February 2010

Judge Young, Bulger/Flemmi and "The Government – Our Government"

February 2, 2010

U.S. Federal District Court Judge William Young has issued a lengthy decision, awarding $2.7 million in damages to the estates of three people murdered by James J. Bulger, Stephen J. Flemmi, and their associates.  Judge Young describes the story as “harrowing,” which may be an understatement. The key defendant in this case is the U.S. Government, which will foot the bill if the decision survives appeal. Here are some quotes, pulled from the opinion, which is linked in all of its gory detail at the bottom of this post.  Judge Young:inst Despite years of legal wrangling and an extensive factual record, at its core this is a very simple case. Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) agents actively protected a group of murderers from apprehension and prosecution in order to use them as informants against La Cosa Nostra. The agents did this over a span of nearly twenty years, despite being on notice that their informants were killers and would, and indeed did, continue to murder. . . . The FBI’s relationship with Flemmi dates back to 1964, when FBI agent H. Paul Rico opened Flemmi as an informant. Bulger was opened as an informant in 1971. Their recruitment as informants was not an accident. The FBI had made the prosecution of organized crime and La Cosa Nostra its top priority.  To that end, J. Edgar Hoover himself inaugurated the Top…

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Defendant Choses a New Trial in Minnesota File Sharing Case

February 1, 2010

When I wrote about the trial judge’s remittitur order in the Jamie Thomas case last week, I didn’t mention that a legal aspect of remittitur is that the plaintiff may accept it, or reject it and demand a new trial. I now understand that the plaintiff in this case has not accepted the judge’s remittitur, and has informed the court that it elects instead to proceed with a new trial. This would be the third trial in this case, since the first was set aside by the judge following verdict.  Obviously, this decision is a matter of principle, not finances, since the cost of the new trial alone will likely exceed the damages offered by the judge. However, this case, like the Tenenbaum case in Boston, is all about principle, and very little about hard, cold cash. There’s an interesting discussion of remittitur on the Copyrights and Campaigns web site, here.

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