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.
A state appellate court rejected San Antonio’s claim of exorbitant pricing by ERCOT during Winter Storm Uri, but did not address the key question of whether the operator of the Texas power grid has sovereign immunity from lawsuits.
The verdict by a federal jury in Florida is the largest to date in an ongoing wave of suits alleging that 3M sold the U.S. government faulty protective equipment, resulting in hearing damage to thousands of military personnel.
The penalty, the second largest of its kind in U.S. history, ends a federal investigation that began after two nurses at Clements University Hospital were found dead from opioid overdoses.
Scores of wrongful death, personal injury and property damage cases are pending against ERCOT since last February’s crippling winter storm. None of those cases can move forward until the appellate courts decide whether ERCOT is a state governmental agency protected from litigation under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. Two Texas courts of appeals — the Fourth Court in San Antonio and the Fifth Court in Dallas — recently heard oral arguments from lawyers on both sides of the issue. The Texas Lawbook has the details.
Houston trial lawyers say Judge Sylvia A. Matthews is smart, fair, well-prepared, smart, organized, hard-working, smart, efficient, decisive … and smart. Those traits well serve Matthews, an experienced commercial litigator and trial judge, as she presides over pretrial matters in more than 150 (and counting) lawsuits stemming from one of the deadliest, costliest disasters in Texas history – Winter Storm Uri, the icy blizzard that paralyzed Texas and its electric grid last February.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Houston rejects claim by defendants that "through no fault of their own" they can’t access needed records and witnesses because of political upheaval in the South American nation.
A hearing Friday on plaintiff lawyer Randy Sorrels’s motion for entry of judgment dealt only with relatively minor calculations of a just sum – an indication that both sides expect District Judge Ravi Sandill to uphold in whole or large part last week’s jury verdict on behalf of Ulysses Cruz, who sued Allied Aviation Fueling Co. of Houston.
If anything, the noted Houston plaintiffs’ lawyer claims, jurors should have given Ulysses Cruz, a paralyzed airport service worker, more for the lifetime of pain and anguish he faces after being hit by a van on a tarmac at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. And Sorrels believes the verdict exceeding one-third of a billion dollars will survive appeal.
The dispute, which stems from emergency pricing for electricity imposed during February’s devastating Winter Storm Uri, could have far-ranging implications for other electric providers who were forced to pay up to $9,000 per megawatt hour – 300 times the normal rate – during the winter storm.
A federal jury in U.S. District Court Judge Alan Albright's court ruled this week that Texas-based Profectus Technology failed to prove that Google infringed on Profectus’s patent for a “digital picture display frame,” an internet visual interface, in developing the Google Nest Hub.
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