On the Record

Possibly when he or she lives for more than a year in a half-million dollar home while paying next to nothing.

In “Rescue is quirk of timing” in Wednesday’s edition of The (Baltimore) Sun, the lead anecdote is Veronica Peterson, a 45-year-old single mother of three who says she can’t keep up with the mortgage payments on a $545,000 house in Columbia. She says she expects an eviction notice any day. The story presents her as a victim of the foreclosure crisis.

However, that’s apparently not the full story. I’ll let the City Paper explain:

…in the comments section below the article, hundreds of readers pointed out what the Sun’s reporters and editors could not, apparently: that Peterson had no business in that house, and that she’s lived there for more than a year rent- and mortgage-free. “Where do you think we can get in on this deal?” one commenter, calling himself Henry Bowman, asked another.

The City Paper goes on to dissect the loan numbers:

The online court and land records show that Peterson closed on the house on Nov. 3, 2006, with two loans from Washington Mutual. The main mortgage, for $436,000, had a starting interest rate of 8.5 percent, adjusting in December of this year to the London Interbank Offered Rate plus 4.99 percent. The second loan, often called a “piggyback,” totaled $109,000 with an interest rate of 11.5 percent, according to The Sun.

Those two payments together would have totaled $3,386.17 per month. That’s before property taxes, upkeep, utilities, etc. Peterson would have to earn at least $50,000 per year just to make her house payments.

But it appears that Peterson made few–if any–payments. The foreclosure was filed July 31, 2007. The balance on the main note then was $435,735.86, plus unpaid interest accrued from Jan. 1, 2007, plus $1,005.72 in late charges. This suggests that Peterson made, at most, one payment on her house: the December, 2006 payment. Given the grace periods typical in home-mortgage business, it is at least as likely that her first payment was not due until January 2007, which would mean she has made zero payments.

Had she made all of her payments, Peterson would have spent about $64,335 so far. Had she rented a similar place, she would have been charged around $2,500 per month–a total of $47,500–since January 2007. Instead, she apparently paid nothing.

Not much of a “victim,” I’d say. I’m also shocked that someone would take out a mortgage for the full price of a home. Am I missing the down payment in this transaction?

JOE BACCHUS, Web Specialist

The New York Times has a story today about what Obama was like during his time teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. On the one hand, he was apparently an engaging professor, if a touch overly pleased with himself:

As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies. (Mr. Obama, in turn, could play the star. In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama’s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. “Take Barack Obama, there’s a good-looking guy,” he would introduce a twisty legal case.)

On the other hand, he sometimes got so wrapped up in the intellectual arguments surrounding an issue that he didn’t do anything about it:

While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

What, if anything, do you think this all says about what kind of president Obama would be? A broader question: do academic types make good political leaders? Are there similarities between the skill set required to be a law professor and the one needed to be president? Or are we talking about two very different personality types here?

CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer

In my story yesterday about a legal battle between a defense contracting firm and its former employee, I mentioned that the judge “appeared annoyed” by the sparring in the second day of cross-motions for preliminary injunctions.

That wasn’t very specific, and there are those who’ve moved for a more definite statement (or, since this is federal court, should I say a bill of particulars?). Anyway, here were some of the clues:

Shortly into plaintiff Dennis Glynn’s testimony, opposing counsel began objecting to the questions Glynn’s own lawyer was asking him. The questions improperly called for the witness to speculate or to draw legal conclusions, according to the Winston & Strawn lawyers representing Impact Science & Technology.

U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz overruled the first couple objections without incident but eventually could not contain his disapproval, calling the tactics of the W&S attorneys “absolutely outrageous.”

Motz said the frequency of objections during an earlier deposition was an “absolute disgrace” that reflected badly on the international firm — and set a bad example for the firm’s younger lawyers.

Later, in response to a further objection about hearsay, Motz included Glynn’s attorneys from The Employment Law Group in D.C. in his criticism.

Between the first day of the preliminary injunction hearing two weeks ago and Monday, Motz said, he had dealt with other pairs of opposing legal teams — and the difference between them and the lawyers in this case was like “night and day.”

“Unfortunately, I’m in the dead of night,” Motz said.

BRENDAN KEARNEY, Legal Affairs Writer

I never played Scrabulous, the Scrabble imitator W₄I₁L₁D₂L₁Y₄ popular on Facebook. Personally, I don’t like playing regular Scrabble because I view it as a no-win situation as someone who makes a living with words: if I lose, I’m a dope; if I win, I’m supposed to.

Still, I read with interest the decision by the Scrabulous creators to remove their game from Facebook after Scrabble-maker Hasbro filed a lawsuit against the online application developed by two brothers from India in 2005. Many of my friends played Scrabulous, among a reported 500,000 users daily, so I’m sure they were upset. Members of a Facebook group, “Save Scrabulous,” were posting last night and into this morning, annoyed at Hasbro for ending Scrabulous and replacing it with their own, inferior version.

“To say that I was disappointed is an understatement,” one wrote. “Will we ever get closure? Are thousands upon thousands of us doomed to live the rest of our profiled lives with our unfinished games in internet limbo?”

But another user pointed out Scrabulous was a blatant Scrabble knock-off and was surprised it took Hasbro this long to file a cease-and-desist order.

I guess the moral of the story is Scrabulous was quixotry. You can’t score a triple-word score circumventing copyright infringement laws.

D₂A₁N₁N₁Y₄ J₈A₁C₃O₁B₃S₁, Legal Affairs Writer, with an assist from Pholph’s Scrabble Score Generator.

As Danny Jacobs wrote in Tuesday’s paper, wireless access has been banned during the bar exam at the Baltimore Convention Center. That means 650 people who used their laptops on the essay portion of the exam had to upload their answers elsewhere by midnight.

