Frank LoMonte left a job at Sutherland’s Atlanta office some years ago to head the Student Press Law Center, a nonprofit in Arlington, Va., that advises student journalists on First Amendment issues. But his former hometown is on his mind, as he sent a letter to Mayor Kasim Reed asking that he drop all charges against two student journalists arrested while covering an “Occupy Atlanta” demonstration on November 5, 2011.

Journalists Alisen Redmond of The Sentinel at Kennesaw State University and Judith Kim of The Signal at Georgia State University told the East Atlanta Patch they had identified themselves as working press on assignment at the demonstration, but that their pleas were ignored by the arresting APD officers; thus both reporters spent over twelve hours in jail before being released and ordered to appear in court in March.

In the letter to Mayor Reed LoMonte writes,

While having a press pass is of course not a license to violate the law, the“violation” for which these journalists were cited consisted entirely of “obstructing traffic” on a street that the police had themselves closed to traffic — a street on which television crews from the professional news media were standing untouched by police, permitted to do their jobs.

We called Mayor Reed’s office today for a comment, but have not heard back. We’ll report back if we do. LoMonte tell the Daily Report that as of Friday Nov. 11 he had not yet received a response from the mayor’s office to the letter.

The National Association of Women Lawyers’ annual survey on how women lawyers fare in Am Law200 firms shows they are making little progress in advancing up the ranks of BigLaw.

Women make up 47 percent of first and second year associates but only 15 percent of equity partners. The survey said the percentage of female equity partners has not changed in 20 years. And 80 percent of firms’ “fixed-income equity partners” are women, who contribute capital but do not share in profits. Firms reported that women make up only 16 percent of partners credited with at least $500,000 of business, which correlates to the percentage of female equity partners.

Few women run Am Law 200 law firms. The survey said firms’ governance committees have a median number of 10 partners, but 77 percent of firms reported two or fewer women on their governance committees. Only five Am Law 200 firms have a female managing partner—the same percentage as in 2006, the first year the survey was conducted. But 95 percent of firms said they have a women’s initiative in place.

NAWL sent the survey to the 200 Am Law firms, and 121 responded.

The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reports today that new DNA tests on the stocking strangler case found no link to Carlton Gary, the death row inmate convicted of three of the seven killings.

Gary’s defense attorney, Jack Martin, suggested the evidence will now go to Bode Technology Group lab in Lorton, Va., for further testing. At the moment, the court is left with conflicting DNA evidence that matches Gary to one strangling case but not the other.

Gary was arrested in 1984, convicted in 1986 and came within hours of execution in 2009, until the Georgia Supreme Court issued a stay and ordered a hearing on DNA testing in Muscogee County Superior Court.

Although Gary was only charged with three murders, police based their case on the theory that he committed all of the series of brutal rapes and killings of elderly women that terrorized Columbus in the late 1970s.

Drama, passion, intrigue, death. Business as usual in the city that inspired the murder mystery “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” Last week in Chatham County Superior Court, a three-week murder trial wrapped up with the convictions of two men for shooting a Savannah College of Art and Design student following a robbery.  One was represented by Atlanta lawyer Steve Sadow, who had to delay a local case to be in Savannah. Also playing out this week was the shooting death of a grill cook in the kitchen of a local restaurant, MaRandy’s, by one of the owners.

In its daily accounts of the murder trials, the Savannah Morning News spares no detail. Today, for example, the local daily gives the defendant Michael Grant’s story of why he shot the cook, John Cornish. The owner said the cook “came from behind the counter” with “something” in his hand. Something shiny, chrome.

“I just lost control. I wasn’t trying to kill him,” Grant said.

That’s the defense side. The prosecution tells a different story, one that includes a long battle between the two men that boiled over. The owner said the cook blew up that night at the restaurant, attacked his girlfriend and cussed and slapped his mother – one of the co-owners. The owner left after arguing with the cook, then returned to the kitchen through the back door with a gun. The newspaper said police evidence shows Grant repeatedly shot and pistol whipped Cornish. Then Grant drove away in his gold Jaguar.

Read all about it in the Savannah Morning News, or Savannahnow.com.

