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.
“If I sent him 25 prescriptions, within 20 or 30 minutes, they were signed,” the onetime employee of Sunrise Medical Inc. of Florida told jurors in the Dallas trial of Dr. David M. Young.
Dr. David M. Young of Fredericksburg, Texas, is accused of electronically prescribing orthotic devices and genetic tests for thousands of patients he never met. U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr told the 14 jurors and alternates chosen Tuesday that the trial is expected to take about two weeks.
Hung juries, in general, are infrequent. One study estimates they occur in about 6 percent of all cases that go to trial. When it happens, it’s usually in state criminal cases where someone’s life or freedom is at stake, not in highly technical disputes over a patent.
In lieu of closing arguments, the company and the U.S. government agreed to file post-trial briefs with Chief Judge David C. Godbey of the Northern District of Texas, who presided over the weeklong tax dispute trial stemming from ExxonMobil’s natural-gas mining venture with Qatar.
In a bench trial before Chief Judge David C. Godbey of the Northern District of Texas, the oil giant claims the government erred by rejecting, for tax purposes, its “partnership” with the government of Qatar in a huge natural gas project.
“I make no excuse for my actions,” Connie Jo Clampitt of Dallas, one of four people to plead guilty in the healthcare fraud case, tells U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr.
According to an SEC order, employees of Senvest Management, which oversees $3 billion in assets, repeatedly discussed company business in personal texts and other “off-channel” platforms in violation of federal securities laws.
Joseph DeLeon, who helped former FBI agent Bill Stone cheat a Granbury woman out of more than $750,000, apologized and said he, too, was a victim of the grift. But U.S. District Judge Ada Brown was having none of it.
Federal investigators said Anthony Floyd of Kennedale, Texas, would tweak tax returns he prepared for clients, causing the government to overpay refunds, which he then pocketed.
The unusual admonition from the bench came on the third and final day of testimony in Justin Pfeiffer’s breach-of-contract suit against Berg & Androphy, his former employer.
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