Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Bruce Tomaso spent more than 30 years as a writer and editor at The Dallas Morning News. When asked what positions he held there, he usually says it’s easier to list those he didn’t.
As enterprise editor on The News’s breaking news desk in the summer of 2016, he played a key role in covering the downtown shooting spree that left five police officers dead. For its coverage, The News was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting.
He spent most of 1997 in Denver covering the federal criminal trials of Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Four years later, he covered McVeigh’s execution.
His first major reporting assignment for The Texas Lawbook was a retrospective on the 20th anniversary of the $119.6 million verdict for 10 young men who’d been molested as children by Rudy Kos, a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Dallas. The stories earned Bruce and his Lawbook editor, Allen Pusey, the Dallas Bar Association’s 2018 Stephen Philbin Award for Feature Writing.
In 2019, he covered the seven-week medical fraud trial of nine physicians, healthcare executives and others associated with Forest Park Medical Center, a now-defunct Dallas surgical hospital.
He’s a member of the Alumni Hall of Fame at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He and his wife, Dallas attorney Patricia A. Nolan, have one grown son, who is smarter than either of them.
He will drop everything, including preposterous sums of money, to see Lady Gaga, Notre Dame football, or the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team.
You can reach Bruce at bruce.tomaso@texaslawbook.net.
Stephanie Hockridge, a former local news anchor in Phoenix, was sentenced Friday by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of Fort Worth for her role in what prosecutors called a vast fraud based on phony applications for loans under the Covid-era Payroll Protection Program. Her husband, Nathan Reis, pleaded guilty in August for his role in the scam.
Barbara M.G. Lynn, the recently retired judge for the Northern District of Texas, has been appointed as mediator in an insurance dispute involving the Boy Scouts of America that the presiding judge in the matter called “the mother of all coverage cases.”
Rachael Jones, most recently deputy chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Texas, joins McKool Smith’s white-collar and complex commercial litigation team.
U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III, in a scathing, 98-page order, effectively upheld a $21.3 million jury verdict in favor of Terry Bevill, a career police officer who was fired and arrested after saying he didn’t think a friend could get a fair trial in Wood County.
Nathan Reis entered his guilty plea on the day his trial was to begin before U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth. Reis’s wife, former Phoenix TV news anchor Stephanie Hockridge, was convicted by a jury in Judge O’Connor’s court in June.
Tiffany H. Eggers, a former criminal chief in the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, and Sarah R. Douglas, a former prosecutor in the fraud section, are reuniting with Leigha Simonton, the immediate former U.S. attorney, and Scott Hogan, Simonton’s former first assistant, who joined Dykema in April.
Stephanie Hockridge and her husband, Nathan Reis, were indicted on federal fraud charges in connection with their efforts to help small businesses obtain forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program. Tried before U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth, Hockridge was convicted of conspiracy Friday. Reis is scheduled for trial in August.
A Dallas County jury on Thursday awarded almost $9.5 million to a trucking business that claimed it was forced aside when a private equity firm acquired its principal client, the El Rancho Supermercado grocery chain.
Skyward Transportation’s lawsuit claims all was well until El Rancho was acquired in 2023 by an arm of Apollo Global Management.
A Mexican company, Constructora Hostotipaquillo, sued Kellogg Brown & Root, contending that an ill-fated partnering with the Houston-based construction, engineering and consulting giant cost it more than $186 million in lost revenue.
© Copyright 2025 The Texas Lawbook
The content on this website is protected under federal Copyright laws. Any use without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.