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.
Long-awaited nominations are in to lead prosecutions for the Northern, Southern and Western Districts of Texas. Two of the nominees are veteran federal prosecutors; the third was El Paso’s DA for 27 years. Still to come: a nominee as U.S. attorney in the Eastern District. Bruce Tomaso has the details.
Long delayed by COVID, the trial involves what federal authorities say is a $158 million scam by doctors and pharmacies to bill a government workers’ insurance program for fraudulent, ultra-costly prescriptions.
In one case alone, $50 million in disputed royalties are at stake. And that could be just the tip of the iceberg.
At the 8th annual Government Enforcement Institute in Dallas, the assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of the criminal division says new guidelines favor companies with vigorous compliance practices.
Seven imprisoned defendants, including four physicians, make their case for reversal before appellate court.
Alamdar Hamdani has been in the limelight in Houston for prosecuting crooked cops and ISIS collaborators. The former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section appears poised to take over one of the nation’s busiest U.S. attorney’s offices.
Charleen McCrory Hill, the late bassist’s wife of nearly 20 years, says in court documents that she never authorized the June memorabilia sale in Houston and didn’t even know about it until she saw press coverage of the event.
A Dallas County jury deliberated less than two hours before finding that the cable giant was liable for the exemplary damages on top of an earlier verdict of $375 million in actual damages.
Experts at a Texas Lawbook CLE say even top litigators struggle with the lightning pace of suits to stop departing workers from stealing customers and trade secrets.
The verdict could balloon when the jurors, having found Charter grossly negligent in its hiring and supervision of the killer, begin deliberating punitive damages next Monday.
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