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.
After eight days of trial, a Houston federal court jury dispatched life-insurance claims by a woman accused of faking her husband's death, answering two essential questions: Did she prove her husband was dead (no) and did the insurance companies prove he misrepresented in his application for the insurance (yes).
Blanca Monica Villareal, accused in a civil suit of faking her husband’s death in Mexico City to swindle insurers Transamerica and Prudential, claimed that she knew nothing about his finances. Testifying in Spanish, she told Houston jurors she couldn’t read the insurance policies and didn’t know what they were when she found them, because they were in English.
If a Mexico City businessman faked his death in 2016 to steal $26 million from two U.S. life-insurance giants, he’s done a remarkable job of lying low since, the lawyer
A private investigator testified Wednesday that two people at a Mexico City office where he was searching for the supposedly dead Eduardo Rosendi, flashing Rosendi’s photo, told him the man in the photo worked there as an accountant – and one had seen him earlier that day. The investigator was a critical witness in the third day of a federal trial in which a $26 million insurance payout is in the balance – if Rosendi is not dead. But Mikal C. Watts, the beneficiary's attorney, should get his chance at cross-examination Thursday.
The plaintiff's attorney, Mikal C. Watts, on cross-examination of the insurers' lead witness, attacked his investigator's thoroughness and his conclusions as hardly indisputable.
A federal indictment in Fort Worth charges 10 people with conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud. Investigators say the labs bribed doctors to order needless tests, which were billed to Medicare and other federal health-insurance programs.
Denman Heard and Derek Merman have worked side by side on cases across the country. Their new firm, they say, will specialize in catastrophic personal-injury claims.
Randy Sorrels, the lawyer for Ulysses Cruz, his wife, and their 2 children, said they’ll consent to the $117.5 million remittitur – but will seek the full jury verdict if the other side appeals.
In sentencing 69-year-old Rudy Avila, Chief U.S. District Judge Barbara M.G. Lynn read the names of his 417 victims and the amount each lost to him.
The longtime girlfriend of a rich Houstonian who died with 4 others when his helicopter crashed claims she doesn’t owe her former lawyers any part of a multimillion-dollar settlement.
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