Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
In closing arguments, Laura Benitez Geisler of Dallas, the lawyer for Terry Bevill, tells a federal jury he deserves at least $33 million because he was wrongfully fired and arrested for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. The jury enters its second day of deliberations Thursday morning.
After six days of testimony, closing arguments in Terry Bevill’s wrongful-termination lawsuit are scheduled for Wednesday morning before U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of Sherman.
The Lanier Law Firm represented a mesothelioma patient who lawyers said is the first person to claim that the medical procedure talc pleurodesis led to his deadly cancer. Cimbar Performance Minerals failed to warn its buyers of the risk of asbestos in its products, which was contained in a product used in the plaintiff’s medical procedure, lawyers said.
Jeff Fletcher, Wood County’s former state district judge, joins fellow defendants in Terry Bevill’s wrongful-termination suit in denying there was any conspiracy to punish Bevill for saying in 2017 that a friend couldn’t get a fair trial in the East Texas county.
Fired Quitman police captain Terry Bevill’s wrongful-termination case in Sherman could go to a federal jury as soon as midweek.
At the conclusion of Friday’s court session before U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III, Bevill’s lawyers said they have two witnesses yet to call, and will probably rest on Tuesday.
The other two defendants in Terry Bevill’s wrongful-termination suit are listed as potential witnesses in the ongoing jury trial before U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III in Sherman.
Had it been up to him, Ex-Chief Kelly Cole said, his second-in-command “probably would have gotten couple of days off” for violating policy by signing an affidavit stating that he didn’t think his friend could get a fair trial in Wood County.
Terry Bevill, the fired officer, testifies that he was nearly ruined in the seven years since he signed an affidavit saying he didn’t think a friend could get a fair trial in Wood County. Defense counsel say he was terminated not out of retribution, but because he violated Quitman city policies.
The Texas Lawbook visited with two Haynes Boone attorneys playing key roles about the major hurdles ahead, how TXSE became a client, and the downstream effects of a national exchange in Dallas for the Texas legal market.
The overstuffed but strangely compelling 1979 legal drama starring Al Pacino begins with the voice of a child reading the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a sardonic start to a barbed, furious, free-swinging indictment of a legal system that, the movie suggests, has gone off the rails. Up is down, black is white, left is right.
A lone Baltimore defense attorney, Pacino’s Arthur Kirkland, is among the only people upset by what he sees. And make no mistake, he’s plenty upset.
Nine days after Southern District of Texas Chief Bankruptcy Judge Eduardo Rodriguez conducted a show cause hearing in a sealed courtroom, he has determined that his former colleague, David Jones, acted in bad faith when he consented to an interview with lawyers from Jackson Walker and Rusty Hardin’s firm. The ruling comes in a case where Judge Rodriguez must determine whether Jackson Walker should be forced to return about $13 million in legal fees earned in bankruptcy cases before former Judge David Jones.
Dean Omar Branham Shirley has obtained three jury verdicts this year against Johnson & Johnson over allegations its baby powder contained cancer-causing asbestos. Another trial ended early when the parties settled. Johnson & Johnson has decried the verdicts and maintained its cosmetic talc products did not cause cancer.
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