Wednesday, April 12, 2012:

• Georgia State Patrol introduces “Nighthawks” DUI program in Muscogee County
• Gwinnett lawyer kills self, husband, wounds third-party person
• T-SPLOST’s publicity campaign has Tea Party sniffing around
• Jury selection begins in John Edwards trial
• Interested parties make statements about Corps’ harbor deepening plan

Tuesday, April 11, 2012:

• Ga. prison and deal with ICE at center of controversey
• Corps calls for 47-foot-deep Savannah River to serve GA port
• Bank of America sues itself – 11 times
• SC Ethics Commission schedules a July hearing for Governor Haley
• Jacksonville attorney helps inform veterans
• Columbus attorney to run for Municipal Court judge
• Google partners with SCAD and Gibbs Museum of Art

Tuesday April 10, 2012:

• SC Electric & Gas building two new nuclear reactors
• Atlanta developer reveals Atlanta traffic conditions scared away his own daughter
• Student refuses to go to her graduation if it’s at Eddie Long’s New Birth church
• Former Talbot County deputy caught in fed’s cash-for-fake-pullovers operation
• Head of FDA tours Savannah port
• Ga. militia suspect to plead guilty
• DeKalb DA James seems to still be possibly working up a case on Andrea Sneiderman
• Two killed in Glynn County high-speed police chase

• Dads challenge a Ga. law that allows judges to send parents to jail for not paying child support.
• In Macon seven teens have been charged with raping a special-needs student at Northeast High School. An attorney for Macon’s newspaper, The Telegraph, has been led to believe, by the Bibb County school system’s lawyer, that the paper will get a full police report about the Jan. 19 incident today. According to some already familiar with the full report, campus surveillance video was used to ID the suspects.
• A defendant in Alabama gambling corruption retrial died over the weekend. A federal trial was supposed to start today, with a new prosecutor for the government.
• And today is – wait for it – Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day.

Good morning! We have plenty of new multimedia online for you this week from the Daily Report.

On our Facebook page is a slide show of before and after pictures of the homeless encampment near the Fulton County Courthouse/Gold Dome area. The associated story about the clearing of the people camped there, by staff reporter Greg Land, is here.

There are videos of arguments before the Georgia Supreme Court in Kesterson v. Jarrett, a case about whether a trial judge may exclude from the courtroom a plaintiff whose disabilities or disfigured features may attract undue attention from jurors. Reported by staff reporter Aly Palmer (subscription required).

Also before the Georgia Supreme Court this week, and on video, were oral arguments in Formal Advisory Opinion No. 10-1, a debate on how to govern public defenders’ handling of client conflicts. Story (subscription required) also by Palmer.

Stop by Daily Report Multimedia often for unique, legal-oriented media. And be sure to sign-up for our twice daily e-news alerts. Top right of the homepage, in red. No subscription needed for our news alerts. They’re free.

Thank you for reading and viewing all the unique media offered by the Daily Report. There’s always more to come.

Seems the White House has noticed Atlanta litigator Jill Pryor.

Muscogee County Superior Court Judge Bobby Peters allowed medical furloughs for a sick, incarcerated Columbus teen. But what happened when no family would take him to Atlanta for treatment? Full story in the Columbus Ledger.

Martha Welsh is giving the Macon city attorney’s office a rennovation. Of sorts. In other words… it won’t be with Martha Stewart paint.

Legislative issues pit our peaches against our blueberries.

Creative Loafing’s blog shows the order by Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Cynthia Wright granting a failed bidder’s temporary restraining order against the City of Atlanta’s plan to enact new airport concessions contracts.

California “birther” Orly Taitz gets a Georgia court date.

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.

The Superior Court judges of the Brunswick Judicial Circuit are reassigning to other judges all of the criminal cases currently assigned to court’s chief judge, Amanda F. Williams, pending the resolution of ethics charges against her.

Williams’ four colleagues on the Superior Court bench made the decision yesterday afternoon following a private meeting with Williams,  Superior Court Judge Anthony L. Harrison told the Daily Report. Judges attending the meeting included Stephen G. Scarlett, Stephen D. Kelley and E.M. Willkes III, in addidtion to Williams and Harrison.  The cases that will be reassigned include all of Williams’ drug court cases, Harrison said.

