Richard Keyt, Author at KEYTLaw's Blog

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School District Gives Up Trying to Fire 79 Year Old 4th Grade Teacher After 5 Years

From the government workers are hired for life department. The LA Weekly story called “LAUSD’s Dance of the Lemons” explains how difficult to impossible it is for the Los Angeles Unified School District to fire a teacher. The LAUSD attempted to fire 74 year old 4th grade teacher Shirley Loftis, but gave up after five years. The the state Commission on Professional Competence found that the district had grounds to fire her, but did not allow her to be fired. During this five year period the district paid Ms. Loftis $300,000 to perform an admin job plus $190,000 for her legal fees.

Why do we have governmental agencies, including schools, that do not hire and fire based on competence or the lack thereof? Why isn’t educating the children more important than the job of one teacher? Is the purpose of a school to educate the children or to provide employment for life for teachers? The article says

“It is so difficult to dismiss or discipline veteran teachers. . . . Recent articles in the Los Angeles Times have described teachers who draw full pay for years while they sit at home fighting allegations of sexual or physical misconduct. But the far larger problem in L.A. is one of “performance cases” — the teachers who cannot teach, yet cannot be fired. Their ranks are believed to be sizable — perhaps 1,000 teachers, responsible for 30,000 children. . . .

But the Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.

New York City Must Pay Cop $4.5 Million After He Accidentally Shot Himself

This story in not recent news, but I just heard about it because the City of New York is appealing the verdict that it must pay a cop $4.5 million after he shot himself when the chair he was sitting on collapsed. The New York Injury Cases Blog has a good summary of this amazing case. The “victim” idiot was sitting in the now notorious chair when a fellow cop asked the idiot to hold his gun. Instead of putting the gun on a desk or in a desk drawer or in a holster that protects against accidental discharge of the weapon, poop-for-brains put the loaded weapon in his waistband, leaned back on the chair, it fell over, dude grabbed for the gun (why?), put his finger on the trigger and pulled. Result: 9mm slug in idiot’s knee and the city owes him $4.5 million.

The case is more evidence of the damage that run-a-way litigation and jury verdicts do to our country. Why did the city have to pay a cent? Why did the guy grab for the gun as he was falling? Think about it. If you are sitting in a chair, you lean back and the chair falls over backward with you in it, do you grab for the gun in your waistband or do you put your hands out to break your fall? I would try to break my fall and so would 99.999% of everybody on the planet. Frankly, I have a hard time believing his story.

Everybody who has had any training in gun safety knows:

You never put a loaded weapon in your waistband.
You always carry a loaded weapon in a holster.
You never put your finger on the trigger unless you are preparing to fire or intend to fire.

I am sure that New York cops are trained in these fundamental concepts of weapons safety. The guy broke three fundamental safety rules and it’s the City’s fault he shot himself! Why does the City of New York have to pay for the idiot cop’s stupidity? Why is it that people are not responsible for their actions? Why do people want to blame others for their mistakes?

See the story in the New York Daily News called “Ex-city cop wins huge award after chair he sat in broke, sending bullet into his knee.”

Arizona House & Senate Bills Would Prevent Arizona Courts from Considering Foreign Laws

Both the Arizona House and Senate are considering identical bills that would prohibit Arizona courts from using, implementing, referring to or incorporating any law or court decision of a foreign jurisdiction in the court’s findings or decisions. The House bill is HB 2379. The Senate bill is SB 1026. Each bill provides:

Any decision or ratification of a private agreement that is determined, on the merits, by a judge in this state who relies on any body of religious sectarian law or foreign law is null and void, is appealable error and is grounds for impeachment and removal from office.

That is a stiff penalty for a judge who boo boos and uses foreign law. I am not a litigator or a law professor so I will defer to Professor Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law for his take on the proposed law. He is not a fan. See his post called “Arizona Bill to Bar Use of Foreign and Religious Law” in which he states:

“It’s pretty remarkable: If a contract provides that it is to be decided under, say, English law (or Mexican law), a judge wouldn’t be able to apply that law (see subsection C) — on penalty of impeachment. . . . Are such radical changes to longstanding Arizona law really sensible?”

There are lengthy legislative findings stated in each bill, which is called the “Arizona foreign decisions act.” See the bills linked to above. I challenge anybody to read the legislative findings and translate it into English.

