Ambulance chasing in the public interest?

At what point does lawyerly risk-taking in the public interest become crass ambulance chasing? Before we consider today’s case — personal injury law firms hovering over last week’s late-night crash landing of Air Canada Flight 624 — let’s layer in some context. In 2013, the Halifax law firm McInnes Cooper won an $887-million class action […]

Bourque, Zahef-Bibeau, personal consequences and public accountability

There is little doubt re-watching video of Justin Bourque chillingly describe the targeted killing of their husbands, sons, fathers — “It’s sad,” Bourque explains blandly. “They might have had a wife and kids, but every soldier has a wife and kids, right?… It’s all about whose side you chose, and they chose the wrong one” […]

Lyle Howe, David Sparks and the race question

Let me begin with this. I don’t believe Lyle Howe was convicted of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman because he was black, or that “those that represent the white power structure” conspired to put down an uppity black lawyer. David Sparks does. Sparks is spokesperson for a group planning a rally outside the law courts […]

06/23/2014
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Cuba, the photos that could answer the question and "national security…"

One of the enduring questions about Cuba’s shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in 1996 is where the planes actually were when they were brought down? In international airspace as the U.S. claims and the International Civil Aviation Agency concluded? Or over Cuban territory as the Cubans continue to insist? The U.S. has […]

01/12/2013
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Day in the Five…Whose fair trial?

On December 8, 1998, after a 14-day trial, jurors in Puerto Rico acquitted five anti-Castro exile militants of plotting to kill Fidel Castro. Afterwards, two of the jurors told reporters the verdict was intended to send a “message to the Cuban people that we’re with you.” The jurors then left the courthouse, singing the Cuban […]

12/08/2010
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Day in the Five… The trial begins

Ten years ago today—on December 6, 2000—five Cuban men finally went on trial in a small chamber on the seventh floor of the Miami court building. They were charged with everything from the relatively minor offence of failing to register as foreign agents all the way to conspiracy to commit murder. In his opening statement, […]

12/06/2010
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Looking for loopholes in El Paso

Cuba’s Granma newspaper says Luis Posada Carriles’ lawyers are trying to use a legal loophole to prevent the court from hearing key evidence in his case. Posada, the alleged mastermind of both the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 and also the 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign, is scheduled to go on trial at […]

11/21/2010
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More details emerge of Hernandez's time in the 'hole'

Gerardo31 “[Gerardo] Hernández’s sister Isabel first learned that he had been put in the ‘hole’ … when she went for a visit at the U.S. maximum security prison in Victorville, California, July 24. She was only allowed to talk to him by phone, separated by a thick glass partition, while he was kept handcuffed… “Hernández […]

08/07/2010
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Another of Five moved to medium security

Ramón Labañino, one of three members of the Cuban Five whose prison sentences were reduced last fall, has been moved from a maximum security prison in Kentucky to a medium security institution in Jesup, Georgia. Ramón Labañino Labañino, 46, had been serving a sentence of “life plus 18 years” following his 2001 conviction for espionage […]

06/27/2010
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Hernandez's lawyers file habeas corpus petition

Gerardo Hernandez In a last-ditch, no-more-cards-to-play legal effort, lawyers for convicted Cuban Five spy Gerardo Hernandez this week (June 14, 2010) filed what is called a collateral appeal—or writ of habeus corpus—in Miami Federal Court claiming it has new evidence the court should have aware of before letting a jury decide the fate of the […]