MASON'S MISTAKE 
In delinquent payment news elsewhere, The Daily News reports that former Brooklyn judge (and favorite tabloid “deadbeat dad”) Reynold Mason defied a court order to appear and describe what action he’s taken to find a job to support his three children. Instead, Mason, who was released from prison in September after agreeing to pay $30,000 to his former wife, Tessa Abrams Mason, said through his attorney that he was still unemployed and too broke to make the trip from Georgia, where he now resides. “I find that incredible that he had no funds to buy a bus ticket," said Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Lobis. “The suspension of his sentence is lifted. He is to be incarcerated to complete his term! I am issuing a warrant!”
 
DORFMAN'S DELIQUENCY 
An attorney who spent more than a decade dodging a malpractice verdict has chosen to take a sentence of two years of probation for criminal contempt and six nights of community confinement in a halfway house, rather than continue fighting the charge in federal court. The New York Law Journal has the story. David A. Dorfman’s troubles began back in 1994 when, fresh out of law school, he misrepresented his expertise in health care law to convince a man who had been misdiagnosed as HIV-positive to hire him for a suit against New York City. Dorfman failed to file the suit before the statute of limitations had run out, and his client, Ricky Baker, sued him. After years of delinquency, Southern District Judge Denise Cote, tasked with enforcing a $385,000 verdict against Dorfman, finally tired of his “elaborate and sometimes fraudulent efforts” to avoid paying the judgment. Cote lobbied the U.S. Attorney's Office to step in and prosecute Dorfman criminally, but now the woebegone lawyer has agreed to a deal. “What is important to me is that I understand that Mr. Dorfman today evaluates that past conduct accurately, so going forward he is going to change that behavior,” Judge Cote said.
 
RABBI-FREE ZONE?
The Village of Pomona, New York, has asked a Southern District judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a Hasidic Jewish congregation whose plans to build a rabbinical college were stifled by the town’s zoning laws. Since it was an unaccredited academic institution, the congregation had sought an exemption from the building codes based on the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Its lawsuit accuses the village of discrimination; in calling for a dismissal, the village, meanwhile, has called the case “enormously premature” and said that the congregation's claims were “deeply flawed.” “Plaintiff's tactic of ‘sue first, apply later’. . . .should be rejected, and their premature and meritless claims should be dismissed,” court papers stated. According to The Journal News, Village Attorney Doris Ulman disagreed with the interpretation of the land use law by the Congregation Rabbinical College of Tartikov, saying that if the village granted an exemption to one group, it would have to do so for every group in a similar situation.

NOT HAVA FRIENDLY
And finally, Newsday reports that Northern District Judge Gary Sharpe today will hear a dispute between the Justice Department and New York State over its noncompliance with the Help America Vote Act, a federal law enacted after the 2000 presidential election that requires up-to-date, handicap-accessible voting machines. New York is the only state nationwide that won’t meet HAVA requirements by the February 5 presidential primary, including providing at least one accessible machine per polling place and the replacement of all pull-lever voting machines with HAVA-certified machines. Ironically, New York’s noncompliance is due in large measure to its strict standards for voting machines, which it says it has not yet been able to meet. “If we had to speed it up for ‘08 November [elections], it seems to us that there's just not enough time so that we could get it all done and get them to work on election day they way they should,” said Lee Daghlian, a spokesman for the state Board of Elections. “But we're going as fast as we can with all due diligence.”