Overlawyered & Overgoverned.

AuthorOlson, Walter

An annual helping of tales from a litigious society.

How were we governed, regulated, policed, lawyered, and judged in 2000? Sadly, much the same as in 1999. Here are some of last year's month-by-month "highlights":

January: New York City announced that it did not intend to give back the brand-new $46,000 Ford Explorer it had seized from 34-year-old construction worker Joe Bonilla after his arrest on drunk-driving charges, even though Bonilla had been found not guilty of the charges.

A husband and wife filed a million-dollar lawsuit against the University of Miami School of Medicine for failing to warn them that their daughter might be born with Down Syndrome even though the school knew that they were first cousins to each other, a "high-risk" category that often prompts additional precautionary testing. (The couple's grandparents are also first cousins to each other.)

Serious fire code violations, including lack of smoke alarms in sleeping quarters and an improperly installed firewall, threatened to delay the ribbon-cutting of a $1-million public facility in Charleston, West Virginia. The facility was a fire station.

February: Escaped Bulgarian murderer Mincho Donchev, who lived for 10 years as a "mountain man" burglarizing vacation cabins in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, won a $412,500 settlement in his lawsuit against Snohomish County for excessive force in his arrest. A police dog had mangled Donchev's foot as officers tried to subdue him. At the time of the arrest, Donchev was armed with knives, handguns, and a pronged stick. Donchev's attorney said the money would help ease his client's re-entry into society on his release from prison.

Former Chicago city treasurer Miriam Santos, once a rising political star, "blamed her now-overturned conviction on extortion charges on pre-menstrual syndrome," reported UPI. "I am human and probably the first woman to go to jail for PMSing," she told a news conference.

ABC confirmed that it had paid $933,992 to Mark Sanders, an employee of the Psychic Services Network. A jury endorsed Sanders' complaint that the network's newsmagazine PrimeTime Live had harmed his reputation in 1993 when it covertly videotaped him and his colleagues working the phones and aired the resulting tapes in a show designed to depict the call-a-psychic business as "a scam and illegitimate."

March: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission argued before a federal appeals court that Conrail violated the Americans with Disabilities Act when it denied a dispatcher's job to an employee with a heart condition that can cause him to black...

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