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.
“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."
The ruling is the latest — but surely not the last — in an 11-year litigation war over the operation of a gold mine in Sinaloa, Mexico.
A Dallas County jury on Wednesday awarded more than $860 million to the parents of a woman killed in 2019 when a 200-foot steel crane toppled onto her apartment building from an adjacent construction site. The verdict exceeded the $700 million sought by plaintiff’s lawyers from Arnold & Itkin.
The consent order is part of a nationwide investigation in which Nexo Capital Inc. agreed to pay $22.5 million in fines related to the sale of unregistered securities.
© Copyright 2026 The Texas Lawbook
The content on this website is protected under federal Copyright laws. Any use without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.