JUDGES OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
In a show of solidarity for judicial pay raises, more than 100 New York judges are expected today’s annual Law Day ceremony in Albany, The New York Law Journal reports. The caravan was the brainchild of Chief Judge Judith Kaye, who asked each of the 13 organizations representing judges in New York to send 10 members each. (Normally, only about 20 judges attend the celebration, whose themes this year include youth empowerment and democracy, according to the Law Journal.) The regular Law Day celebration happens May 1^st. "This year, we obviously have issues that have united us even more strongly than in general," said Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Marsha L. Steinhardt, president of the Association of Supreme Court Justices of the State of New York. As reported in the Law Journal, Justice Steinhardt said judges want to demonstrate that they are "united and deserving of an increase" in salary. After the ceremony, Chief Administrative Judge Lippman and Chief Judge Kaye will brief the judges about the status of pay raise legislation in Albany. The judges will then head up the street to the state Capitol to lobby legislators, Judge Lippman told the Law Journal. "A great number will be going up on the hill in the most responsible, productive way to express their sincere feelings and frustrations about all of this," Judge Lippman said. Last week, a bill was introduced to the Senate, sponsored by all 62 senators, that would raise the salaries of Supreme Court justices from $136,700 to $165,200, on par with U.S. District Court judges.

DRUG DEALER OR JUST GULLIBLE DOCTOR?
The New York Times's Tierney Lab science blog has an interesting analysis of the federal drug trafficking conviction of Dr. William Hurwitz, a Virginia-based pain management physician who wrote prescriptions of OxyContin and other opioids to drug dealers and addicts. (See here for the story on Hurwitz’s conviction.) Tierney interviewed three jurors, who said they considered Dr. Hurwitz to be a doctor “dedicated to treating pain who didn’t intentionally prescribe drugs to be resold or abused.” Neither did Hurwitz appear to benefit financially from his patients’ drug dealing or come across as a conventional drug trafficker, said the jurors. Then why did they convict him on 16 counts for “knowingly and intentionally” distributing drugs “outside the bounds of medical practice” and engaging in drug trafficking “as conventionally understood”? Tierney offers two possible explanations. First, that the jurors were confused by the Controlled Substance Act – which Hurwitz was charged with violating by prescribing drugs “outside the bounds of medical practice” – and second, that the law itself is inadequate, because Hurwitz generally believed he was helping his patients and was not financially benefiting from the transactions, making the so-called criminality of his motives suspect. “I don’t know that I know enough to be clear about that gray area between malpractice and out of bounds,” Juror 1 told Tierney. “We just had to go with our gut,” Juror 2 said. “That was definitely a struggle,” Juror 3 said. “That was a gray area.” In 2004, Hurwitz was convicted of over 50 counts of drug trafficking. He was sentenced to 25 years but that decision was thrown out upon retrial. Each of the counts in his latest conviction carry 20 year maximum prison sentences but no minimum.

VANITY OF ALL VANITIES 
The Daily News has a macabre list of the city’s most dubious, and con artist, attorneys, including a former administrative law judge turned parking ticket defense attorney who pretended he was still a judge to avoid paying $12,000 in fines. Even after leaving the bench, Glen Caldwell, 58, put his judge placard on his dashboard and purchased vanity plates with a special combination of letters and numbers that provided him with a defense against summonses. Caldwell also had a deal with Pay-O-Matic, a chain of check-cashing stores with 92 outlets in metropolitan New York, in which the chain got $1 per ticket paid and the slimy attorney got $3 and 75 percent of every fine reduction "I believe I provide a valuable service to these individuals and my fee is not excessive when put in perspective," Caldwell told an appellate court disciplinary committee investigating possible fraud. On Feb. 16, 2006, Caldwell was suspended from practice for three years. Also making the Daily News’s list: Jay Gordon, a former Greenburg Traurig partner disbarred for arranging tax shelters in a kickback scheme for real estate mogul and former MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow; Columbia Law School grad Gwenrva Cherry, who misappropriated $892,000 in complex real estate deals and clients' escrow funds; former Wilkie Farr & Gallagher partner Patrick Carmody, who was suspended for a year for charging $30,000 worth of long distance personal phone calls to friends and family to his firm's clients.

CONTEMPTIBLE!
Ending one of the longest-running cases of civil contempt in American legal history, Manhattan Federal District Court Judge P. Kevin Castel last Friday lifted the seven-year sanction against financial adviser Martin A. Armstrong, who’d been imprisoned since January 2000 for failure to turn over millions in assets from a $3 billion Ponzi scheme that prosecutors accused him of stowing away. The decision means Armstrong can begin serving his five year sentence for criminal conspiracy, reached in a plea deal last summer. As reported in The New York Times, Judge Castel left in place the finding that Mr. Armstrong was in contempt but decided that keeping him in jail on that claim had no effect. “Those who believe you are innocent or a victim are the latest victims of Mr. Armstrong’s fraud,” Judge Castel said. “They haven’t done their homework.” “If seven years didn’t do it, another two, another three, another five years isn’t going to do it either,” said Armstrong’s attorney, Thomas V. Sjoblom. After the hearing, lawyers from both sides sparred. “You could have gotten your client out of jail seven years ago, but you blew it,” court-appointed receiver Tancred V. Schiavoni told Sjoblom.