Google Yourself Corpus Christi: When Carlos Valdez Confesses Error Does Not The Same Rule Apply?

Google Yourself Corpus Christi: When Carlos Valdez Confesses Error Does Not The Same Rule Apply?

First, in seeking the death penalty, prosecutors sometimes overlook glaring illegalities.

"courts, especially state courts, are too often willing to overlook even obvious constitutional flaws when reviewing death penalty cases."

And if they are "willing to overlook even obvious constitutional flaws and glaring illegalities when Prosecuting & reviewing death penalty cases."

WATT about all of the other cases?

How many "overlooks" of "constitutional flaws" or "glaring illegalities" have become tools of Cheating Prosecutors who have forgotten "Prosecutors, despite striking hard blows, must never lose sight of their ultimate obligation to do justice in every case.

How many Prosecutors deliberately commit the error of failing to file a reply brief in an Appeal Process because it deprives the appellant of exculpatory testimony, evidence, and confessions of error or witness tampering by the State Prosecuting Attorney?

Watt does TLR Et Al think @ them Apples?

San Anton lawyer could challenge Cornyn

Watts assails senator for allegiance to Bush, Iraq commitment.

By W. Gardner Selby
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, May 06, 2007

Fueling Democratic hope that Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn's political appeal will soon crumple, San Antonio lawyer Mikal Watts has been testing a challenge to Cornyn, whom he assails for a "blind allegiance" to President Bush and the Iraq war.

Watts, a Corpus Christi native and plaintiffs' lawyer who made his name in legal circles suing Firestone, Chrysler and other big companies, could decide by June whether to declare his 2008 candidacy for the seat that Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general, won in 2002.

Lauren Victoria Burke
ASSOCIATED PRESS

(enlarge photo)

John Cornyn Republican senator says he disagrees with Bush on some issues.

Alicia Mireles
ASSOCIATED PRESS

(enlarge photo)

Mikal Watts Big-time donor, lawyer known for fighting giant companies.

Watts, 39, ranks among a handful of Democrats who might leap in. They include former state Comptroller John Sharp, U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson of Houston and state Rep. Rick Noriega of Houston, who has said he is flattered by such speculation.

"I am incredibly worried about this war," Watts said last week. "I have no faith that John Cornyn is going to take one step to bring our men and women home."

Cornyn, 55, opposes the Democratic push for deadlines for U.S. troops to return from Iraq.

He insisted that he's not in lock step with the president.

"George Bush is a friend of mine, and he's got the toughest job on the planet," Cornyn said. "I've agreed with him when I think he's right. And I've disagreed with him when I think he's wrong."

Cornyn named as differences his support for expanded access to government records; for the regulation of tobacco as a drug (he co-sponsored legislation on the issue with U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.) and for comprehensive immigration reform: "I worry that the administration is so eager to have a solution that they're not going to insist on an enforceable border protection in place or workplace verification" of employees' immigration statuses.

Democratic activists rate Cornyn as a surprisingly little-known incumbent. A poll of 800 voters conducted April 11-15 for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee suggests that 33 percent did not recognize his name. The poll found that 47 percent of voters favored Cornyn for re-election, against an unnamed Democrat at 38 percent.

Despite recent Texas election results, Democrats envision Republican Texas recoiling from Cornyn just as voters in some states rejected Republicans last year, resulting in Democratic majorities in Congress — in great part a reaction to tough going in Iraq.

Matt Angle, who steers the Lone Star Project, a political committee supportive of Texas Democrats, rates Cornyn as a "stand-and-salute, me-too" senator who can be taken.

History suggests that it's rare for an incumbent senator to lose. The last incumbent senator from Texas to fall was Democrat Bob Krueger in 1993; he'd been appointed to fill an opening. Previously, Democrat Ralph Yarborough lost to a well-funded challenger from the conservative wing of the then-dominant Democrats, Lloyd Bentsen. That happened in 1970.

Norm Ornstein, a congressional expert with the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, likened the Democrats' chances in Texas to a snowball's in hell.

"Talk about a steeply uphill battle," he said.

Angle conceded that Cornyn, who totes more than $3 million in campaign cash and a 12-election winning streak dating to his roots as a Bexar County judge, remains the favorite. But "the favorite doesn't always win," he said.

Because of Texas' size, a candidate could need at least $15 million to be competitive.

Watts, whose law firm has won verdicts and negotiated settlements exceeding $1 billion since its founding in 1997, said that if he runs, he won't bankroll the campaign, but he'll have resources to "finish the deal."

He's proved a big donor, giving more than $2 million personally or through his law firm to state candidates or groups since 2002, according to an online search of filings at the Texas Ethics Commission. He has given more than $114,000 to candidates for federal office since 2004, according to Political Money Line.

Last month, Watts hosted a fundraiser at his home that yielded $1.1 million for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.

The event led Austin activist Glen Maxey to enthuse over Watts. Maxey wrote on the Burnt Orange Report, a Democratic blog, that Cornyn is "going down."

Watts is married and has three children. He clerked for Tom Phillips, chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, after law school and then joined a Corpus Christi firm. He left the firm, he said, after presenting his boss with a note he'd scrawled his first day on the job, vowing to have his own firm by age 30.

