BAD APPLE
An Appellate Division, First Department panel dealt another setback to a police officer convicted of murder who has twice been granted parole by Manhattan Supreme Court justices, The New York Law Journal reports. After detective William R. Phillips was caught accepting protection money from a prostitute, he testified before the anti-corruption Knapp Commission, where another detective watching the proceedings identified Phillips as the suspect in the unsolved murder of a prostitute and a pimp years before. Phillips was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 25 years to life. In 2005, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Alice Schlesinger ordered Phillips released only to be reversed by an appellate panel for exceeding her authority. This time, the panel reversed Justice Marcy Friedman, who had ruled that the New York State Board of Parole had failed to consider the statutory criteria at Mr. Phillips's September 2005 hearing, his fourth since he became eligible in 1999. "Not only did the Parole Board fail to weigh all the relevant factors, but it considered penal policy - a factor that the Court of Appeals and the Appellate Division of this Department have expressly cautioned is outside the scope of the Executive Law provisions governing parole," wrote Friedman in 2006. The First Department saw things differently. "The Board appropriately placed primary emphasis on its concerns about the circumstances of the crime itself, and whether petitioner's release would 'so deprecate the seriousness of [the] crime as to undermine respect for law," wrote Justice David B. Saxe.

FROZEN LAND
Also in the Law Journal, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Shirley Kornreich ordered the release of $30 million frozen in connection with a lawsuit about a 1996 middle east terrorist dispute. Granting summary judgment in favor of the Palestinian Monetary Authority (FMA), Justice Kornreich ruled that the PMA was a "separate judicial entity" from the Palestinian Authority (PA), the country's governing body, which has had trading restrictions placed on it by the U.S. Government. "The PMA [will now be able] to resume financial transactions that will further the economic stability of the region," said attorney Scott Emery, a partner at Lynch Daskal Emery who represents the monetary authority. After an American rabbinical student and his pregnant wife were shot to death in Israel in 2000, apparently by Hamas, Rhode Island attorney David R. Strachman filed a lawsuit against the Palestinian Authority, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hamas in federal court. He sought damages under the Anti-Terrorism Act, arguing that the PA should have prevented Hamas from carrying out such attacks, and brought the present case to New York Supreme Court to halt a wire transfer to the PMA by the Bank of New York.

FRIDAY THE 13TH
It's Friday the 13th, so we couldn't resist a little news of the macabre — like this morsel from the Elmira, New York Star Gazette about admitted killer Chad Mack, whose conviction for murdering a Schuyler County woman in 2002 was thrown out by the Appellate Division, who said Mack was deprived of his right to choose counsel. (Mack didn't pull the trigger, his girlfriend did.) As reported in the Star-Gazette, as a second trial gets started Mack's attorney, Susan BetzJitomir, will file motions to withdraw Mack's guilty plea, to have the county pay for expert witnesses and to claim that he remains incompetent to stand trial.