While writing a post for True/Slant about child porn enthusiasts who used a private social network to trade their kiddie pics, we stumbled across the website of Lindeman, Alvarado, & Frye. The Texas criminal defense firm has a kiddie porn practice group.
We think the photo accompanying the description of the group is a little off…. UPDATE: Other practice groups include disturbing images, as pointed out by commenters.
Portland, Tennessee high school math teach Sandy Binkley was convicted of statutory rape back in September. The 37-year-old woman had sex with a 17-year-old student in a locker room.
Binkley argued that the 17-year-old student raped her. She gave an interview to Tennessee News Channel 5 before her trial:
“There was one incident with one student – who was a month away from being 18. He was bigger than me and he forced himself on me,” said Binkley. “He came into the room and forced himself upon me.”
The jury didn’t buy it.
On Friday, Binkley was sentenced. And man, the judge essentially put her behind bars and threw away the key. The Tennessean reports:
A former Portland High School teacher convicted of having sex with her underage teacher’s aide has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.
District Attorney Ray Whitley said Sandy Binkley “got what she had coming to her.”
“(Judge Dee Gay) gave her the maximum sentence and that’s what she deserved,” Whitley said.
The woman got 12 years — the maximum sentence — for having sex with a 17-year-old? Really? Does that make sense to everybody here?
Binkley’s lawyers (obviously) feel the judge went a little overboard. Details after the jump.
Both California and Texas are thinking about officially deep-sixing sex between lawyers and their clients.
The California State Bar Association is considering a change to the professional rules of conduct to “prohibit sex with clients unless they are spouses or the relations preceded the lawyer-client relationship,” according to The Recorder. The Texas Supreme Court is suggesting the same type of thing in the Lone Star state, according to the Texas Lawyer.
The American Bar Association generally frowns on lawyers getting into their clients’ briefs. The argument against taking discovery to the bedroom is that sexy time undermines an attorney’s ability to give objective advice and to keep his or her interest from limiting that of the client.
On the other hand, regulating bed behavior potentially violates a lawyer’s privacy and the right to freedom of association.
ATL readers, we turn the debate over to you. Is it okay for lawyers to be their clients’ master debaters and masturbators? Moving beyond the theoretical, how many of you have actually had to grapple with this? Take our polls and hear some stories, after the jump.
English couple Caroline and Steve Cartwright have a healthy sex life. But it doesn’t sound healthy. According to BBC News, their love-making sounds to neighbors like “murder” and has been described as “unnatural.” So prudish, those Brits.
Neighbors complained the noise kept them up all night, making them oversleep in the morning and arrive late to work.
Apparently Caroline Cartwright is the noisy one in the couple. She was convicted of “breaching a noise abatement notice.” She appealed the conviction:
She argued she had a right to “respect for her private and family life” under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act.
So do the British courts respect a woman’s right to be vocal about her pleasure?
We’ve mentioned Corri Fetman before, mainly because she’s a lawyer who has posed for Playboy. But today she’s making news that doesn’t have anything to do with her boobs. The Chicago Tribune reports:
The Chicago divorce lawyer who stirred up controversy with a racy billboard for her law firm and later bared it all for Playboy is now being sued by the magazine.
Playboy alleges in a suit filed Monday that Corri Fetman is trying to steal the phrase “Lawyer of Love” that it coined for an advice column Fetman briefly wrote for the magazine’s Web site.
Alright, today’s Corri Fetman’s news is tangentially related to her boobs.
Fetman isn’t one to receive service from Playboy lying down. In fact she fired the first shot at Playboy.
Details after the jump.
I have criticized U.S. News for caring about the number of books available in a law school library. I’ve criticized the Thomas Cooley law school rankings for caring about the size of a law school library.
Clearly, I don’t know what a law school library should be used for. But students at UC Davis do.
We have another episode in the saga of Deidre Dare, one of our favorite laid-off lawyers. She was an attorney in Allen & Overy’s Russia office until she penned typed a salacious online novel about her expat adventures, which featured lots of drinking, sex, drugs, donkeys, and dwarves. After the firm let her go, she sued.
