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.
Lawyers for Kimberly Goesling said Tarrant County Judge Kimberly Fitzpatrick should be recused because of ‘irregularities’ in her instructions to the jury that exonerated American last month. The recusal motion was denied Saturday by a San Antonio senior judge brought to Fort Worth to decide the matter.
State District Judge Kimberley Fitzpatrick says she can’t explain why jurors weren’t given the correct form to record their verdict, or how they instead got an outdated version that included an instruction she’d earlier ruled was improper.
The jury found against Elevate Development, an Austin company that sought to acquire and develop six parcels on Sixth Street, in ‘one of the most vibrant parts of Austin.’
David Peeples, once lauded by Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht as the ‘gold standard’ for handling touchy cases, will decide if an improper jury instruction disqualifies a Tarrant County judge from sticking with a former flight attendant’s $26 million suit against the airline
At the conclusion of a six-day bench trial in Dallas, U.S. District Judge Karen Gren Scholer ordered a near-doubling of disability payments to former running back Mike Cloud, saying the league’s retirement board ‘spent virtually no time’ looking into his claims.
Lawyers for Kimberly Goesling say the Fort Worth jury that exonerated the airline on May 11 did so after receiving a faulty written charge from the court.
Jurors found that British celebrity chef Mark Sargeant sexually assaulted Kimberly Goesling in a hotel room in Germany in 2018, but rejected her claim that American Airlines is to blame.
U.S. District Judge David C. Godbey, reversing a decision he made in 2016, refuses to dismiss the suit over what the plaintiff, VidStream, says is at least $600 million in unpaid patent royalties.
Calling the appeal of a construction dispute "a poster child" for abuse of the interlocutory appellate process, the 14th Court of Appeals sent the case back to a Houston district court for trial.
Less than three months after their indictment, 11 Texans, including two doctors, have pleaded guilty in a payoff scheme involving needless lab tests billed to Medicare and other federal programs by three Dallas-area labs.
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