I was on the scene this afternoon as hundreds of fatigued participants walked by. Even though they were in a rush, several laptop users were willing to talk about where they were planning to go for wireless access.

Check out the video and hear what some of them had to say.

RICHARD SIMON, Multimedia Reporter

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/tQkYsw5vXng" width="375" height="300" wmode="transparent" /]

Just finished reading Adams v. Rice, the D.C. Circuit’s pronouncement that sex is, indeed, a “major life activity” under federal disability law. A story in this week’s Legal Times says Adams, and another case that bestowed the same status on sleeping, could lead to a lot more litigation.

If that’s true, we should be almost nine years into the surge already. The 9th Circuit decided that sex was a major life activity back in December 1999, in McAlindin v. County of San Diego. (Stop smirking, it was not a Kozinski opinion. It was authored by Judge Dorothy W. Nelson, former dean of USC Law - my alma mater - where her image smiled kindly from the wall of the main lecture hall. With her prim blue suit, her tilted head and her neatly folded hands, Dean Dottie looked like she was about to offer us all a nice cup of tea. What better person to declare that sex is a major life activity?)

But, back to the D.C. Circuit. Kathy Adams says she was turned down for a Foreign Service post because she’s a breast-cancer survivor. The lower court threw out her case because being a cancer survivor is not a disability.

Adams, while she’s “fit as a fiddle” otherwise, said she’s still disabled because “the prospect of dating and developing an intimate relationship is just too painful and frightening. While I have overcome the physical disease,” she said, “my ability to enter into romantic relationships has been crippled indefinitely and perhaps permanently.”

That, combined with Adams’ history of cancer, was good enough for the D.C. Circuit, which remanded the case. No matter that the government insisted it didn’t know Adams wasn’t interested in sex.

Curious, isn’t it? If it hadn’t been for her lack of a love life, the State Department would have been free to discriminate against her based on her prior battle with cancer.

I think I will have that cup of tea now.

BARBARA GRZINCIC, Managing Editor/Law

* With “pain pump” cases burgeoning across the country, Robert Jenner of Pikesville is heading to San Francisco this week for a hearing that will determine how and where the actions will be tried.

* Chief Judge Bell is in Anchorage, Judge Murphy’s taking a day off to venture deep into enemy territory — read what they and other Court of Appeals judges are doing this summer.

* A Howard County homebuilder is being sued, twice, by lawyers who claim they are owed a total of almost $60,000.

* A disbarred lawyer has been ordered to pay nearly $1 million for failing to handle his client’s appeal of a consumer protection lawsuit. Also, an advertising agency wins $300,000 in its suit against two former executives who started a competing firm and took a prominent client with them; and a med-mal case settles on the fifth day of trial.

* In Unbillable Hours, Ober|Kaler’s E. Scott Johnson shows off his collection of vinyl albums and vintage hi-fi turntables and equipment to play them on.

* Our columns this week include a call from the Editorial Advisory Board to shut down the Health Claims Alternative Dispute Resolution Office, and Jack L.B. Gohn’s take on the New Yorker’s Politics of Fear cover. Judge Dennis Sweeney’s “Judge on the Jury” series continues with tips on dealing with juror questions.

Plus:
Legal briefs; On the Move; Letters to the Editor; and our weekly law digest, this week with 27 cases: four from the Court of Special Appeals, 14 from the 4th Circuit and nine from U.S. District Court.

BARBARA GRZINCIC, Managing Editor/Law

Happy Monday! Here are a few law-related links to start your week:

– A Maryland firm involved in some of the last remaining 9-11 lawsuits got a dressing-down from a federal judge in New York last week. The judge said Azrael, Franz & Gann’s “request for 25 percent of $28.5 million it had recovered ‘would reflect a very large windfall,’ and that its ‘entire strategy seems to have been to coast on the work of others.’”
– Collegiality between prosecutors and defense lawyers is overrated, says Jon Katz.
– A Prince George’s County mother is suing the school district, claiming a bus driver failed to protect her daughter from fellow students angry that she had turned them into for smoking marijuana on the bus.
– More from the “court appearance” files: a New York lawyer muses on adjusting one’s appearance to please a judge of the opposite sex. Hat tip: Feminist Law Professors.
– The Westboro Baptist Church crew’s pickup truck is taxable because it’s not used solely for religious purposes, says the Kansas Court of Appeals.

CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer

My story in today’s paper, “Raising Doubt on DNA,” deals with the practice of using DNA databases and DNA found at a crime scene to identify the perpetrator. It was sparked by an ongoing series in the Los Angeles Times, especially last Sunday’s piece.

It’s an eye-opener. Last Sunday’s story begins like this:

State crime lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona’s DNA database when she stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles.

The men matched at nine of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people.

The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. But the mug shots of the two felons suggested that they were not related: One was black, the other white.

According to the Times, “Arizona searches” in that state, Illinois and Maryland have yielded more than a thousand instances in which at least two samples match at nine or more loci. The FBI says the way the searches are conducted skews the result, and points out that it now looks for matches at 13 loci.

To read last Sunday’s story, click here; for other stories in the Times’ series, click here.

CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer

The Associated Press reports that a New Zealand judge thought the name of a little girl involved in a custody battle was beyond ridiculous — so he changed it.

The name? “Talula Does the Hula from Hawaii.”

Do you think the judge was rightly sparing the 9-year-old a lifetime of humiliation or sticking his nose where it didn’t belong? What if some U.S. judge (maybe in Hollywood?) started renaming kids? Would it mean so long to celebrity baby names like Tu Morrow, Moxie CrimeFighter Jillette and Pilot Inspektor Lee?

Lawyers: have you ever had a client with such a horrible name that you’d have changed it, if you had the authority to do so?

Hat tip: ABA Journal.

CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer