It’s been two years to the day since a group of kids, aged 12-15, shoved 19-year-old Octavius Lanier into a moving DART train while trying to rob him of his cell phone at MLK Station. Lanier, who was on his way home from a doctor’s appointment, was dragged for about…
For David Tran, October 29 was a very good day. He beat a drunk-driving rap he picked up in Arlington three years earlier, when he was 17 years old and blew a .095 into the Intoxilyzer — just a shade over the .08 legal limit. The offense could be expunged…
If a same-sex marriage happens outside of Texas, but no law in Texas was there to recognize it, did the marriage ever even happen? Earlier this year, a state senator asked Attorney General Greg Abbott to weigh in on the question in light of all the same-sex couples employed by…
Casting Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott as a union buster isn’t tough to envision. At least that’s the narrative the Texas State Troopers Association is pushing in a recent lawsuit filed in federal court. It argues Abbott and the Department of Public Safety are bent on “breaking apart a public…
It’s not every man who could do what Paul Green did. Last year, first in a lawsuit and then on the local news, he came forward and admitted that he’d peed his pants. Granted, Green had a perfectly legit medical condition the precipitated the episode, but still. It’s not a…
The City of Red Oak, about 15 minutes due south of Dallas, never really explained why Police Chief Craig Rudolph abruptly resigned this summer after six years on the job. Officials did, however, immediately appoint a special committee to review potential cases of racial profiling and race relations within the…
This spring, Mike Bishop, an irascible former chemical engineer, filed a pro se lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the permit it issued for the Oklahoma/Texas leg of the Keystone oil pipeline. On Wednesday, at Bishop’s request, a federal clerk issued an entry of default against the…
Thanks in large part to a series of freak snow-and-ice storms leading up to the game, North Texas made a shambles of its first ever Super Bowl-hosting opportunity in February 2011. Canceled flights, snarled traffic, an overbooked stadium, sheets of ice falling from the roof of Cowboys Stadium — it…
The case of Jeffrey and Henry Buck, the gay Dallas couple who married in Massachusetts in 2006 before filing for divorce in Dallas two years later, proved a couple things. One was that gay married couples, just like straight married couples, can fall out of love and decide it’s best…
Last April, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued enforcement guidance No. 915.002, more commonly referred to as the “Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records in Employment Decisions Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Few people paid attention. One of those who did was Texas Attorney General…
The aftermath of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling last week reinstating the requirement that doctors performing abortions in Texas have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic was swift and sweeping. By the next morning, a third of the state’s abortion clinics had closed…
Most of Texas’ sweeping anti-abortion law has already gone into effect. The ban on the procedure after 20 weeks post-fertilization, the requirement that clinics meet the standards laid out for ambulatory surgical center, the mandatory reliance on outdated FDA guidelines on abortion-inducing drugs–all scooted from Governor Perry’s desk to reality…
Since the Texas Legislature made online solicitation of a minor a crime in 2005, it’s been used to lock up any number of gymnastics coaches, teachers, as well as plenty of non-educators caught digitally cruising for sex with underage kids. Today, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled unanimously that…
On October 3, a few weeks after celebrating their 16th anniversary as a couple, Vic Holmes and Mark Phariss of Plano walked into the Bexar County Clerk’s Office to apply for a marriage license. Their request was was denied, as they knew it would be. Same-sex marriage is still banned…
U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel never intended to wade into the abortion wars. He made that much clear in the preamble to his ruling, handed down today, in Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit over Texas’ new abortion restrictions: Today there is no issue that divides the people of this country more than…
A piece of classic Rockwall architecture is in danger. The Cinemark movie theater, whose majestic faux-Mediterranean facade and tasteful neon signage are the apotheosis of the modern strip-center design movement, will no longer greet eastbound drivers on Interstate 30 unless a team of developers and their allies at Rockwall City…
The stakes in the two-day trial over Planned Parenthood’s challenge to Texas’ new abortion restrictions, which kicked off yesterday in Austin, are rather low. Whatever decision U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel hands down will be appealed to the 5th Circuit, then the Supreme Court, leaving the law in constitutional limbo…
More plaintiffs are lining up to take a crack at Chesapeake Energy, this time joined by the city of Fort Worth. It’s the second major North Texas city to file suit against the first player to make a big splash extracting natural gas from the Barnett Shale. Arlington brought its…
In the wake of last month’s hunt for a serial rapist targeting South Dallas, the smart money said that the first lawsuit would come from Alan Mason, the mild-mannered insurance salesman whose name and picture were plastered across the media after he was mistakenly identified by police as a “person…
After five years of litigation and a three-week trial, it took a jury all of a couple of hours to decide that, contrary to the Securities and Exchange Commission, there was no evidence that Mark Cuban was guilty of insider trading. Outside the courthouse, a newly vindicated Cuban briefed a…
True.com has always been a study in contradictions, an upstart dating website promising “a wholesome environment for courtship” while rather shamelessly inundating the Internet with ads featuring photos of scantily clad women and, in one alleged case, a dead soldier. For a time, the paradox worked. The New York Times…
Gubernatorial hopeful and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott probably won’t get a chance this time around to roll back every meaningful regulation that curbs carbon-dioxide emissions — the gas driving climate change — but he will take a shot at a significant one. The high court announced Tuesday that it…
