Nota Bene

The Sacramento Bee reports:

The possibility that a former attorney for record producer Phil Spector may go to jail for refusing to testify in his murder trial became more likely Monday.

Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler announced with jurors absent that the state 2nd District Court of Appeal had turned down attorney Sara Caplan’s bid for a hearing on her claim of attorney-client privilege.

From The Wired Blog Network:

Life in an FBI muzzle is no fun. Two Connecticut librarians on Sunday described what it was like to be slapped with an FBI national security letter and accompanying gag order. It sounded like a spy movie or, gulp, something that happens under a repressive foreign government. Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey, librarians in Plainville, Connecticut, received an NSL to turn over computer records in their library on July 13, 2005. Unlike a suspected thousands of other people around the country, Chase, Bailey and two of their colleagues stood up to the Man and refused to comply, convinced that the feds had no right to intrude on anyone’s privacy without a court order (NSLs don’t require a judge’s approval). That’s when things turned ugly.

The four librarians under the gag order weren’t allowed to talk to each other by phone. So they e-mailed. Later, they weren’t allowed to e-mail.

In the news and around the web:

• The Washington Post reports that Jesse Davis’ body has most likely been found and her boyfriend has been arrested for double murder.
• The Sacramento Bee reports another failure by the Delgadillo family to obey the law. This time, the wife of LA’s City Attorney, Michelle Delgadillo, failed to obtain a business license and file tax returns.
• AP News reports that a California Court of Appeal has ruled on the legality of a West Hollywood ordinance banning cat declawing. You can read the court opinion here. You might guess the outcome based on how the opinion starts off: “Echoing Gandhi’s teaching that a society’s moral progress is best judged by its treatment of animals, the City of West Hollywood has banned as cruel and inhumane the practice of animal declawing unless necessary for a therapeutic purpose.”
• Overlawyered.com reports on a Dutch woman’s lawsuit for emotional distress over not winning a lottery that she never entered.
• The Sacramento Bee reports that the California Court of Appeal has stayed the contempt sentence for Phil Spector’s former lawyer who has refused to testify at his criminal trial regarding the allegation that Henry Lee mishandled evidence at the crime scene.

Justice Janice Rogers Brown on Terry Stops in drug neighborhoods:

The facts of this case lead me to wonder if Terry’s prudent constraints on police conduct have been forgotten in our frustration over city life plagued with drug trafficking and violent crime. As a result, what we are now tempted to enforce is not Terry but the rule that, in a high-crime neighborhood, being young, male, and black creates reasonable, articulable suspicion. See David A. Harris, Factors for Reasonable Suspicion: When Black and Poor Means Stopped and Frisked, 69 IND. L.J. 659 (1994). Here, four men were stopped. There was no constitutionally adequate justification for the initial confrontation. Three of them were innocent of criminal activity, but nevertheless faced the indignity of being placed against a rail and searched. Vaughan Walker testified he started walking away as soon as he saw the police car because he “didn’t feel like being harassed.” The lesson of today’s decision is clear: he has no choice.

When the ostensibly neutral principles set forth in Terry are thus applied, what was created to be a carefully outlined exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant and probable cause requirements is transformed into a general warrant—a police license to search out crime by playing the odds, relying on hunch, intuition, street smarts, and stereotypes. The odds are good, although the crimes charged are too often unrelated to the “suspicion” that led to the stop.

You can read the entire opinion in United States v. Goddard (No. 05-3080 Jun. 22, 2007) here. (Via TalkLeft).

Legal Brief Today reports:

The LA Times reports:

Civil rights attorney Stephen G. Yagman, whose relentless quarter-century crusade against police brutality drew both admiration and ire, was convicted Friday in federal court of 19 felony counts of tax evasion, bankruptcy fraud and money laundering.

The verdict, if upheld on appeal, would end the career of the combative and pioneering litigator, who brought hundreds of cases against the Los Angeles Police Department and other law enforcement agencies.

Yagman, 62, could be sentenced to more than six years in federal prison, according to Assistant U.S. Atty. Alka Sagar.

Via How Appealing.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The growing Pinkberry Inc. chain took a couple of body blows last month, when two consumer lawsuits were filed contending that the popular frozen dessert lacked the healthy bacteria cultures found in yogurt.

Making matters worse, Los Angeles-based Pinkberry can’t call its product frozen yogurt because it is mixed in the stores, not at a manufacturing plant as required by state regulations, authorities said. Pinkberry said its product contained yogurt, as well as a powder, but declined to say what else was in it.

Intrigued by the mystery of whether the product is actually yogurt, The Times sent samples of Pinkberry — along with Golden Spoon and Baskin-Robbins frozen yogurt — to a food lab for analysis.

The test results were clear: “Bottom line, they all had cultures,” said Brian Parmenter of Bodycote FPL, a food-testing lab in Portland, Ore. What’s more, they are all relatively low-calorie and fat-free. Of the three samples, Pinkberry logged the lowest calories per ounce with 26 and undetectable levels of fat.

The Metropolitan News Enterprise reports:

A man who made child support payments based on a paternity judgment later proven erroneous was not entitled to reimbursement, this district’s Court of Appeal ruled yesterday.

Affirming an order by Los Angeles Superior Court Referee Dennis Carroll, Div. Eight held that Taron Grant James could not get back the money he paid to the Los Angeles County Child Support Services Department pursuant to a factually mistaken paternity finding.

You can read the opinion in County of Los Angeles v. James (June 19, 2007 B187770) here.

Via Legal Pad comes word that the California Supreme Court has requested briefing on four questions relating to the question of gay marriage:

1. What differences in legal rights or benefits and legal obligations or duties exist under current California law affecting those couples who are registered domestic partners as compared to those couples who are legally married spouses? Please list all of the current differences of which you are aware.

(more…)

Forbes.com reports:

Wes Craven sued his neighbor Pauly Shore, alleging that water from the comedian’s home seeped down a slope and damaged the director’s property.

Craven claimed that a landslide occurred on his property in December after Shore upgraded his home with a pool, spa, landscaping and other improvements, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court.