murder charges they will one day wake up at 3 a.m. — screaming. Larry Davis kills [sic] six police officers; Kunstler gets him off. Davis goes on to become known as “Hood Hero,” and later as Adam Abdul-Hakeem. Quite a guy. Eventually, as you would expect, the Hood Hero murdered again, and this time was convicted. The prosecutors got it right the second time.

How does Boortz know the prosecutors “got it wrong” the first time?  He doesn’t even barely get the facts straight.  The police weren’t killed, for instance, though several were badly wounded.  The rest of the editorial is a similar flight of fancy: set up defense attorneys as misunderstood victims of society, then praise them for standing up to a government hell-bent on framing and convicting perfectly innocent people for some unknown reason:

The question is not whether or not you did it; it’s whether or not the government can prove you did it.  Trust me, you don’t want to live in a country where your life, liberty or property can be taken away because of political whim or the passions of the majority.

Never mind that six innocent public servants got shot trying to protect the life, liberty and property of people who went on to make a hero of the unrepentant shooter.

Never mind that Kunstler used both politics and passions — pure mob mentality — to win his cases in the highly politicized courts of his era.

Never mind that he valued some types of people over others.  That he unabashedly celebrated the murder of people who were cops.  That he defended leftist and Muslim terrorists while heaping contempt on the “life, liberty and property” of ordinary citizens.  That he refused to defend people whose politics clashed with his own, while pretending to stand for transcendent legal values.

That’s why people hated him, not because he was a defense attorney.

But here is the part of Boortz’ editorial that really makes no sense, coming from a libertarian: William Kunstler was actually for big government standing between jurors and the facts of any case.  He believed the people could not be trusted with the truth, and he shamelessly used an activist system of technicalities to get brutal killers off free — free to deprive other people of their rights.

Above all else, Kunstler represented a system of increasing bureaucratic intrusion into the justice system, not the defense of the boring little people from state power.

~~~

In any case, William Kunstler is dead and buried, and the little people have been winning real victories recently. In a little-noticed trend, the Roberts court has begun to chip away at excessive Kunstler-era exclusionary rules that keep evidence from being heard and considered.  Of course, news organs like the New York Times don’t like this provide jurors and judges with actual evidence and trust their judgment thing, but it is a sign of balance returning to a system in which defense attorneys — you know, those under-appreciated freedom fighters — have managed to tilt the playing field for far too long.

View the original article here

Cop-Killers, Neil Boortz, and, Thank God for the Roberts Court

I get a lot of angry mail from people who are shocked and offended that anybody would deign to advocate for locking criminals up.  You know, using words.

Most of this mail is weirdly personal and tendentiously riffs on a few themes:

I’m for enforcing the law, so I must want innocent people to rot in jail.I’m for locking up predators and thugs, so I must be a vengeful person who daydreams of pulling the switch on fuzzy puppies and other living things.I must hate men, or minorities, or human beings in general, or myself in particular.Furthermore, since I was a crime victim once, I cannot be trusted to express any opinion about the justice system, so I should just shut up, or dedicate myself to apologizing for existing, or make amends for existing by pretending to teach pretend literacy at some pretend prisoner education program.

My favorite angry letter was a recent screed from one of the many registered sex offenders who contact me whenever I write about . . . sex offender registration.  They have an on-line club or something, and there’s a big sign nailed to the door with my name crudely painted beneath a skull and crossbones.

So this sex offender guy writes to tell me that he is “ashamed” of me.  He says that I am a symptom of “a broken education system” because I have PhD. but my ideas suck and I should try to think harder (he clearly doesn’t know much about graduate schools).

He gave me a lot of advice about improving myself.  It’s nice to know that people care.

My least favorite letter arrived from a Ron Paul supporter in Colorado who wrote that he loves to hear about police officers getting killed because they don’t deserve to live.  He was writing in response to a post about several officers killed recently in the line of duty, including two young men killed in front of, or near, their own fathers, who are themselves cops.  None of this moved the letter-writer:

Cops ARE assholes, no doubt about it.  And IT IS ALWAYS a good thing when they get blown away. . . I’m fairly certain most assaults are carried out by police officers.  They are scum of the earth not by coincidence . . . only assholes apply to be cops.

And so on.  There was a lot more of it, fringy, pot-addled, paranoid, extremist rantings to be sure.  But far too many non-extreme people also feel far too comfortable treating cops like they are expendable, or inhuman, these days.

I don’t think the average person could endure very much of the crap that police must endure in their daily soak in the waters of whiny –and yet potentially deadly — criminality.  Imagine having to spend ten or twelve hours a day, every workday, stuck with that irritating, whacked out, stinky, unpredictable guy you avoided on the train this morning . . . and twenty more like him . . . all the while being brow-beaten by a bunch of self-important “criminal defenders” who fancy themselves Atticus Finch while playing a rigged system that flushes violent men back out onto the streets the moment you arrest them.

