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.
The co-owner of two Fort Worth pharmacies testified in federal court that Quintan Cockerell made “millions a month” by steering doctors to send in thousands of prescriptions for costly compounded medicines.
The appellate court praised U.S. District Judge Karen Gren Scholer for casting light on the NFL retirement plan’s “disregard of players’ rights” and its “lopsided system aggressively stacked against disabled players.” But, it said, former running back Michael Cloud was not entitled, under the plan’s rules, to the increase in benefits that Judge Scholer ordered.
In a cease-and-desist order, state regulators bar BigWhale.io and two individuals based in the United Arab Emirates from offering unregistered, deceptive securities to Texans.
An appellate panel rejects every ground raised by seven convicted defendants in one of the biggest medical fraud cases in Texas history.
The radio station’s owners sued the two broadcast celebrities, accusing them of violating their noncompete agreements by starting a sports-talk podcast shortly after quitting in July. U.S. District Judge Karen Gren Scholer, presiding over the case, repeatedly encouraged to two sides to resolve their differences.
The league’s retirement plan is appealing a Dallas federal judge’s 2022 ruling in favor of former running back Michael Cloud, who said he was denied the benefits he deserved after concussions and other injuries cut his playing career short. The judge wrote that Cloud’s case fits a pattern by the pension plan of nickel-and-diming retired players “suffering from the devastating effects of severe head trauma.”
After a daylong evidentiary hearing, U.S. District Judge Karen Gren Scholer said the radio station’s owners failed to show they would suffer irreparable harm if the new podcast by Dan McDowell and Jake Kemp continues until December, when a civil trial is scheduled to determine whether the two violated their noncompete agreements with KTCK "The Ticket."
In an ongoing case involving numerous lawsuits and counterclaims, a jury in the court of U.S. District Judge Alan D. Albright finds that Halliburton did not prove its patents for electronic fracking of oil and gas wells were infringed upon.
Lawyers for both sides told U.S. District Judge Karen Gren Scholer they’d like to resolve a lawsuit accusing the two sports-talk hosts of violating a noncompete agreement by launching a sports podcast after leaving the radio station. “I am very confident you’ll work out a deal,” the judge said after conferring in chambers with the parties and counsel.
An eight-page opinion by a Fifth Circuit panel cites “several instances of inappropriate behavior” by Finn, a former state district judge, including “twice failing to show up for a client’s sentencing hearing.”
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