PROMISE KEEPERS 
The Daily News responds to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent demand of a no-strike pledge from the Transit Workers Union (TWU) in exchange for returning the union's right to collect dues from workers’ paychecks. That was the last remaining sanction imposed by the city after the costly 2005 work stoppage. Bloomberg made the demand as union president Roger Toussaint filed a petition before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Bruce Balter to grant resumption of the dues payouts, which earn the union about $1.5 million per month. “This city was very badly hurt by a strike, and this is a union, incidentally, that struck a couple of other times as well,” Bloomberg said. In an editorial, the News paints Toussaint’s ploy as “too cute”: “If the union won't make that promise of no strikes, the MTA and other public officials will be negotiating with a gun to their heads, knowing that the TWU can break the law at will with an illegal walkout. . . . The TWU is a recidivist (with transit strikes in 2005, 1980 and 1966), and since it is a repeat offender, the public and the court have every reason to ask the union to promise to follow the law. The dues checkoff is a privilege, and an unrepentant scofflaw should not receive a privilege.”

 
CONVICTED COP LOSES ONE
The judge assigned to determine whether a police officer was wrongly convicted of murder has thrown out at least one of the defense attorney’s claims — that a juror’s failure to reveal his criminal history, and potential bias towards police, influenced the outcome of the trial. In 1997, former New York City Police Officer Richard DiGuglielmo was sentenced to 20 years to life for shooting a man brandishing a baseball bat over an argument about a parking space owned by DiGuglielmo’s father. As reported by The Journal News, last week, Westchester County Judge Rory Bellantoni dismissed the juror issue — ruling there was “no clear dishonesty” that would demand a hearing — but delayed a decision on DiGuglielmo’s other contention: that a central witness was pressured by Dobbs Ferry police to change his story about whether DiGuglielmo was defending his father when he shot Charles Campbell on Oct. 3, 1996.

 
IN MEMORIAM
Newsday and The New York Times report on the passing of two respected judges. First, longtime Nassau County judge Ira Wexner has died of cancer at 78. Wexner presided over the trial of serial killer Joel Rifkin and the re-sentencing of "Long Island Lolita" Amy Fisher, reports Newsday.

And the Times notes the deathof James L. Oakes, former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, who was appointed by President Richard Nixon yet became one of the court’s most liberal voices over his 36-year tenure. (After Watergate, he used adhesive tape to cover the signatures of Nixon and Attorney General John  N. Mitchell on the judicial commission that hung in his chambers. In a 1997 Columbia Law Review article that chided politicians for equating judicial “activism” with the defense of fundamental rights, Oakes described himself as “old-fashioned — fashioned from the thirties of the Great Depression, the forties of war and the Holocaust and fascism, the fifties of the cold war and McCarthyism and Little Rock, and the sixties of the civil rights movement, the assassinations and the would-be Great Society.”

BIG MAIL DAY 
After months of defending itself against claims that toxins at Ground Zero led to illnesses for 9,000 workers, the City of New York is exploring a settlement in the massive class-action lawsuit. The Daily News has the story. Thousands of plaintiffs received a letter last week from their lawyer, Marc Bern, detailing the $1 billion offer. Plaintiffs have until the end of the month to decide whether to allow Bern to negotiate a settlement; those who refuse can continue their own litigation, probably with another attorney. “If we receive an aggregate settlement offer from the defendants, it will be up to you and our other clients to accept or reject the offer and, if you accept it, to agree on how the [money] would be divided,” Bern wrote. “The defendants would have nothing to do with that decision.”

BULGING GUT 
And finally, The New York Sun reports on a study by the Manhattan Institute arguing that the only way Governor Spitzer will succeed in reducing the state’s tax burden, among the highest in the country, is by amending the Taylor Law and other labor-friendly statutes that create labor peace (by removing penalties for striking workers) and yet balloon the public sector. The Taylor Law lets unions collectively bargain contracts with counties, cities, towns, villages, school districts, and public authorities — and over the years created a decline in work stoppages throughout the state — but also led to a disproportionate percentage of unionized government employees in New York, who receive higher salaries and better benefits and vacation plans.