Ethics
« Previous Entries Next Entries »Pants-Gate Update
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007ATTENTION! ATTENTION!
The man pictured below is a massive fuckstain.
If you see this man please to not attempt to engage him in conversation as he is considered to be a massive fuckstain and extremely stupid.
Just kick him in the nuts.
Rob posted earlier about this and I just had to follow up.
“Judge” Roy L. Person Jr. broke down in court yesterday. Over a pair of pants. I’m going to actually hand this over to the Washington post for a moment. I’ve bolded the more amusing bits.
Before trial began yesterday in the case of the D.C. judge who sued his neighborhood dry cleaners after they lost his pants, the most extraordinary fact was Roy Pearson’s demand for $65 million in damages.
That was before Pearson, an administrative law judge, broke down while testifying about the emotional pain of having the cleaners give him the wrong pants. It was before an 89-year-old woman in a wheelchair told of being chased out of the cleaners by an angry owner. And it was before she compared the owners of Custom Cleaners in open court to Nazis.
“I knew it: It’s all my fault,” said the reporter from German television who was sitting next to me.
The global import of Pearson v. Custom Cleaners was evident from the start. The courtroom was packed with members of the Korean Dry Cleaners Association and reporters from print and broadcast outlets in at least five countries. The guy from the tort reform lobby handed out bright green buttons protesting the $65 million “pantsuit.” The gent from Fox TV sported neon-color paisley pants.
And Pearson, who by his account has spent more than 1,400 hours preparing his case, arrived in a black pinstripe suit. I hope he won’t sue me if I mention that the pants could have used a pressing.
“Never before in recorded history have a group of defendants engaged in such misleading and unfair business practices,” Pearson said in his opening statement. You don’t get a lot of firsts in recorded history in D.C. Superior Court, though I should add that Marion Barry was in the building for his day in traffic court, and the pants suit easily outdrew the ex-mayor-for-life.
The “willful and malicious conduct” Pearson described consisted of this: In 2005, Pearson was starting his new job as a judge and therefore needed to start wearing suits again after a couple of years of unemployment. He brought five suits in for alterations because he’d put on 20 pounds and needed to have the pants let out. Four suits came back fine. One came back without the pants.
Pearson says the Chung family — Korean immigrants who came here from the charcoal factories of Seoul in 1992 and now own three cleaners, including the one a short walk from Pearson’s place in the Fort Lincoln section of Northeast — had no intention of living up to the sign in their shop that said “Satisfaction Guaranteed.” Therefore, Pearson said, he had no choice but to take on “the awesome responsibility” of suing the Chungs on behalf of every resident of the District of Columbia.
Judge Judith Bartnoff went to remarkable lengths to try to keep Pearson moving along while disabusing him of the notion that he represented either the tens of thousands of people who have used Custom Cleaners or the half million people in Washington who might theoretically be at risk of being dissatisfied with the shop’s service.
From the start, Pearson kept referring to himself as “we,” as if he were representing everyone in town. Bartnoff was having none of it: “Mr. Pearson, you are not a ‘we.’ You are an ‘I.’ “
Defense lawyer Christopher Manning depicted Pearson as a bitter, wildly litigious man who emerged from a recent divorce with financial difficulties and who held a deep grudge against the Chungs stemming from a previous run-in. Back in 2002, after the cleaners lost another pair of his pants, Pearson was compensated with a check for $150. The Chungs then tried to ban him from their shop, but Pearson implored them to let him come back because Custom was the only cleaners within walking distance of his home, and he doesn’t have a car.
Pearson presented a series of witnesses who told of unhappy experiences at Custom. Their satisfaction, they said, was hardly guaranteed. But every one of Pearson’s witnesses told the defense that in fact, they would have been entirely satisfied if they had been given credit for free cleaning or compensation in the amount of the value of their damaged or lost garment. Most of the witnesses said they’d generally had good experiences at Custom, and not one of Pearson’s witnesses said anything about deserving millions of dollars.
Witnesses depicted Soo Chung, the mom in the Mom and Pop operation, as someone who was pleasant and professional — until a dispute arose, at which point she told several of the customers that it was they who had brought in damaged goods, not the shop that had caused any problem with an article of clothing.
Grace Hewell, a retired congressional staffer, said Jin Chung, Soo’s husband, “chased me out of the store” when she complained that her suit pants “looked like they had been washed” and no longer fit properly. “At 89, I’m not ready to be chased,” she said. “But I was in World War II as a WAC, so I think I can take care of myself. Having lived in Germany and knowing the people who were victims of the Nazis, I thought he was going to beat me up. I thought of what Hitler had done to thousands of Jews.”
