On the Record

Spotted in Annapolis near the city dock:

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As a theater aficianado, Judge Dana Mark Levitz is probably familiar with the concept of a ”limited engagement.”  The term can now also be used to describe his role as a retired, visiting judge, which is what he was Wednesday in Baltimore County Circuit Court.

Levitz has sat in the Towson courthouse a few times since he retired at the end of last year, and Wednesday I sat in on part of the criminal docket he was handling. His familiar, booming voice popped up occasionally, but there was a softer edge. Levitz walked into the courtroom with a big smile, the look of a man happy to be back in the courtroom but also happy that he was just visiting.

I found Levitz to be wonderfully quotable while he was a sitting judge, and that apparently hasn’t been affected by retirement. He told a 21-year-old charged with D.U.I., “I believe there’s not a person in this courthouse who didn’t do something stupid when they were young. God knows, I did. This is your stupid.” He fined the defendant and gave her probation.

He later sentenced a 38-year-old Parkville man to three years in jail for a series of car burglaries around Loch Raven Reservoir earlier this year. The defendant said he broke into the cars to steal credit cards to support his heroin addiction. Levitz shook his head.

“Is getting high worth it? I can’t imagine it is, but people keep doing it,” he said. “What a waste at any chance for a happy life.”

I couldn’t make it to the confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee, so I’ve been reading the reviews with great interest.

Baltimore federal judge and 4th Circuit nominee Andre M. Davis drew high praise from Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who said she’d been waiting eight years for someone worthy of filling the Murnaghan seat. He drew opposition from groups who think he’s too conservative when it comes to the Americans with Disabilities Act, at least as it relates to employment cases.

But according the Associated Press, Wednesday’s toughest questioning came from Sen. Russ Feingold. The Wisconsin Democrat grilled Davis about a blind spot the nominee had, and cured, some five years ago.

In 2004, Davis was invited to join the board of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment — that’s FREE, as in free-trips-for-judges to their seminars. Davis accepted the invitation but resigned in 2005 after asking the judiciary’s Codes of Conduct committee to weigh in.

Davis assured Feingold he had seen the error of his ways. However, he refused to be drawn on the question of why other judges remain on FREE’s board — essentially telling Feingold he was not his brethren’s keeper. An age-old issue, that one, but I don’t imagine it will keep him off the appellate court.

Anybody know yet how Tom Perez fared?

For homebuyers who just can’t bear the thought of driving around a free-but-gas-guzzling SUV, realtors in Spain are offering the next big incentive: a free divorce.

Spanish real estate company Geimsa is throwing in a divorce lawyer with the purhcase of a three-bedroom house (minimum $89,000) in the Andalucian province of Huelva, Spain, according to a recent UPI article.

Officials with Geimsa realtors said the deal is aimed at couples who have been postponing divorce because they can’t afford new homes, Britain’s The Daily Telegraph reported Thursday.

“A divorce is very expensive,” said Vanesa Contioso of Geimsa. “So we are offering new clients the free use of our lawyers to handle the process.”

That sure beats a free lunch.

Hat tip: Maryland Divorce Legal Crier.

Yesterday afternoon, as the TV news folks were going into full-on swine flu panic mode (anchors demonstrating surgical masks! talking head feds reassuring us! Dr. Sanjay Gupta!), I got the opportunity to talk to Saul Ewing partner Randy Lutz.

Lutz, it seems, was chief counsel to the state’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene the last time the country was in fear of a swine flu epidemic, around 1980. The state’s institutions for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled fell under his purview. This was before the massive deinstitutionalization in the later 1980s, so there were some 10,000 people in these homes.

Doctors wanted to innoculate the institutions’ residents, Lutz said. People living in close quarters like an institution are especially prone to sharing disease.

The problem was that, statistically, of those 10,000 residents, three would likely get sick or injured by the vaccine or the needle used to administer it. But they were not necessarily competent to give their informed consent.

“Doctors said to us lawyers, ‘Fix it. Make sure we can innoculate the patients,’” Lutz recalled.

Lutz said that usually in such a case the court would appoint a guardian for the patient and maybe hold a trial, which could take six months — obviously far too long. Doing this for thousands of patients would have been logistically impossible. In the end, Lutz said, the lawyers couldn’t figure out a way around the problem. 
“It was impossible to get their informed consent to give them the innoculation, and we ended up telling doctors, ‘You do what you have to do,’” he said.

