Ohio

Mailing it in

Got work to do, so let’s throw out some stuff I ran across:

Well, no, it doesn’t always stay in Vegas.  With a hat tip to Overlawyered comes this story of Arelia Taveras, an up-and-coming New York lawyer — she’d worked on the 9/11 lawsuits — whose career crashed upon revelations that she’d stolen about $100,000 from various clients to feed her gambling addiction.  As I’ve mentioned before, we lawyers don’t exactly overexert ourselves preaching personal responsibility — telling  a potential client that it’s his own damned fault for putting his hand into a running lawnmower isn’t going to put food on anyone’s table — and Taveras isn’t an exception to that:  she’s suing the casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas for $20 million, claiming that they should have known of her addiction and cut her off. 

“They knew I was going for days without eating or sleeping,” Taveras, 37, said. “I would pass out at the tables. They had a duty of care to me.”

Yeah, I mean, it’s not like it’s her fault or anything.

The War on Candy.  New Haven residents can sleep easier tonight.  Despite being an honors student, 8th-grader Michael Sheridan was stripped of his class vice-presidency and suspended for three days for buying (pick one:  heroin/marijuana/ritalin/none of the above) at school.

The answer?  None of the above.  He bought a little bag of Skittles.  It turns out that candy sales in school were banned five years ago, this story tells us, ”as part of a districtwide school wellness policy.”

The most pathetic part of the article is this line:  “[Sheridan] says he didn?t realize his candy purchase was against the rules, but he did notice the student selling the Skittles on Feb. 26 was being secretive.”  No wonder she was being secretive.  If he got a three-day suspension (later reduced to one) for buying candy, what did the seller get?  Probably this.

You know, we baby boomers look at what goes on in schools nowadays and like to say, “If I’d come home and told my dad I’d done something like that, he’d have beaten the tar out of me.”  Well, that’s true, but on the other hand, I imagine if I’d come home and told him I’d been suspended for buying a bag of candy in school, he might have gone up there and beaten the tar out of the principal.  And rightly so.  This is just nuts.

Reasons you don’t want to go to jail:  “Compassion” isn’t part of the skill set that they’re looking for in corrections officers.

Full post as published by The Briefcase on March 13, 2008 (boomark / email).