Memorial services are planned for this week for Barry Phillips, who first joined the firm that became Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton in 1954 and was later its chairman. Phillips died Monday at the age of 82.

According to the firm, the family will receive friends at H.M. Patterson Spring Hill Chapel, on Wednesday, January 25th, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.  Funeral services will be held at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church on Thursday, January 26th, at 3 p.m.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP Scholarship Fund, in honor of Barry Phillips at the University of Georgia Law School, 120 Herty Dr, Athens, Ga. 30602, in care of the Development Office. Donations may also be made to the American Heart Association P.O. Box 840692 Dallas, Texas 75284-0692 or www.heart.org.

Online condolences may be made at H.M. Patterson & Son-Spring Hill Chapel.

A full obituary released by the firm is below: Read more »

Four months after watching his client Troy Anthony Davis executed at a Georgia prison, Jay Ewart entertained questions at his alma mater, Emory University. Speaking to a few dozen students, alumni and others Wednesday night, Ewart told the story of the pro bono case he picked up at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C., not long after graduating from Emory’s law school in 2003.

Davis was executed in September for the 1989 shooting of Savannah police officer Mark Allen MacPhail. Backed by Ewart, other lawyers and a worldwide network of activists, Davis had long maintained his innocence.

Ewart said Wednesday his practice focuses on antitrust law, but he logged 600 to 700 hours on the Davis case. He won a groundbreaking victory for Davis from the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009, when it ordered Davis be given an evidentiary hearing on his innocenceclaims. But the hearing, before U.S. District Judge William T. Moore Jr. in Savannah, went poorly for Davis, ending his best hope for relief.

Ewart’s talk was both candid and guarded, as he offered personal insights into the case but showed some hesitancy in identifying by name the players he was discussing.

Read more »

This column in The New York Times tells the story of Joseph Hartinger, who in 1933 was a prosecutor for the region surrounding the new Nazi concentration camp near Dachau. After investigating suspicious deaths of Jews at the camp, he indicted the camp commandant and three others for murder.

Author Timothy Ryback, who read Hartinger’s journal, writes, “The murder indictments had a surprising impact. The commandant was removed. The killings stopped. Hartinger had hurled a legal wrench into the Nazi bureaucracy and singlehandedly paralyzed its homicidal impulse.”

The Nazis found a way around Hartinger by transferring him to another jurisdiction.

“[H] had there been more Germans like Hartinger to hold individual Nazis personally accountable  … the course of history could have taken a very different turn,” Ryback adds.

While the world at large remembers today as the 70^th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it is also the 65^th anniversary of the fire at Atlanta’s Winecoff Hotel in which 119 people perished.

A search for the words “Winecoff” and “fire” on Lexis shows that the 1946 disaster prompted a flurry of litigation over insurance coverage, the appointment of a receiver for the hotel and negligence claims. Many of the cases were decided in 1947 and 1948—suggesting how fast litigation moved in those days.

Two other cases in the database show that Fulton County prosecutors ran into a tough Supreme Court of Georgia when pursuing criminal charges against the operators of the 15-story hotel (which was refurbished as The Ellis Hotel not long ago.) Read more »

The Augusta Chronicle reports that a stretch of highway in south Richmond County has been named for John H. Ruffin Jr., a former state Court of Appeals judge who died in January 2010.

The marker unveiled at a ceremony yesterday names Georgia Highway 25 from Georgia Highway 88 to the Burke County line in Ruffin’s honor, the newspaper reports.

The first black member of the Augusta Bar Association and the first black judge on Augusta’s Superior Court bench, Ruffin got involved in civil rights battles while in private practice. In 1972 he won the suit that desegregated the Richmond County school system. His lawyering also helped let blacks vote for county commissioner desegregate the Augusta police force and restructure the state’s penal system.

The Chronicle previously reported on the naming of the new Richmond County courthouse in Ruffin’s honor. After some controversy about its naming, the Augusta Richmond County Judicial Center and John H. Ruffin, Jr. Courthouse was dedicated in May.

Commuters tuned into the local National Public Radio affiliate this morning, likely heard U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Shoob  recall to his daughter, Fulton Superior Judge Wendy Shoob, a haunting incident from his service in Europe during World War II. The pair shared their dialogue through WABE’s StoryCorps Atlanta project.

Be warned: it’s a violent and grim story, but as the elder Judge Shoob recounts, the experience was pivotal, informing how he would spend the rest of his life.

It’s a story that the elder Judge Shoob has told before, but to hear it in his own voice adds impact to its gravity. The story begins with Shoob’s capture of six German soldiers and ends with an act of brutality so senseless that he believed his best alternative was to spend a snowy night beneath the soldiers’ corpses.

Federal prosecutors in Florida have seized a masterpiece work of art –  “Christ Carrying the Cross Dragged by a Rascal” by Girolamo de’ Romani — that was part of the Nazis’ plunder during World War II in order to protect the nearly 500-year-old painting until its real owners can be confirmed.

