frivolous defense

Not Frivolous, Just Dopey: Disney’s Wrongful Death Defense

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Wow. Disney is being sued by a man whose wife died from a reaction to severe food allergies at EPCOT. Disney’s lawyers have come up with a creative defense: the $50,000 lawsuit should be dismissed because the plaintiff, Jeffrey Piccolo, signed up for a one-month trial of the streaming service Disney+ in 2019. The deal’s fine print requires Disney+ trial users to submit “all disputes” with the company to arbitration. This, the theory goes, extends to attempts to sue Disney for matters having nothing to do with the streaming service.

Piccolo’s lawyer called Disney’s argument “preposterous” in court filings and said that the idea that signing up for a Disney+ free trial should bar a customer’s right to a jury trial “with any Disney affiliate or subsidiary, is so outrageously unreasonable and unfair as to shock the judicial conscience.” He accused the entertainment giant of seeking to block its 150 million Disney+ subscribers from ever bringing a wrongful death case against it in front of a jury even if the case facts have nothing to with Disney+.

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Bizarro World Legal Ethics Update….

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This just in:

You know that aneurysm-inducing defense in the case of the Republican consultant who created a robocall designed to trick black Democrats into not voting on election day?

It worked. Continue reading →

Criminal Defense Ethics: The Aneurysm-Inducing Argument

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Darrow would understand.

Apoplectic stand-up comic Louis Black has a classic routine in which he describes how a snippet of a conversation he over-heard at an IHOP nearly killed him. The statement, “If it hadn’t been for that horse, I never would have spent that year in college,” made no sense to him at all and kept going around and around in his brain, threatening to cause a fatal aneurysm.

I know exactly how he feels.

A week ago, I read a news account of the election fraud trial of one Julius Henson, a former campaign consultant to ex-Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich. This was the second trial arising out Ehrlich’s dirty and unsuccessful campaign in 2010 to win re-election over Democrat Martin O’Malley. In the first one, Ehrlich’s campaign manager, Peter Schurick, was convicted of election fraud for approving an election day robocall that went out to African-Americans in Maryland who were registered Democrats, suggesting that they “relax” and stay home, because O’Malley had already won. In the article, it said that Henson’s attorney had offered the defense that the call, which was created by Henson with his wife’s voice on the recording, was not designed to suppress the black vote for O’Malley. It was, argued Edward Smith, intended to prompt them to go to the polls and vote for Erhlich through the use of “reverse psychology.”

WHAT??? Continue reading →