After questioning eight witnesses, Pearson spent two hours telling his own story, but as he came to the part about when Soo Chung finally told him she had found the missing pants, the tale of the $10.50 alteration that went awry proved to be too much.
“These are not my pants,” Pearson recalled telling Chung when she handed him a pair of gray pants with cuffs. “I have in my adult life, with one exception, never worn pants with cuffs.”
“And she said, ‘These are your pants.’ ”
Pearson paused. He struggled to breathe deeply. He could not continue. Pearson blurted a request for a break, stood up, turned around and walked out of the courtroom, tears dripping from his full and reddened eyes.
When he returned, he called that moment when Chung offered him the wrong pants “a Twilight Zone experience,” and again, he welled up and had to halt the proceedings. Pearson wanted to submit the remainder of his testimony in writing, but Judge Bartnoff wouldn’t hear of it.
The trial is expected to end today. Pearson has reduced his claim to $54 million. But he told the judge that he also wants to be awarded attorney’s fees, even though he represents himself. He would like to be paid at a rate of between $390 and $425 an hour.
Earlier in the day, Pearson called his 30-year-old son as a witness. The son testified that he was surprised that his father had filed this suit. “I know you don’t like litigation at all,” he said.
Boy, that is a lot of bold text but since the bolded bits are so damn funny I couldn’t help myself.
Who does this cockholster think he is pretending to represent all of D.C.? Hell if he wants to represent them all let him. It should just mean that if he wins he should have to split it evenly will every god damned resident.
Oh look, here is the record of his divorce. It is a fun read I’ll tell ya. The one bit that stood out for me is:
The trial court found that husband was substantially responsible for “excessive driving
up” of the legal costs by “threatening both wife and her lawyer with disbarment [sic],” and
creating unnecessary litigation. Consequently, it awarded wife $12,000 in legal fees to be paid
by husband.
Looks like he has been an unreasonable fuckstick for a while now. Hey junior, being a “judge” does not entitle you to abuse the system.
I Just Don’t Get It
Friday, June 8th, 2007What am I missing here?
First, Paris Hilton gets out of jail after 3 or so days of her sentence because the prison food is beneath her. Sure, she’s probably going back to jail, but that really doesn’t undermine the fact that she was, in fact, released. That decision was actually made.
Now I hear about a judge, yes a J-U-D-G-E judge, who is suing a dry-cleaner over the loss of a pair of pants.
Not unusual, you might say, but the fact of the matter is he’s suing for $54 Million. I’ll give that a chance to sink in.
$54 Million.
It’s a pair of pants.
There’s a scene in the film The Last Boy Scout where Bruce Willis makes fun of Damon Wayans’ $600 pants. I wonder what he’d say about this.
Anyway, here’s the story.
Judge Sues Dry Cleaners For $54 Million
Remember that judge who was seeking $67 million from a dry cleaners that lost his pants? Now, he’s asking for only $54 million, according to a May 30 court filing in D.C. Superior Court. (Click here for the AP story; click here and here for prior Law Blog posts.)
Roy Pearson, a D.C. administrative law judge, first sued Custom Cleaners over a pair of pants that went missing two years ago. He was seeking about $65 million under the D.C. consumer-protection laws and almost $2 million in common law claims.
He is now focusing his claims on signs in the shop that have since been removed. The suit alleges that the Chungs, the shop’s owners, committed fraud and misled consumers with signs that claimed “Satisfaction Guaranteed” and “Same Day Service.” But Chris Manning, the Chungs’ attorney, says that the fraud claim carries a “reasonable person” standard, and no reasonable person would interpret them to be an unconditional promise of satisfaction, he says.
Pearson, who is representing himself, said in an e-mail to the AP reporter that from the start, the case’s focus was based on the “false, misleading and fraudulent advertisements displayed by the Chungs.”
Skank Hilton Released
Thursday, June 7th, 2007Ok, this idiot drives drunk. More than once. Gets arrested and sentenced to 45 days. Serves 5 days, and is released due to “medical reasons.”
WTF?
Sure, now she’s under house arrest. Big fucking deal. She gets to hang out at home for a month.
She’s a God damn worhtless human being. She never did anything to deserve to be famous, yet people adore this piece of trash.
Now, she’s walking proof that the law doesn’t apply to celebrities. Our society is so obsessed with these idiots that we let them get away with whatever they want. Oh, poor Paris Hilton. She’s too good for prison.
She’s sick, so fucking what? If it were anyone else, they’d have been sent to the prison infirmary.