 On a night when four Atlanta mayors spent much of a 90-minute discussion congratulating each other for their accomplishments, the Atlanta school testing scandal elicited a rare moment of disagreement between Mayor Kasim Reed and predecessors Andy Young and Bill Campbell. And Reed suggested he’ll continue to use his bully pulpit to encourage the school board to improve its governance, warning that “if we don’t see significant improvement  . . . then the mayor should take the system.”

Accountability is the issue, Reed said. While few citizens can name members of the school board, “everybody knows who the mayor is and they hold him accountable.”

 The comments came in an Atlanta magazine-hosted forum Monday evening  at the Atlanta History Center. Reed, Campbell, Young and Sam Massell took questions from Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas A. Blackmon. Shirley Franklin didn’t attend because of a family obligation.

Young attributed the current state of the Atlanta schools to the school board’s penchant for hiring “outsiders”—particularly from the Northeast—to run the system. He also suggested the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was determined to find wrongdoing and dismissed all standardized testing as nonsense. While not calling out the AJC by name, Young said “the newspapers have to take some responsibility. Just like they sent [a reporter] to trash Mayor [Maynard] Jackson, they sent people to trash the schools.”

Bill Campbell, who famously had his differences with the AJC, didn’t follow Young’s shot at the  newspaper, but he did criticize Beverly  L. Hall, the former Newark and New York City school administrator who presided over the Atlanta schools during the cheating scandal. “The school system functioned tremendously well for many, many years before  Dr. Hall came here” and became preoccupied with testing and treated teachers poorly, he said.

But Reed said that standardized testing is a national issue and “I don’t want us to run away from tests. If  tests are the measure, I believe  our kids can match up. I just want the improvement to be real.”

Reed confided that he first took advice from Young—in a school—many years earlier. Reed, a product of Fulton public schools, recalled meeting Young as a 10-year-old and being disturbed when the mayor playfully messed up his carefully coiffed Afro. Young recalled  the meeting, too. “I think what I said was ‘you got your hair fixed, now you better get your head right.’”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported late last night that a lawyer attacked in the 100 block of Spring Street blamed his beating on a disgruntled client.

The attacker ambushed Rand Csehy, of the Csehy Law Group, around 7 p.m. Read more »

Three Arkansas men who were convicted in 1994 of murdering three eight-year-old boys were released on Friday after pleading guilty to the crimes but expressing their innocence, according to news reports.

The Commercial Appeal of Memphis said in a story on its website, “The pleas were based on a seldom-used North Carolina case allowing the defendants to plead guilty while maintaining their innocence.” Read more »

According to The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Miss.), the U.S. Attorney who successfully prosecuted a reputed Klansman in 2007 for the beating deaths of two African-American teens in 1964 died last night, just 15 days after the murderer he helped put behind bars.

U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, 60, apparently died of natural causes. Convicted Klansman James Ford Seale died in prison on Aug. 2. He was 76. Seale was serving three life sentences for killing Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. Read more »

Earlier this week, The Daily Show covered the story of a Florida couple who foreclosed on their local Bank of America branch after the bank tried to foreclose on them.

As reported in numerous other media outlets in early June, Warren and Maureen Nyerges paid cash for their Naples home in 2009. Thanks to some kind of serious mix up, Bank of America sent the couple a foreclosure notice in 2010. Read more »

As road crews made progress clearing Atlanta’s thoroughfares on Wednesday, courts began announcing plans to reopen on Thursday.

The Supreme Court of Georgia will reopen at 12 p.m., and the Court of Appeals will open at 10 a.m.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reports that it will again be open Thursday, with clerk’s office employees being asked to be at work no later than 10:30 a.m. Oral arguments will begin at 1 p.m. on both Thursday and Friday.

Atlanta Judicial Circuit Superior, State, Juvenile, Magistrate, and Probate Courts will resume normal business operations on Thursday. Attorneys who have previously scheduled matters before the court are urged to contact specific judicial or administrative offices to determine potential changes in calendars. Juvenile Court hearings for Thursday will be canceled, except for Probable Cause and Emergency hearings which will be held in the afternoon. Jurors who received summons for service this week do not need to report.

The DeKalb Superior, State, Magistrate and Probate Courts are open normal business hours today.

All divisions of U.S. District Court will be open Thursday on a delayed basis.

All four offices of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of Georgia’s Northern District will be open tomorrow, Thursday January 13. The opening of the court, however, will be delayed two hours.