From the Wool-sack
| Publication year | 1988 |
| Pages | 868 |
| Citation | Vol. 17 No. 5 Pg. 868 |
1988, May, Pg. 868. FROM THE WOOL-SACK
Finley Peter Dunne
On Wall Street
March 4 was not a bully day for Bobby Brown. That was the day a federal jury ordered Soldier of Fortune magazine to pay $9.4 million in damages to the family of a dead woman. Robert K. Brown is the perpetrator and perpetuator of that adventurer's journal. He and his magazine live in Boulder, Colorado.
Although I know nothing of the case, my guess is that Soldier's lawyers were pleased that the case was tried in conservative Houston and not liberal Boulder. Had the case been tried in Boulder, Bobby's hobby might have gotten socked for a large amount of money by one of those Boulder juries which all of my litigating colleagues have learned to fear. I can hear the sigh of relief which went up in the office of counsel for Soldier when they were able to keep the case in Houston. Houston is, as the geographically illiterate may not know, in Texas, and Texas is the state that has been known to trivialize crime, depending, of course, on the color of the skin of the perpetrator or the victim.
One of its more glorious moments was found in the case of United States v. Denson.(fn1) In that case, three members of the Houston police department were convicted of conspiring to injure and intimidate Mr. Torres, which conspiracy resulted in his death. Without going into all the details, Torres was so badly beaten by his captors while handcuffed that when he and the officers arrived at Houston City Jail, the jailer refused to accept Mr. Torres. Thereupon the defendant officers, apparently not knowing what else to do with him, pushed Torres into a bayou where he drowned. The district court judge sentenced each defendant to ten years' imprisonment on the first count, with execution of the sentence suspended; on the second count pertaining to putting Mr. Torres into the bayou, the sentence was imprisonment for one year. These sentences were to be served consecutively.
The government appealed on the grounds the court could not suspend execution of the sentence on Count I. The appellate court agreed and remanded to the district court, which thereupon sentenced the defendants to one year...
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