This will be my last Faculty Lounge guest post. Thanks so much to Dan Filler for inviting me to share some stories from Lawtalk. I've had fun, and hope FL readers have enjoyed them.
Since this is the time of year when we start looking for exam ideas, I'm remembering the times when real cases ended up being much more interesting than anything I could concoct. The Lawtalk entry for "lawyers, guns, and money" provides that kind of 'truth is stranger than fiction' example. The phrase comes from the title of Warren Zevon's classic 1978 song. Its lyrics tell the tale of a man in trouble, including waitress-spies, gambling losses in Cuba, and Latin American hideaways, concluding:
Now I’m hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan.
The musical tale is dramatic, but life added a legal twist. In a case of life imitating art, the combination of lawyers, money, and offspring in jeopardy led a judge in New York to invoke Zevon’s lyric to express sympathy but deny relief. A woman named Cornelia Sage had died in 1972, and her will created a trust for her son Henry and his children. The will provided only a limited power to spend the principal of the trust. In 1976, Henry’s son Ricky Sage and Ricky’s wife, Karen, were jailed in Brazil and charged with illegal possession of drugs. Henry paid $85,000 to lawyers in Brazil to secure special treatment for Ricky and Karen, for their release, and for dismissal of the charges. The New York judge, concluding that the payments were in fact used to pay bribes, refused to allow the trust funds to be used to repay Henry. The judge did not question the "motives of a father’s decision to employ this means to free his children from such intolerable and life- threatening prison conditions. No father could do less. The lyrics of contemporary rock music capture the ageless seeking of a child for a parent’s help—‘Send lawyers, guns and money/Dad, get me out of this.’ And while Dad did answer and get his children out, this Court cannot indorse the methods employed."
While the judge did not allow trust funds to pay for the release of Ricky and Karen, he did let the trustee use trust money to pay the attorneys’ fees of the many lawyers involved in the dispute over the trust. Perhaps the judge thought the song just said, "Send lawyers money."
nice info..! thx
@http://goo.gl/U0dXH
Posted by: Rowlind | November 25, 2011 at 01:45 AM