Day: August 18, 2008

Minor denied release pending appeal – alcholism a disease, Fifth's decision sick! UPDATED

The Sun Herald online reports the Fifth Circuit has denied Paul Minor’s request for release pending appeal.

The court denied his motion, saying, “Minor has failed to establish by clear and convincing evidence that he is not likely to pose a danger to the safety of the community if released.”

Minor was imprisoned before his 2007 conviction because he violated the terms of pre-trial release when he drank alcohol to excess. U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate, who presided over the trial, found Minor a potential danger to the community.

Minor, ordered to complete an alcohol treatment program, said he has been sober since April 2006.

The Sun Herald’s story provides the familiar background in the brief story posted now with promises of more to follow.  I’m going to find and post the full decision. I’ll be back shortly .

UPDATE:

I’ll keep looking but I’ve begun to believe it may be a docket note that I’m looking for and not a document. As I read around the blogosphere looking for more information, I noted comments that showed a shocking ignorance about the disease of alcoholism.

If the decision to deny his request for release during appeal considered his conduct without considering his illness, as appears to be the case, I suspect we’ll hear a lot more about this decision.

I’ll continue to search and update as more information becomes available.

Some Good Neighborly Greed From the Good Hands People Part 2: State Farm Enters the Florida Fray

Part 1 of this series detailed how Allstate tried to game the system in Florida to fleece consumers. While Allstate was hammering out their settlement with Commissioner McCarty at FLOIR. State Farm decided to make a run at Commissioner McCarty when they filed for a 47% rate increase last month. Hindsight reveals their timing was terrible as Allstate has since agreed to pay a substantial fine, write new policies and cut rates. The cat is out of the bag now and the State Farm rate hearings were big news last week in Florida. It seems State Farm evidently thinks they can pull the same baloney as Allstate and make it stick where Allstate has failed. The news coverage tells a different the story, however. We start with the coverage in the Palm Beach Post:

State regulators appear poised to reject State Farm Florida’s proposed homeowner rate hike of almost 50 percent, announcing at the close of a hearing Tuesday that the insurer had made a series of miscalculations in determining its premium needs.

State Farm overstated its hurricane risk by not fully taking into account its plan to drop 50,000 coastal policyholders, used unauthorized hurricane catastrophe models in determining its rate need and adjusted the models to reflect losses four times greater than what they would have been, said Ed Domansky, a spokesman for the state Office of Insurance Regulation.

Domansky’s comments reflected the line of questioning from a panel of regulators at the three-hour rating hearing who continually challenged the assertions of State Farm Florida that its financial stability depends on the rate hikes. Continue reading “Some Good Neighborly Greed From the Good Hands People Part 2: State Farm Enters the Florida Fray”

Moos update and the udder-ly ridiculous spin on the beef plant case

Moo-v-ing straight into the update with a summary of post-plea moos and news and udder-ly ridiculous spin from cyberspace about the beef plant case – starting with what the Clarion Ledger has online.

  • $50 on the skinny one, an editorial cartoon from the Ledger’s award winning cartoonist Marshall Ramsey;