Phoenix Has a $244 Million Deficit & Owes $300 Million for New Convention Center So Mayor Gordon Plans to Build $1 Billion Rail to the Airport without Federal Funds

The Phoenix rail huggers lead by Mayor Phil Gordon desperately want to extend the light rail system to the number one most visited site in Arizona, which site was some how overlooked by the nit-wits who planned the initial 20 mile long $1.4 billion Phoenix-Tempe-Mesa light rail system. Today the federal government laid the bad news on the Phoenix area rail huggers – the federal government will give the discredited community organizer Acorn almost $4 billion, instead of funding any portion of the estimated cost of $1 billion to extend the Phoenix light rail to Sky Harbor airport.

The Department of Transportation announced today that Phoenix will not get any of the $1.5 billion of federal stimulus money going to state and regional transit and transportation projects. With their heads completely in the sand so they could ignore Phoenix’ $244 million deficit, the layoffs of hundreds of police and fire personnel, closing and reducing of services and the $300 million owed on the new convention center money pit, Phoenix officials responded that they were not going to let a little thing like lack of money stop (it’s now being built) the construction of the $1 billion people mover to the airport. You gotta love their spunk.

How is it that Acorn gets almost $4 billion and Phoenix and needy states and cities get the shaft? Democrat mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix lobbied the federal government for money for the people mover, but was not successful. Maybe he could pull some strings with his homies in the the party and get Phoenix some of that Acorn money.

Didn’t Congress pass legislation last year removing Acorn from the public dole? The following is from an editorial in the Investor’s Business Daily:

You’d think a group implicated in dozens of electoral fraud cases, theft of funds and, most recently, helping criminals interested in bringing child prostitutes to the U.S. would have been ruled ineligible for federal aid long ago. But think again, because these aid rats are experts at survival. FrontPage magazine reports that federal Judge Nina Gershon ruled that Acorn is eligible for the Obama administration’s proposed $4 billion in Housing and Urban Development grants within the $3.83 trillion federal budget proposal for 2011. That cancels the ban Congress placed on Acorn funding late last year after at least five of the group’s offices willingly aided undercover reporters posing as a pimp and prostitute to get federal funding for a brothel and cheat on their taxes.

See the story in the Arizona Republic called “Phoenix misses out on stimulus transit money.” The story says:

The first leg of the system, connecting light rail, the east economy parking lot and the heavily used Terminal 4, is scheduled to carry its first riders in 2013. The second phase would extend the train to the rest of the airport terminals and the rental-car center by 2020.The stimulus money would have accelerated project construction, connecting all three terminals to light rail and the parking lot by 2013.

EEOC Sues Trucking Company for Sexual Harrassment, Loses & Must Pay Trucking Company $4.56 Million

One of the unintended consequences of big government is that agencies have to justify their existence by finding and attacking windmills. Imagine being an Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC) worker whose job is to stamp out sexual harassment in the work place. Problem number one is you must sniff out the evil sexual-harassment-doers, and that is not so easy. Promotions and bonuses may depend on creating a track record of finding and stomping on the bad companies that practice sexual harassment in the work place. You must find and pursue cases to prove you are good at your job. What if instead of one EEOC anti-sexual-harassment champion of justice the EEOC employs ten or one hundred or one thousand?

Many times the power and unlimited legal resources (translation: money is no object) of the EEOC causes small businesses to cower and cave-in and agree to the claims made by the big, bad all-knowing EEOC. Most businesses just do not have the funds, the time or the willingness to engage in a lengthy and expensive court battle. Recently, however, CRST Van Expedited, a trucking company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, fought and won a very expensive lawsuit brought by the EEOC in 2007. The judge in the case said, “the EEOC has not compiled the failings of CRST’s managers in any meaningful way to show that CRST has a pattern or practice of tolerating sexual harassment in its workplace.” Oops! Three years of litigation and no evidence of sexual harassment in the workplace. The judge ordered the EEOC to take $4.56 million from the taxpayers and pay it to CRST Van Expedited for its attorneys fees and costs. That is a lot of money, but it illustrates how expensive it is to litigate, which is why so many defendants cannot or will not spend the money to defend against the allegations of the EEOC.

It would be nice if some heads rolled at the EEOC and the people who were responsible for pursuing this big loser case would be fired or at least disciplined and demoted. Unfortunately, government rewards incompetence so there is no chance the EEOC perpetrators will suffer any adverse consequences for costing the government $4.56 million plus the time and cost of EEOC personnel who wasted government resources prosecuting the EEOC harassment lawsuit.

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