Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
In the first edition of Litigation Roundup in 2023, the City of Dallas has to pay up in a real estate dispute, Exxon Mobil sets its sights on undoing a “windfall tax” the European Union has imposed on energy companies and the Fifth Circuit revives an excessive force case against a cop who punched a man at Hobby Airport.
If a trucking company gets its way at the Texas Supreme Court, the grief of rich plaintiffs will be worth more in wrongful death damages than the grief of poorer plaintiffs, numerous law professors and a trial attorney interest group argue.
One of five banks facing a multibillion-dollar fraud trial next month in Houston for providing financial services to Ponzi scheme perpetrator R. Allen Stanford and his investment firm has agreed to settle its part of the case for $100 million. Mississippi-based Trustmark Corporation, the parent of Trustmark National Bank, agreed late New Year’s Eve to pay the $100 million instead of facing a federal jury alongside four other banks accused of “aiding, abetting and participating in the fraudulent scheme” perpetrated by Stanford and his associates.
After eight aborted settings since 2017, the trial on bribery and kickback charges was under way in Dallas when a defense lawyer needed surgery. Rather than resuming after a monthlong delay — and making jurors work through the holidays — U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay rescheduled the trial for next September.
Senior U.S. District Judge Thad Heartfield, who served in the Eastern District of Texas, died Tuesday. He was 82.
Bankruptcy trustee James E. Cross alleges Dallas-area home flipper Skyler Aaron Cook, who has filed for bankruptcy in Arizona, defrauded investors out of at least $3 million in a scheme aided by Valliance Bank. The bank and its former executive vice president have denied the allegations.
As restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic were rolled back in 2022, courts across the state went to work adjudicating long-delayed cases. Here, in no particular order, The Texas Lawbook looks back on some of the most significant litigation Texas lawyers handled in 2022.
Senior U.S. District Judge John McBryde of Fort Worth was old school and hardcore, viewed as the epitome of a federal judge and always regarded as the lord of his courtroom. Criminal defense lawyers compared him to the hanging judges of the Wild West because of the lengthy prison sentences. But other lawyers and judges say he was a fierce protector of the rule of law and the right to trial by jury. Judge McBryde, appointed to the federal bench in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, died Sunday. He was 91.
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