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Calif. debt firm settles Pa. class-action suit

November 5, 2009

A California debt collection company has agreed to a $2.55 million judgment to settle a lawsuit brought by thousands of Pennsylvanians who claim they were wrongly led to believe they had to pay costly fees to avoid criminal charges for bouncing checks.

 

American Corrective Counseling Services admits no wrongdoing as part of the settlement approved Monday in bankruptcy court in Delaware.

 

The company sent out letters as recently as last winter purporting to be from various Pennsylvania district attorneys’ offices to people who bounced checks.

 

Read Article: San Francisco Chronicle

 

Posted By: Phoenix DUI Attorney

Diocese pays $4.24M in sex abuse case

The Catholic Diocese of Savannah, Ga., said it would pay $4.24 million to a 40-year-old man who says he was sexually abused by a former priest.

 

The figure is the second largest payout to an individual since the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal erupted in the 1980s.

 

The diocese said it agreed to pay former St. James Catholic School of Savannah student Allan Ranta Jr. “to avoid the expense and burden of a lengthy trial by all parties.”

 

Ranta had filed a complaint in a Jasper County, S.C., civil court stating he was molested by the Rev. Wayland Y. Brown from 1978 to 1983, starting when Ranta was 10 years old.

 

Read Article: United Press International  

Posted By: Phoenix DUI Attorney

L.A. Clippers’ Sterling Settles Housing Bias Lawsuit

Donald Sterling, owner of the National Basketball Association’s Los Angeles Clippers, agreed to pay $2.73 million to settle a U.S. government lawsuit in which he was accused of housing discrimination.

 

The payment is the largest ever obtained by the government in a discrimination case involving apartment rentals, the Justice Department said today in a statement.

 

“Housing is a basic human need, and yet decades after passage of the Fair Housing Act far too many still encounter barriers like discrimination,” Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez said in the statement. “The magnitude of this settlement should send a message to all landlords that we will vigorously pursue violations of the Fair Housing Act.”

 

Read Article: Bloomberg

Posted By: Phoenix DUI Attorney

$2.5 million awarded in lead-paint lawsuit

A city jury awarded more than $2.5 million Tuesday to a pair of siblings who were poisoned by lead-based paint while living in a West Baltimore rowhouse that their mother had been told was “lead safe.”

The siblings, Dontae Wallace, 20, and Searra Wallace, 17, have permanent cognitive and behavioral disabilities that stem in part from being exposed to lead paint in the house their family rented from City Homes Inc., a nonprofit organization, for four years in the early 1990s, medical experts said in court.

Tiffini Wallace, the siblings’ mother, was 19 when she learned that her 4-year-old son had been exposed to lead in a house the family was renting at the time. She enrolled Dontae in a lead-paint abatement study run by Kennedy Krieger Institute Inc. and moved to the house on Booth Street in an effort to protect her son and daughter from the dangers of an element that for decades was a common ingredient in paint.

 

Read Article: Baltimore Sun

 

Posted By: Phoenix DUI Attorney

Rhode Islanders stricken by illness after trip

The signs of trouble arrived deep in the night: first, bloody diarrhea, then nausea and vomiting. Later, chills and a fever descended.

 

Neither Austin Richmond nor his mother knew it at the time, but he had been infected with a potentially lethal germ known as E. coli O157:H7. And, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday, the 11-year-old from Lincoln, R.I., caught it doing what many children do when they are away at camp, by eating a cheeseburger.

 

There were trips to the emergency room, trips to the doctor’s office, and initial confusion over what was causing him to be so sick. For more than two weeks, Austin, a sixth-grader, has been banished from school and not just because of his own illness. There is also concern that, because his immune system has been so ravaged battling the E. coli infection, he might prove especially susceptible to swine flu, which killed another student at Lincoln Middle School over the weekend.

 

Read Article: Boston Globe  

Posted By: Phoenix DUI Attorney

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