NRA wants halt to arms seizures
Alarmed by the way authorities confiscated guns in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the National Rifle Association called on all police chiefs and mayors Thursday to sign a pledge that they will never forcibly disarm law-abiding citizens.
“Mayors and police chiefs have already sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States in their oaths of office. So signing this pledge should be just as effortless,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said a day before the group opens its annual convention in Milwaukee.
The nation’s most powerful gun lobbying group also said it would support state and federal legislation making it a crime to forcibly disarm law-abiding citizens.
After Katrina hit New Orleans, police and soldiers confiscated guns from some evacuees and removed them from homes. The police said that they took only guns that had been stolen or found in abandoned homes.
Los Angeles
Law firm charged in kickbacks case
One of the nation’s highest profile class-action law firms was charged Thursday with a scheme that paid more than $11 million in kickbacks to get people to take part in shareholder lawsuits.
The charges follow years of investigation into the way New York-based Milberg Weiss, Bershad & Schulman conducts shareholder lawsuits against major corporations. The firm was a lead plaintiff in more than half the federal shareholder suits settled from 1997 to 2004.
The law firm and attorneys David J. Bershad and Steven G. Schulman were charged with secretly paying about $2.4 million to Seymour M. Lazar, a Palm Springs lawyer involved in real estate, and others to act as class-action plaintiffs since 1981 and concealing the payments.
Lazar was also named in the indictment along with Paul L. Selzer, another lawyer from Palm Springs.
The indictment’s 20 counts included conspiracy, racketeering conspiracy, money laundering, mail fraud, filing false tax returns, obstruction of justice and criminal forfeiture.
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Tate receives new 30-year sentence
Lionel Tate, the teenager who got a second chance after he beat and stomped a 6-year-old girl to death, was sent back to prison for 30 years Thursday for gun possession.
“In plain English, Lionel Tate, you’ve run out of chances. You do not get any more,” Circuit Judge Joel T. Lazarus told Tate.
Tate, now 19, was convicted of beating Tiffany Eunick to death in 1999, when he was 12, claiming he accidentally killed the girl while imitating pro wrestling moves he had seen on television. He became the youngest person in modern U.S. history to receive a life sentence.
His murder conviction was overturned in 2004 by an appeals court that said it was not clear Tate understood the charges. He was freed under a deal in which he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years’ probation.
On Thursday, he was back in court over the holdup of a pizza deliveryman last May.