Legal News

Texas Supreme Court Justice Ensnared By Arson Case

By Peter Lattman

Meet David Medina, one of the nine justices on the Supreme Court of Texas. Yesterday, he and his wife were charged in an arson fire that destroyed their suburban Houston home last summer. Today, the DA’s office plans to seek dismissal of the indictments against them.

That’s the confusing information given to the media by Terry Yates, the Medinas’ lawyer. Here the story from the NYT.

According to Yates, the grand jury had voted the indictments prematurely over the prosecutors’ objection. DA Charles Rosenthal, who also made not-so-great Law Blog headlines recently, has not made a statement on the case, but the Dallas Morning News quoted him saying, “We don’t feel there’s sufficient evidence to proceed,.”

Justice Medina (Southwest Texas State — Go Bobcats!, South Texas Law) has not commented on the case either. The Medinas’ $300,000 home in Spring, Texas, was destroyed by a fire on June 28. Investigators detected arson, and also noted the family had been having financial problems. In a November interview with the AP, Yates talked about his clients’ financial problems, noting that Medina, who makes $150,000 a year as a judge, took a “tremendous” pay cut from what he earned as a private lawyer. He was an in-house lawyer at Cooper Industries.

Our Favorite Law Blog Story About Terry Yates: We’ve often asked ourselves, “How do white-collar defendants find their lawyers?” In the case of Jamie Olis, the former Dynegy executive serving a prison term for fraud, he found Yates — part of a four-lawyer Houston boutique — after his wife saw a picture of him in the Houston Chronicle getting kissed by a client he had successfully defended. The picture, lucky for us, is featured on Yates’s Web site.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 18, 2008 (boomark / email).