~~~

Which brings me to Neil Boortz’s unfortunate column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today. I like Neil Boortz, not sycophantically, but I’ve listened to him on the radio for some twenty years, and he’s one libertarian who doesn’t irritate like most people who subscribe to the weird church of libertarianism (aka — Of course everyone should build their own personal highways to get to work because that’s far better than government taking your money to build highways for everyone).

He, and I, and my sex offender pen pal all feel the same way about the blighted state of education these days, for example.

But today, Boortz published one of those non-argument arguments in defense of the existence of defense attorneys, as if anyone really thinks they shouldn’t exist.  And, quite unfortunately, to illustrate his example of why society (allegedly) doesn’t appreciate defense attorneys enough as they valiantly defend us against the rampant false accusations imposed by the blue meanie police state, he jokingly mentioned the horrific case of Larry Davis (aka Adam Abdul-Hakeem), which ought to instead be remembered as a watershed injustice of the degree of the un-prosecuted murder of Emmett Till or the un-prosecuted murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

Only, it was cops who got shot.  Six cops and at least four other men who Davis likely assassinated.  The police were risking their lives trying to arrest Davis when he shot them.  And then, in just one of the innumerable injustices that made much of the late Sixties to early Nineties such a bloodbath, defense attorney William Kunstler not only got Larry Davis off on multiple murder charges and the shooting of six cops but degraded the victims by making Davis a cultural hero — not using superior wit and legal skills, as Boortz implies, but by exploiting a twisted system of government protection that no libertarian should espouse.

Here is Boortz, describing the trial:

Davis hires William Kunstler who, in his closing argument at trial, tells the jury that if they don’t acquit Davis of these murder charges they will one day wake up at 3 a.m. — screaming. Larry Davis kills [sic] six police officers; Kunstler gets him off. Davis goes on to become known as “Hood Hero,” and later as Adam Abdul-Hakeem. Quite a guy. Eventually, as you would expect, the Hood Hero murdered again, and this time was convicted. The prosecutors got it right the second time.

How does Boortz know the prosecutors “got it wrong” the first time?  He doesn’t even barely get the facts straight.  The police weren’t killed, for instance, though several were badly wounded.  The rest of the editorial is a similar flight of fancy: set up defense attorneys as misunderstood victims of society, then praise them for standing up to a government hell-bent on framing and convicting perfectly innocent people for some unknown reason:

The question is not whether or not you did it; it’s whether or not the government can prove you did it.  Trust me, you don’t want to live in a country where your life, liberty or property can be taken away because of political whim or the passions of the majority.

Never mind that six innocent public servants got shot trying to protect the life, liberty and property of people who went on to make a hero of the unrepentant shooter.

Never mind that Kunstler used both politics and passions — pure mob mentality — to win his cases in the highly politicized courts of his era.

Never mind that he valued some types of people over others.  That he unabashedly celebrated the murder of people who were cops.  That he defended leftist and Muslim terrorists while heaping contempt on the “life, liberty and property” of ordinary citizens.  That he refused to defend people whose politics clashed with his own, while pretending to stand for transcendent legal values.

That’s why people hated him, not because he was a defense attorney.

But here is the part of Boortz’ editorial that really makes no sense, coming from a libertarian: William Kunstler was actually for big government standing between jurors and the facts of any case.  He believed the people could not be trusted with the truth, and he shamelessly used an activist system of technicalities to get brutal killers off free — free to deprive other people of their rights.