The painting – which dates to circa 1538 and depicts Christ — crowned with thorns, robed in copper-colored silk and carrying the cross while being dragged with a rope by a Roman soldier – has been on display at the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee since last March when it arrived as part of an exhibition of 50 Baroque paintings on loan from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Italy.

The painting is among a number of artworks and other valuables taken in a forced sale from the estate of Federico Gentili di Guiseppe, who died in 1940 in Paris just months before Hitler invaded France, according to the seizure complaint. After receiving advanced warning of the invasion, Gentili’s children and grandchildren fled to Canada and the United States, leaving their property and possessions behind, federal prosecutors said.

Gentili’s estate was auctioned by the French Vichy government in 1941, and anti-Semitic laws imposed by the invaders
stripped Jewish French nationals like the Gentilis who had fled France in advance of Hitler’s armies of their nationality and arranged for the confiscation of their properties, according to federal prosecutors. The painting was acquired by the Pinacoteca di Brera in 1998.

Since the war, Gentili’s grandchildren have taken legal steps internationally to locate and reclaim the artwork illegally taken from their family during the Nazi occupation.  In 1999, a French Court of Appeals forced the Musee de Louvre in Paris to return five paintings to Gentili’s descendants and voided the auction of the Gentili estate during the war as an illegal, forced sale, federal prosecutors said.

Pamela C. Marsh, U.S. Attorney for Florida’s Northern District, said that under U.S. law, the painting cannot be returned to Italy until the ownership disputes are resolved. “Our interest is strictly to follow the law and safeguard this work until the courts determine rightful ownership,” she said.

Hamilton McWhorter Jr., a former state senator, Oglethorpe County attorney and 73-year veteran of the State Bar of Georgia, died this week in Atlanta. He was 98 years old.

McWhorter, known to his family as “Big Hamilton,” graduated from the University of Georgia in 1934 and the University of Georgia School of Law in 1936, according a news release today from the Georgia Senate Press Office. The State Bar of Georgia’s website said he joined the bar in 1938.

McWhorter practiced law in Lexington with his father until World War II, during which time he served in the Military Intelligence Service. Later, he was attorney for Oglethorpe County, held a seat on the Lexington City Council and was a state senator from 1961 to 1962.

McWhorter finished his career as Secretary of the Georgia Senate—a job he held for 25 years, from 1967 to 1992.

He died Oct. 18 at the Lenbrook Retirement Community. His graveside service will be Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Clark Cemetery in Lexington. In lieu of flowers, his family has asked that memorials be made to the University of Georgia Foundation.

Justice George Carley announced this morning that he will step down from the Supreme Court of Georgia next July, allowing Gov. Nathan Deal to choose his successor and precluding an election for his seat for which some lawyers around the state had been planning to run. 

Just last week, Atlanta attorney Scott Bonder announced that his campaign for the high court had already raised more than $85,000. In August, Bonder and divorce lawyer Tamela L. Adkins told the Daily Report that each planned to run for court seat expected to be vacated by Carley, who had said earlier he would serve out his term that ends in December 2012.

In the same August story, Presiding Judge Anne Elizabeth Barnes of the state Court of Appeals said she was considering joining the race.

Carley said Tuesday in a press release issued by the court, “I am announcing this now to notify potential candidates before the election cycle gets into full swing.”

In unrelated news that could nonetheless interest would-be candidates for the high court, the U.S. District Court is seeking to hire a new magistrate judge to replace Judge C. Christopher Hagy, who is stepping down next June. The deadline for applications is Oct. 21, according to this link.

The Daily Report will have a full report on Carley’s announcement in its next edition, which will be online late this afternoon.

The full text of Carley’s press release is below.

GEORGE CARLEY TO STEP DOWN JULY 2012

Atlanta, October 4, 2011 – Presiding Justice George H. Carley announced today that he will leave the Supreme Court of Georgia on July 17, 2012, after all cases from the January term of court have been decided.

That means that Governor Nathan Deal will have the opportunity next year to appoint a replacement to the state’s highest court. Whoever the governor appoints will then have to run for election in 2014.

 “I am announcing this now to notify potential candidates before the election cycle gets into full swing,” the Presiding Justice said. Carley, 73, announced earlier that he did not plan to run for re-election.

When he steps down, Carley will leave the high court as its Chief Justice. The court voted unanimously last month to have him serve as the leader of Georgia’s judicial system for two months before he leaves the court. He will become the first in Georgia history to have served as Chief Justice and Presiding Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, as well as Chief Judge and Presiding Judge of the Georgia Court of Appeals.

The Presiding Justice said that although he is stepping down from the state Supreme Court, he intends to continue being involved in the legal field. “I have loved every minute I have served,” said Carley, who has been a judge for 32 years.

Courtesy of The Washington Post, you have to love this New Jersey man’s enthusiasm for the Big Nine. Read here.