Harrison said that Williams will retain “some limited role” in civil cases that are currently assigned to her, but he declined to comment on specifics until an order memorializing the case reassignments is completed and filed this afternoon.

Williams was in conference and could not be reached immediately for comment.

Harrison said that during the meeting, the judges did not discuss with Williams the ethics charges filed against her last week by the Judicial Qualifications Commission, the state’s judicial disciplinary agency.

In a 31-page notice, the JQC accused Williams last week of “willful misconduct in office,” including her alleged practice of jailing drug court defendants indefinitely.  According to the charges, Williams also allegedly improperly allowed members of her family to litigate cases in front of her, allowed her social and political relationships to influence her judicial conduct, and improperly gave her political endorsement to a woman who is now the circuit’s district attorney.

The charges also accuse Williams of issuing ex-parte orders on substantive legal matters without the knowledge or input of all parties involved in the disputes, holding hearings in chambers without a court reporter present, improperly jailing people who appeared before her, demonstrating an open bias against defendants, and using “rude, abusive and insulting language” in court.

Williams was the subject last spring of a lengthy and controversial report by “This American Life”, a weekly public radio show hosted by Chicago reporter Ira Glass. The March 25 broadcast, “Very Tough Love” examined Williams’ practices in presiding over the Brunswick circuit’s drug courts and described her as a judge that people “truly fear.”

Read more from the Daily Report about the Judge Williams charges here. Associated documents, including the JQC’s 31-page notice, are available at that link too.

The Washingtonian magazine asks why Penn State football coach Joe Paterno chose King & Spalding’s Wick Sollers to represent him in the fallout from the school’s sex abuse scandal, pointing out that Sollers generally defends corporate executives on the quiet. Sollers “is not among the circle of elite Washington white-collar defenders whom celebrities, politicians, and other high-profile folks usually turn to in this city when they’re in trouble,” says the magazine.

Sollers is the managing partner of King & Spalding’s Washington office and has chaired the firm’s special matters and government investigations practice. His firm bio says his defense work includes accounting fraud cases, criminal environmental, health care and FDA matters and internal corporate investigations. He also represented former President George H.W. Bush in the Iran-Contra affair.

Paterno was fired Wednesday along with Penn State’s president, after Pennsylvania prosecutors charged former Penn State defensive coach Jerry Sandusky with sex abuse of teenage boys and two university officials with covering up his alleged crimes.

Sollers was in the news himself last spring after former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement quit King & Spalding because the firm refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act for his client, the U.S. House of Representatives. Sollers, who’d recruited Clement to the firm, said in a statement amidst fallout from the departure that it was “reasonable” for Clement to think King & Spalding would accept the DOMA matter even though the firm’s standard client/matter review process was not followed, calling the episode an “unfortunate misunderstanding with a friend.”

An in-depth Sunday story by Jim Mustian in the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer shines a spotlight on delays in the mandatory appeals of three capital cases stalled at square one in Muscogee County Superior Court.

The oldest of the three murder convictions was in 1992 – only a year after the Troy Davis conviction. But unlike Davis, who maintained his innocence up until his execution, James Andrews confessed to killing Viola Hicks after breaking into her house to rob her. The Ledger-Enquirer story quotes him telling the jury that after he bludgeoned the Sunday school teacher to death with her iron skillet, he realized her mutilated appearance reminded him of what he “felt like on the inside,” and that he bent down, kissed her and told her he was sorry.

The Andrews motion for a new trial – the first small step in the appeal — has been pending in since 1993, according to the Ledger-Enquirer, which also noted two others “similarly stalled at square one” in Columbus. The article quotes defense attorneys saying they had no motivation to push for movement on the appeals, since that would push their clients toward execution, and that the judges in the cases have retired.

The Ledger-Enquirer credits Muscogee County Superior Court Chief Judge John D. Allen with stepping up efforts to resolve old cases by creating a new docketing system and scheduling upcoming hearings.

Ironically, the story also quotes the daughter of Andrews victim saying that her mother “was a true Christian” and did not believe in the death penalty. The daughter said she doesn’t believe in the death penalty either, but still expressed frustration with letting the appeal languish for nearly two decades. Catheryn Hollis told the Ledger-Enquirer: “If they’re going to give you the death penalty, they should go ahead and get it over with.”