Dare’s still in Moscow, where she writes an often controversial column for the Moscow News called sExpat. The latest reveals that Deidre likes it rough:
Anyone who has spent even five minutes in bed with me knows that I have a strong proclivity for S&M. My experience in the area ranges from the mild (spanking) to the extreme (ball gags, golden showers and the like), according to how much experience my partner has and what he or she likes.
The column goes on to praise Russia’s abusive men. Dare writes: “If you’re hanging out with real men and you’re a little slutty, you’re going to get hit. Period.” Roll On Friday photoshops A&O’s chairman into being a “real man” here.
Ed. note: We at Above The Law do not condone physical violence against women. We do, however, condone violence against the commenter ShaFeef.
In a previous column, Dare said money was tight and suggested that prostitution might be a way out of her money woes. That might have led to more hitting than even Deidre likes. Luckily, she’s come up with a different way to make money. She’s written another book. Its title, fittingly, is SLUT.
When ex-associates sue their former firms, a fun time is had by all — with the possible exception of the litigants. Dirty laundry is aired, often for the amusement of onlookers. Here are some classics:
Charlene Morisseau v. DLA Piper (African-American female associate filed $250 million lawsuit against her former firm; firm accused plaintiff of rudeness and insubordination, e.g., throwing a partner out of her office).
Today’s Lawsuit of the Day, Alan Levy v. Sedgwick Detert Moran Arnold LLP (PDF), is a similar suit. Alan Levy (pictured), a former associate at Sedgwick, alleges that his employment was terminated on the basis of disability — to wit, severe depression and a breakdown, brought on in part by the abusive treatment he received at the hands of a partner, Scott Haworth.
So, what was the alleged abuse inflicted upon Levy by Haworth?
Dear ATL,
Should I be paranoid about pictures from Halloween being posted on Facebook? Some people don’t have their profiles set to private, and I’m worried it will come up in a Facebook or Google search (eek!). Maybe I’m being too paranoid? I don’t know.
Planning on Going as a Slutty Nurse
Dear Planning on Going as a Slutty Nurse,
What’s so amazing about Halloween is that it’s the one day a year when you get a glimpse into the inner workings of other peoples’ minds. Everyone has an inner costume, and Halloween Purim is when it’s socially acceptable to wear it outwardly. There is a kernel of truth behind every disguise, which is why Prince Harry’s Nazi costume a few years ago was so disturbing. You can’t possibly wear a Nazi costume unless you’re at least 1/4th Nazi. In Halloween, Veritas.
Your fear of Halloween pictures showing up on Facebook really sounds as if you’re afraid of others seeing the real, slutty nurse you. A vixen. A healer. An unoriginal. This year, I considered going as Sheryl Weinstein or Blanket. Surely those costumes speak volumes.
As I’ve said repeatedly in these Pls Hndle posts (we’ve been at this for over a year, btw!), you have to be yourself, no matter what the cost. That’s why I left the law. That’s why I subscribe to Dog Fancy. If you want to be a slutty nurse, be one, Facebook and Google footprint be damned. Live free or die hard.
Happy Halloween!
Your friend,
Marin
A high school principal in Indiana doesn’t want slutty-seeming students playing sports, reports Courthouse News Service.
Two sophomores attended a summer slumber party with other girls from Churubusco High School. They did what all high school girls do at slumber parties (at least in the imagination of high school boys). From their complaint [PDF]:
During the sleepover the girls took pictures of themselves pretending to kiss or lick a large multi-colored novelty lollipop shaped phallus that they had purchased as well as pictures of themselves in lingerie with dollar bills stuck in their clothes as well as other pictures.
Ed. note: See this comment. Should that read “phallus-shaped lollipop”?
The girls later posted these photos on MySpace. Someone among their MySpace “friends” printed the pics and gave them to the principal. The principal decided the girls had violated the school’s code of conduct and suspended them from all extracurricular activities, including athletics, for the entire school year.
The ACLU thinks the principal is a sucker, and has stepped in to help the girls sue their school.
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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While writing a post for True/Slant about child porn enthusiasts who used a private social network to trade their kiddie pics, we stumbled across the website of Lindeman, Alvarado, & Frye. The Texas criminal defense firm has a kiddie porn practice group.