Early on, the Watts Law Firm had a reputation for battling large corporations, according to Law.com, including a 1998 automotive defect case in which the jury awarded $80 million — at the time the largest such verdict in state history.

The firm, which has offices in Houston, San Antonio, McAllen and Brownsville, specializes in catastrophic personal injury, products liability, aviation and toxic torts, according to the site.

Watts, who moved to San Antonio last year and enrolled his children in a local school, said he hasn't scribbled a vow to reach the Senate by a certain age.

"I'm not quite so Clinton-esque," he said, referring to the former Democratic president.

wgselby@statesman.com; 445-3644

Additional material by staff writer Tara Copp.

"Quantum meruit"

Glossary of Legal Terms from "Quantum meruit" to "Quitclaim deed"

Quantum meruit

Expression means "as much as he deserves," and describes the extent of liability on a contract implied by law.

Quash

To vacate or void a summons, subpoena, etc.

Quasi-contract

An obligation created by the law in the absence of an agreement or contract; not based upon the intentions or expressions of the parties.

Quasi-criminal action

A classification of actions such as violation of a city ordinance that is not also violation of a criminal statute, which are wrongs against the public punishable through fines but are not usually indictable offenses.

Quid pro quo

What for what; something for something; giving one valuable thin- for another.

Quiet title action

A court proceeding to remove a cloud on the title to real property.

Quitclaim deed

A deed without warranty of title which passes whatever title the grantor has to another.

OSAMA OBAMA is stoned if he thinks myspacewill not charge after the bar racks talley the actual GROSS net worth

Obama takes MySpace page from backer

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer Thu May 3, 3:00 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Is MySpace always mine or can it belong to someone else? At the cost of losing 160,000 friends, Democrat Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record)'s presidential campaign has taken over control of the MySpace page listed under his name on the popular social networking site.

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The case highlights the struggle between campaigns' desire to control their message versus the power of voter-generated material. And it shows how one person — in this case Los Angeles paralegal Joe Anthony — can become an influence on presidential politics through the power of the Internet.

The dispute between the Obama campaign and Anthony, a one-time supporter who started the Obama MySpace page, became such a concern for the Illinois senator that he personally tried to smooth things over Wednesday night.

Anthony felt he was mistreated by the campaign after he spent the past 2 1/2 years running the MySpace page as an enthusiastic volunteer. At first, that arrangement was fine with the Obama team, which worked with Anthony on the content, promoted the link and even had the password to make changes.

But as the site exploded in popularity in recent months, the campaign became concerned about an outsider controlling the content and responses going out under Obama's name. It told Anthony it wanted him to turn it over.

In this new frontier of online campaigning, it's hard to determine the value of 160,000 MySpace friends — about four times what any other official campaign MySpace page had amassed. But the Obama campaign decided they wouldn't pay $39,000, which is what Anthony said he proposed for his extensive work on the site, plus some additional fees up to $10,000.

MySpace reluctantly stepped in to settle the dispute and decided that Obama should have the rights to control http://www.myspace.com/barackobama as of Monday night. Anthony had the right to take all the friends who signed up while he was in control, and that includes the right to tell them how he feels about the Obama campaign — although he said he was still locked out of the page with his contacts as of Wednesday.

Anthony wrote on his MySpace blog that he was heartbroken that the Obama campaign was "bullying" him out of the page he built. He initially said the candidate lost his vote, but Obama may have begun to win it back after a Wednesday evening phone call that Anthony called a great honor. Anthony said he was so nervous that he doesn't remember exactly what Obama said, but the candidate expressed his appreciation and they agreed everyone learned a lesson in this case.

"I assured him that this is just a horrible thing that happened and obviously he wasn't responsible," Anthony said in a blog post. "It'll take time for me to work this out and decide if I will personally continue to support Obama, regardless of how I feel about his campaign's handling of this situation."

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign was trying to rebuild his friends network from scratch and was up to more than 20,000 by Wednesday evening.

Joe Rospars, Obama's director of new media, wrote in a blog post that the campaign "decided to take a leap" in teaming up with an outside organizer on MySpace. He said the arrangement worked at first, but campaign officials became uncomfortable when Anthony changed the password to prevent them from working on the site and made his financial requests.

"We're going to try new things, and sometimes it's going to work, and sometimes it's not going to work," Rospars wrote. "That's the cost and that's the risk of experimenting."

The campaign's fight drew widespread criticism among leading liberal bloggers who question why they would treat a volunteer like Anthony with such disregard. But Obama has some online defenders who say volunteer work should remain that way and not be held up for payment.

Advocacy Inc. CEO Roger Alan Stone collects and sells contact information to Democratic campaigns, lawmakers and advocacy groups, but says he isn't working for any of the current White House candidates. He says e-mail addresses collected for such a cause can go for $1 each, so in that sense the price Anthony was asking was low.

But Stone comes down on the side of the Obama campaign in this dispute.

"As something that was done on a volunteer basis that you want to charge for after the fact, that is ridiculous," Stone said.

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