This NY Sunday Times article reports on the lawsuit of former federal government oil and gas auditor Bobby L. Maxwell, who is suing Kerr-McGee Corporation in Denver federal court for underpayment of oil and gas royalties to the federal government on oil and gas wells producing on federal lands. Under an obscure federal statute that rewards private citizens who expose fraud against the government, Maxwell and his counsel stand to recover as much as $15 million if they ring the bell in the lawsuit, which is scheduled for trial on January 16.
Although I know nothing about the particulars of the Maxwell case other than what is reported in the article, underpayment of oil and gas royalties is not uncommon. Indeed, when I am retained by royalty owners in a reorganization case of an oil and gas company, my standard advice is for the royalty owners to hire an experienced oil and gas auditor to conduct at least a review of the debtor’s royalty payments. When an oil and gas company starts having financial problems, scrimping on royalty payments is not an unusual occurrence.

Longtime Eastern District of Texas U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice has long been one of most controversial federal judges and, thus, one of the best-known in Texas. The 86-year old Judge Justice was recently back in the news as the first honoree of the Morris Dees Justice Award, named for the famed Alabama civil rights lawyer, which prompted this profile from the Chronicle’s Janet Elliott.
Judge Justice is the quintessential activist federal judge, so he is not the most popular fellow in all quarters. Maybe he should have been in the legislature, but it’s hard not to admire a judge who at 86-years of age still handles a full court docket and chooses to be activist in cases that promote desegregation in education, equal educational opportunity and prison reform. The legislature has never done a particularly good job of dealing with those issues, anyway.

In the right move, Texans’ offensive lineman Fred Weary’s criminal case was dismissed yesterday by Harris County Court at Law Judge Pam Derbyshire, who commented from the bench that Weary did not use enough force against police officers during the Nov. 14 incident to justify either the charge or, presumably, being Tasered.
Meanwhile on the police overreaction front, this Pokerati series of posts chronicles the latest Dallas SWAT team “success” — breaking into and destroying several of the city’s underground poker rooms. Pokerati has firsthand accounts of Dallas SWAT teams swooping into the poker rooms, breaking windows, kicking down doors, and charging with assault weapons drawn into peaceful gatherings of “dangerous” Texas Hold ‘Em enthusiasts. I’m sure everyone in the Metroplex is sleeping more restfully now that these evil card sharpies are behind bars.
As former Cato Institute policy analyst Radley Balko shows in this Cato study, small municipalities frequently misuse SWAT squads for routine police work, which has led to an increasing number of botched raids resulting in injury or even death to innocent citizens. The Dallas poker raids were only the most recent example of unnecessary and dangerous SWAT unit deployments; this earlier post reported on one in a Houston suburb. Police overreaction is dangerous enough when it occurs in the spur of the moment as in the Weary case. But the risk of innocent citizens being harmed goes off the charts when SWAT teams are unnecessarily deployed to break up peaceful gatherings of people engaging in harmless activities.

David Lat of AbovetheLaw.com does a good job here of analyzing the various candidates for the two “Texas” Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judgeships that will be opening soon with Judges Patrick Higginbotham and Harold DeMoss taking senior status. Houston judges George C. Hanks, Jr. (First Court of Appeals), Jennifer W. Elrod (190th District Court), Jane Bland (First Court of Appeals) and U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal are on the short list, as is former Houstonian, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson. This should be quite a competition, so stay tuned.

An organization called Perverted Justice — a so-called “Internet Watch” group — goes around the country and induces men to correspond with what they think are minor boys via email, instant messenging and chat rooms. However, the minor boys are really Perverted Justice operatives, who then turn over the evidence of solicitation to police authorities while notifying the news media about the impending arrest of the men for soliciting sex over the Internet with people they thought were underage boys. In turn, the police enjoy the publicity and allow the news media to tag along to video the arrest for the 10 o’clock news.
This past Sunday, a well-regarded 56-year old prosecutor, Louis Conradt, Jr.. of the North Texas town of Terrell killed himself as the police were knocking on his door to arrest him in a Perverted Justice-inspired sting operation. Of course, a Dateline NBC camera crew was outside Conradt’s house when Conradt killed himself.
Although there is forensic computer evidence that Conradt had communicated over the Internet with other minor boys, there is no evidence that he had ever actually met any of the boys. Conradt clearly needed help for a personal problem, but that therapy did not include having a camera crew show up on his front porch to film the most humiliating moment of his life. What Conradt did is shameful, but what Perverted Justice, the police and the Dateline NBC reporters did to Conradt is much worse than the crime that they contend that their actions are attempting to deter.