Above all else, Kunstler represented a system of increasing bureaucratic intrusion into the justice system, not the defense of the boring little people from state power.

~~~

In any case, William Kunstler is dead and buried, and the little people have been winning real victories recently. In a little-noticed trend, the Roberts court has begun to chip away at excessive Kunstler-era exclusionary rules that keep evidence from being heard and considered.  Of course, news organs like the New York Times don’t like this provide jurors and judges with actual evidence and trust their judgment thing, but it is a sign of balance returning to a system in which defense attorneys — you know, those under-appreciated freedom fighters — have managed to tilt the playing field for far too long.

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Mesothelioma Court Case Settlements

mesothelioma court case settlements

If you are already involved in a mesothelioma lawsuit, your lawyer may be advising you to go for a settlement rather than waiting for your day in court. Alternatively, you may be going through the process of choosing a mesothelioma lawyer, and need some more information about your options. What exactly is a settlement, and why would you want one?

What is a Settlement?

In legal terms, this word most commonly refers to situations in which the plaintiff and the defendant agree to resolve the case out of court-either before the trial begins, or during the trial itself. This resolution is made without the help of the courts-a judge does order that a settlement should be reached, and cannot prevent the parties involved from agreeing to settle. Whether or not to agree to a settlement is a decision made by the plaintiff and the defendant involved in a lawsuit.

Why should you settle out of Court?

Your lawyer may advise you that settling your case out of court is the best option for a variety of reasons. They may, for example, feel that your case is not strong enough for you to win a lawsuit that is decided in court. This might happen if you are missing some vital information that means the lawsuit may not be decided in your favor.

Alternatively, you yourself may decide that a settlement is the best option for you-if you would like to get the case resolved more quickly, or if you do not want to put yourself through the stress of going to court.

Another point to consider is simply whether or not it is practical for you to settle rather than waiting through what might be a long, drawn-out court case. Mesothelioma is a devastating form of cancer, and the majority of people with this type of cancer have between one and five years to live after diagnosis, depending on how far advanced their disease is. This means that resolving a lawsuit quickly is often an important factor in deciding whether or not to settle. This is particularly true due to the fact that mesothelioma treatments are expensive, and many people with the disease require ongoing at-home care in addition to treatment. For some people, delaying the resolution of a lawsuit means they may be deprived of care and treatment that might prolong their lives-in such cases, it may be in the best interests of the patient to reach a settlement quickly so that they can get the treatment they need.

None of this means that you absolutely must settle-it does, however, mean that choosing whether or not to accept a settlement requires some careful thought, and discussion with your doctors as well as with your lawyer.

What else should you know about Settlements?

The majority of mesothelioma lawsuits are settled out of court. The dangers of asbestos exposure are very well-known, and there have been many, many lawsuits of this kind. For this reason, most companies are willing to agree to a settlement if you have a valid claim that can prove the responsibility of the company.

One factor to consider is that when you agree to settle, you may receive less compensation than you might if you won your case in court, mainly because you are likely to receive more "damages" money from a court decision than a settlement. The compensation you receive will typically depend on a variety of factors, including how much damage you have suffered as a result of the disease, the expenses involved in your care and treatment, how much income you have lost, and how responsible the defendant is proven to be in your case. The size of the settlement may also depend on the current political climate and the laws in the state where your lawsuit was filed, as well as previous results of settlements and trial verdicts.

When you agree to a settlement, you are effectively agreeing to forgo your right to sue in exchange for a guaranteed outcome. This is another reason why a settlement may be considered a desirable option, even though a smaller amount of compensation might be received-although juries tend to be sympathetic to the plaintiff in mesothelioma lawsuits, there is still no guarantee that the case will be decided in your favor. By agreeing to settle out of court, you are exchanging an uncertain outcome for one which is guaranteed according to the terms of the settlement.

About the Author

Nick Johnson is lead counsel with Johnson Law Group. Johnson represents plaintiffs in many states and focuses on injury cases involving Fen-Phen and PPH, Paxil, Mesothelioma and Nursing Home Abuse. Call Nick Johnson at 1-888-311-5522 or visit http://www.johnsonlawgroup.com

Mesothelioma Legal Settlements
This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 10:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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