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.
Deliberations, which began Wednesday afternoon, are to continue Thursday morning in the federal fraud trial. The defendant, Richard Hall, is accused of running a bogus-prescription scam that cost U.S. taxpayers $55 million.
George Lock Paret, chief pharmacist at one of two Fort Worth compounding pharmacies co-owned by criminal fraud defendant Richard Hall, says he routinely modified the mixtures of ingredients in prescribed medicines to “make us more money.” Paret is one of several former associates of Hall’s testifying against his former boss in what prosecutors say was a $55 million bribery and kickback scheme to defraud federal insurance programs.
Prosecutors claim Richard Hall of Fort Worth recruited “a vast network” of marketers who signed up doctors to prescribe custom drug creams, which were billed to the U.S. government at thousands of dollars per tube.
“Defrauding the government is an affront to American taxpayers,” says Leigha Simonton, U.S. attorney in Dallas. “Defrauding the government during a pandemic — at a time when millions of hardworking entrepreneurs struggled to make payroll and rent — is pouring salt in a wound.”
In the years since Reconstruction, the Texas House of Representatives has impeached five officials. Two were convicted by the Texas Senate. The most recent was a state district judge 48 years ago. Two were acquitted, in 1893 and 1931, respectively. And now Attorney General Ken Paxton awaits his Senate trial. If convicted, he would be just the third Texas elected official removed from office by impeachment. Texas Lawbook writer Bruce Tomaso looks back to those past impeachments and what insights they might provide.
At an Austin news conference, lawyers Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell promise a protracted fight to acquit the beleaguered attorney general. They also poked fun at the lead impeachment prosecutors, Rusty Hardin and Dick DeGuerin, saying the pair were introduced earlier by the Texas House “like they were the homecoming king and queen.”
At a Capitol news conference, the two lawyers said they were stunned by the evidence against the suspended attorney general. “It’s 10 times worse than what has been public,” Hardin said.
On the eve of trial, the automaker reached an out-of-court settlement with a Highland Park woman who claimed she bought a used i3, an electric hatchback, that BMW knew was defective.
After hitting BMW North America and Hedrick Kring Bailey with $773K in sanctions for ‘frivolous and groundless’ efforts to delay discovery in a woman’s suit over the sale of a defective used BMW, Judge Eric V. Moyé informed the automaker the case will go to trial June 6.
In a scathing order, Dallas County District Judge Eric V. Moyé said BMW and Hedrick Kring Bailey have used "delay, misdirection, and both rejected as well as frivolous arguments to make litigation unfairly difficult and expensive for its opponents."
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