God damn it, this pisses me off. Here, read the article from CNN.com:
LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — Paris Hilton was let out of jail Thursday morning, days after she began serving what was to have been a 45-day sentence for violating probation, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said.
Hilton must wear a monitoring bracelet and remain at her home for another 40 days, said sheriff’s department spokesman Steve Whitmore.
Medical considerations “played a part” in the decision to offer Hilton home confinement for the remainder of her sentence, Whitmore said. (Watch Whitmore detail Hilton’s deal
)
He said privacy rules prohibited him from giving details about the medical issues, but celebrity Web site TMZ.com earlier quoted sources saying Hilton was refusing to eat much of the jail food served her.
Whitmore said that after “extensive consultation with medical personnel” it was decided to offer Hilton “reassignment” to home confinement, which she and her attorneys accepted. (Watch Hilton enter jail
Part of the deal was that her original sentence of 45 days, which had been reduced to 23 days if she showed good behavior behind bars, would be restored to the full length. Although she reported to the jail just before midnight Sunday and departed in the early hours of Thursday, she was given credit for five days, he said.
Whitmore said the decision to send Hilton home was made by a panel of officials in the sheriff’s department, although the judge who sentenced her was advised of the move.
Hilton was arrested on charges of drunken driving in September.
In January, she pleaded no contest to a charge of alcohol-related reckless driving. She was sentenced to three years’ probation and had her license suspended.
In February, she was caught driving on a suspended license, which later was ruled a probation violation.
Hilton entered jail Sunday after attending the MTV Movie Awards, where she answered questions from the press and was the subject of host Sarah Silverman’s jokes.
This Motherfucker Has Gone Too Far.
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007So it seems like some fuckwit or fuckwits in Orcas Island, Washington decided it would be a good idea to burn the flags that were placed on the graves of veterans for Memorial Day and replace them with flags of their own design.
Flags bearing swastikas.
Members of the American Legion replaced the flags but the fuckstick(s) returned to repeat the stunt on Memorial Day.
Seriously, what the fuck is this shit?
You want to burn a flag in protest, go for it. As far as I’m concerned it is well within your right to do so. Taking the flags off of the grave of a veteran is something completely different. Sure you might not like this war, or any wars for that matter, but how in the hell is this helping your cause? Unless your cause is just to be an asshole. Shit like this just puts you in the same group as Fred Phelps and his gaggle of douchenozzles.
I spent a (very) short time in the army and I never saw any action so when I’m gone don’t put a flag on my grave for Memorial Day because I don’t deserve it. I have friends that, if they go before me, I will be there to put a flag on their graves. Some of these friends disagree with the current war but that is not what the flag is for. It is to remember the person and what they did, not to glorify the war they fought in.
A Matter of Life and Death
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007At first it seemed like a good story to tell my friends. Then, I got to thinking about it. The more I thought about it, the more guilt that started to build up inside me.
I was on the Blue Line yesterday coming back from a downtown job interview. It was late morning, so there were quite a few people on the train, so I grabbed the first seat I could find. The seat was one next to a black woman, who appeared to be in her late 40’s to early 50’s, and she didn’t look well. She was wearing a dark winter jacket and her shoes were off and next to her feet on the floor. SHe was slumped forward, shaking and muttering something unintelligible.
I figured she was just another homeless crack addict, riding the bus to get her next fix, and I proceeded to ignore her. I sat on the left edge of my seat so as to give her room to do her shaking and fidgeting without invading my personal space. At one point she looked at me and said, “SHe done it!” pointing to a 20-something professional woman sitting in front of me.
I ignored that, too, and continued to stare off into space. I was trying to ignore everything that was happening on the train around me, the common mindset of the city commuter.
Then it happened. I was about three stops from home when this woman started shaking violently, almost a convulsion. It went on for a couple of minutes until she collapsed head-first into my lap. At first, I just sat there in shock. The, I lifted her off of me and leaned her against the window. She didn’t appear to be breathing, but I figured at first that I just couldn’t see her breathe because of the bulkiness of her winter jacket.
She didn’t move at all before I got to my stop where I got off.
Now, I feel as though I should have done something to help her. What if she died? I could be ethically responsible for it. Not because I killed her, but because I did nothing to help her. I was more interested in myself than helping out my fellow human being.
It could also be argued that there was nothing I could have done that could have saved her. She made her own choices in life that led her to that point. It was not my responsibility. There were a lot of other people on te train who witnessed this as well, and none of them made a move to do anything. We could all be held responsible for this woman’s apparent death.
Then again, she could have just passed out. She could have fallen asleep. I’ll never know what the fate of this woman was, because I just got up and left her.
« Previous Entries Next Entries »
