JUDICIAL ELECTIONEERING: NOT A PRETTY SIGHT
Errol Louis has dire words of warning about judicial elections in his Daily News column. Louis writes that the still-unresolved race on the lower East Side for a Civil Court seat presages what’s to come in a post-Lopez-Torres universe: a “rock-‘em-sock-‘em norm” in which “judgeships go to whichever political brawlers can run the roughest street campaigns.” He blames Margaret Chan and David Cohen for lowering the bar for judicial races by trading accusations of voter fraud, voting machine sabotage and “street thuggery.”  Louis direly predicts that the political and ethnic bickering that has characterized this race is the face of the future for judicial elections in New York…”It’s almost enough ot make you miss those smoke-filled back rooms.” Almost. But the new transparency will, at least eventually, force reform.

 
WRITING ON THE WALL
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit set the standard for the admission of lay witness testimony to authenticate handwriting, Mark Hamblett reports in The New York Law Journal. A three-judge panel upheld the evidentiary ruling of Southern District Judge Colleen McMahon. The decision will be published Friday.

PATENTLY WINNING
in federal court in Manhattan yesterday, according to this report by the Associated Press in The New York Times, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled in favor of three Israeli scientists and against now-infamous ImClone Systems Inc. regarding who should own the patent for bestselling cancer drug, Erbitux.

A MOTHER'S SUFFERING
A noteworthy agreement in Brooklyn Supreme Court happened yesterday when a group of doctors who allegedly botched an abortion agreed to pay $4.2 million to their client, who ultimately gave birth to a developmentally disabled son after the abortion failed. The Post reports that the agreement is the first of its kind in the state to include damages for the mental suffering of the mother, who wasn’t physically harmed.

 
EVIL INCARNATE 
In the Daily News, Westchester County Judge Lester Adler spared no righteousness when sentencing a mentally ill homeless man yesterday to 25 years to life in prison for fatally stabbing a woman because she was white. A jury took four and a half hours to convict Phillip Grant. “You, Mr. Grant, represent the face of evil,” Adler said.