In the end, the swine flu did not break out in Maryland.

Lutz said this kind of large-scale dilemma could never repeat itself today, for three reasons. First, Maryland subsequently made it easier for someone other than a patient to give informed consent on the patient’s behalf, he said. Second, there are far fewer people institutionalized today.

And third — we don’t have a vaccine for this one.

The federal court and state circuit and district courts in downtown Baltimore have been closed for the day due to a water main break at Lombard and Gay Streets.

The federal court will open tomorrow, according to a U.S. Marshal there, as will the state district court, according to a message on the main phone line there.

On the cover: Lawyers who sue the police say they take only a fraction of the cases that come their way — and the pursuit of justice is just one of many factors in their decision.

The owners of The French Press Cafe in Towson will hold your phone while you are in Maryland District Court for just a small fee.

In Breaking News, a D.C. firm wants Whiteford, Taylor & Preston LLP to return legal fees; the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals finds that a career criminal is not eligible for a sentence reduction under the recent crack-cocaine sentencing amendments; and an insurer is not required to defend an attorney who didn’t give notice of a potential malpractice claim.

Read about what a jury awarded a construction worker who was forced out of his job in Verdicts & Settlements.

Susan Giller, a private investigator with three law licenses, discusses litigation lessons in My First.

 The Editorial Advisory Board writes about two local, recent victories for the First Amendment.

In The Big Picture, Jack Gohn comments on interrogation techniques and the Obama administration’s passage of an important FOIA test.

Stay up-to-date with Legal Briefs and the Law Digest, which includes cases from the Maryland Court of Appeals, Maryland Court of Special Appeals, U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and U.S. District Court, Maryland.

Everyone’s feeling the recession, including Peter Angelos.

Press Box points out that Forbes left the Orioles owner and personal injury-law mogul off its World’s Billionaires list last month and its Baseball’s Billionaires list last week. The magazine put Angelos’ net worth at around $1.2 billion last September but now estimates that he has since lost at least 30 percent of his net worth, “despite the Orioles’ value staying flat at $250 million this year.”

No word yet from Angelos’ satirical Twitter alter ego, @Peter_Angelos, on how the drop in net worth is affecting his lifestyle.

Happy Monday!

• Page Croyder observes “serious traffic court” in Baltimore City for a day. The former prosecutor-turned-gadfly is not impressed at the sentences imposed.
• The Washington Post writes about how the new death penalty restrictions could affect defendants already charged with murder. The story also raises the possibility of the governor using the new evidence requirements to commute the sentences of people already on death row.
• Benjamin Polakoff reviews construction contracts in the Baltimore-D.C. area.
• Over the weekend, The Sun had this compelling account of the Carl Lackl murder-for-hire plot. My one nit-picky criticism: why is murder mastermind Patrick Byers’ mother “hooked on heroin, an addict like her six siblings,” while victim Lackl was “struggling with a heroin addiction”? Do you see the difference in language? I think it’s a little heavy-handed and unnecessary, given how good the writer is elsewhere in the story at portraying her subjects.
• The balance of power in big law firms has shifted back to management, writes the National Law Journal.

The NFL Draft is this weekend, when college players find out what team they will play for come fall. I never thought of the draft in legal terms. But, as Eriq Foster wrote in Slate, essentially “team owners are allowed to conspire to claim rights over the lives and labor of young men.”

This set-up was sanctioned by an agreement between the NFL Players’ Association and the league more than 30 years ago that recognized the draft as a ”non-statutory labor exemption” to the Sherman Antitrust Act, Foster wrote. Such a compromise was needed because of a lawsuit filed by former player James “Yazoo” Smith in 1970.

Smith was a first-round pick of the Washington Redskins in 1968 who signed with the team for $50,000. His career ended due to injury in his rookie season. He sued the league, arguing that without the draft, he could have negotiated a better contract with the team of his choice.

Smith won nearly $300,000 in U.S. District Court, a ruling upheld by an appellate court. “The draft inescapably forces each seller of football services to deal with one, and only one buyer, robbing the seller, as in any monopsonistic market, of any real bargaining power,” it said.

Foster noted other professional leagues soon followed the NFL’s lead when it came to the draft.

Just some food for thought when you’re not basking in the glow of Mel Kiper Jr.