SPITZER PROBE
Eliot Spitzer will soon face an investigation by the state Ethics Commission, a powerful governmental agency that has the power to supbpeona the governor’s office, writes The New York Times. Earlier this week, the state Attorney General’s office issued a report that alleged that Spitzer’s office had used the state police to specifically investigate Joseph L. Bruno, the powerful leader of the Republican senate. High-ranking Spitzer staffers refused to discuss the scandal with the Attorney General’s office, and that office does not have the power to subpoena the governor’s staff. However, the ethics commission does, in addition to being able to dole out up to $40,000 in fines and suggest prosecution in criminal matters. The ethics commission is lead by John D. Feerick, the former dean of Fordham Law School. Feerick is familiar to most judge watchers as the architect of court reform in New York, ordered by Chief Judge Judith Kaye to find weak points in the court system.

PUBLIC ENEMY FINED
Rapper and reality television star William “Flavor Flav” Drayton cried foul in court yesterday, after a Supreme Court judge ruled that he should pay $1.8 million to a man he allegedly shot at in 1993 — and the New York Daily News has all the gory details. Drayton’s lawyer said that Judge Dianne Renwick, the civil term judge who smacked him with the damages in the shooting lawsuit, should have recused herself because her husband once tried to convict Drayton of the same crime. Renwick is married to Robert Johnson a Bronx DA who tried to prosecute these crimes against Drayton earlier in his career. She nearly recused herself in January, but decided to stay on after reviewing case law.  "Her actions were retaliatory because her husband lost a series of cases to Flav," said Charles Johnson, the attorney defending Flav against these charges. Drayton allegedly took pot shots at his neighbor while living in a Bronx high-rise, prompting his neighbor to file an assault and battery suit with the civil court. Drayton never showed up in court, but a default judgment of $850,000 was issued against him — ten years later, interest had accrued into the millions.

FBI V. AG 
The federal Attorney General took a three-pronged attack yesterday, The New York Times reports. The director of the F.B.I. poked holes in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’ testimony about a top secret wiretapping scheme from 2004. In a hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee, F.B.I. chief Robert S. Mueller III said that the controversial intelligence gathering operation that allegedly eavesdropped illegally on American citizens had caused enormous tension inside the Bush administration, something that Gonzales had repeatedly denied. At the same time, the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Karl Rove in a separate investigation over the firing of federal prosecutors—the second alleged scandal that has plagued the Attorney General. Four prominent democratic Congressional leaders sent a letter to the Justice Department yesterday requesting a special counsel investigation into Gonzalez’s tenure.

NO COP SHOT DAMAGES
Despite the fact that two different juries granted a Bronx man over $50 million in damages after an off-duty police officer shot and paralyzed him, an appellate court has dismissed the complaint for the second time. According to The New York Law Journal, an off-duty officer shot Darryl Barnes in 1998 after the man fired a Tec-9 machine gun at him. Barnes claimed that he had already dropped the gun and was shot in the back. In 1998 and 2003, two separate Bronx juries awarded Barnes huge damages in a civil suit he filed against the city, and both awards were decreased by at least $40 million by the Appellate Division. The dismissal this week hinged on Barnes’ lawyer’s decision to read his client’s testimony about the incident, rather than bringing Barnes into the courtroom. The appellate panel was not amused in their decision: “It was counsel's choice, deliberate and calculated, to withhold his client from the rigors of cross-examination - an understandable strategy, given plaintiff's unsavory background and conviction of attempted assault in the first degree for his actions in the very incident in question," they wrote.