Lead Stories
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In December in Texas, death-row inmate Leonard Rojas was executed, but two months later three of the nine members of the state’s highest criminal court concluded that the lawyer appointed to handle Rojas’s appeals had been woefully incompetent. The lawyer, David K. Chapman, by his own admission did only cursory work: he rarely met with Rojas, failed to investigate the case, and by missing a filing deadline barred Rojas from a federal appeal. Even worse, Chapman was suffering from bipolar disorder at the time, which he confesses affected his performance, and during the case he was slapped with a probationary suspension by the Texas bar–the third time he’d been so disciplined.
A race-discrimination lawsuit brought by two black sisters (Grace Fuller, 48, and Louise Sawyer, 46) against Southwest Airlines was scheduled to go to trial in Kansas City, Kansas, earlier this week. A white flight attendant on the sisters’ plane, in a hurry to get passengers seated, allegedly recited Southwest’s version of an old children’s rhyme: “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe / Pick a seat, we gotta go.” Because the rhyme has a racist history–years ago the second line was often rendered “Catch a nigger by his toe”–the sisters say they felt alienated (and apparently believe they are due some money).
Something Else to Worry About
In February in Hickory, North Carolina, two women were arrested (and two men were still being sought by police) in connection with a failed counterfeit-check scheme; though the counterfeiters used computer software that produced what police called “impressive” bogus payroll checks, none of them noticed that a check from Broyhill Furniture misspelled the name “Boryhill Furmiture.”
