Litigation: March 2008 Archives

         A self-proclaimed cosmic truth seeker with a Ph.D from Berkeley in Biology has filed for an injunction in United States District Court in Hawaii seeking to halt the work on CERN’s Large Haldron Collider in Geneva Switzerland. The plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, and his colleague Luis Sancho, believe something bad may happen when the collider is put on line. How bad? Remember when Ghostbuster Dr. Spengler warns it would be bad to cross the beams and Dr. Venkman asks: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"? Dr. Spengler responds: “Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.” That’s how bad.

 Not that the scientists at CERN or elsewhere agree. They are pretty sure the universe and the space-time continuum will not be irreparably harmed even though a few tiny black holes may be generated and some other things never seen since the dawn of time may appear. Other than that ….

             The Collider, the world’s largest, is the result of 14 years work by some of the world’s leading physicists and $8 billion pooled by various governments and foundations. The goal is to propel protons at such speeds that when they collide they will recreate energy and conditions equal to that  which occurred at the moment of the big bang when the universe was one trillionth of a second old. All this information and more is available on CERN's website which explains how safe the project really is and why it is important to conduct such research to unwrap the mysteries of the cosmos.

      Wagner and Sancho, however, are not convinced and believe a federal judge in Hawaii should issue an injunction to preserve the status quo otherwise known as all life as we know it. They are primarily concerned about two phenomena that could be produced by the proton collisions. The first are those miniature black holes.  Wagner thinks they just might begin sucking in all surrounding mass growing unstoppably in size and power like a giant snowball until they engulf the entire Earth and maybe the solar system. Or, even worse,  maybe these black holes could act as spacewarp wormhole portals into alternate universes that could pull us all through a rift in the  fabric of space-time into a parallel universe. Yikes!

        The folks at CERN don’t deny they just might produce these black holes; in fact, they are excited about the prospect. But they point to a 1974 paper by no one less than Stephen Hawking who theorized that such machine generated black holes would quickly and harmlessly evaporate in a burst of radiation. Whew! I feel a lot better, now.

          Of course, Hawking hasn’t written about those other things Wagner is worried about and which some physicists believe might just be produced. These are something called “strangelets,” primordial particles consisting of equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks. Not that I know what a quark is but physicists explain that when these heretofore hypothetical strangelets come into contact with ordinary matter they just might convert ordinary nucleii into strange matter, much the way Ice Nine operated in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle. So within a fairly short period of time every particle on earth just might be converted into dense shrunken strangelets. That would be bad.

          The lawsuit, filed March 21, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN  and its sponsors from proceeding with the Collider until they produce a safety report and an environmental impact assessment. In addition to CERN, the defendants are the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation. A scheduling conference is set for June 16, a few weeks before CERN is scheduled to bring the Collider on line.

Alan Milstein

In Glendale, California, the jury rendered a defense verdict in the malpractice trial over alleged negligence and liability in John Ritter's death. Jurors, who voted 9 to 3 against liability, said they were torn “between sympathy for Ritter's wife and children and their conviction that the doctors were blameless."

The family of John Ritter has sued Burbank's Providence St. Joseph Medical Center and the emergency room physicians charging failure to diagnose and treat the late actor’s rare aortic dissection in timely fashion. Ritter’s family had already received $14 million in settlements and was seeking another $67 million from the emergency room physicians who did not participate in the settlement. This in a state with a $250,000 cap on damages for pain and suffering. That 67 mil is the amount the experts projected Ritter would earn over the remaining course of his career.

Where to begin?
 
Soon to be ex-Governor Elliott Spitzer was caught on federal wiretap in what appears to be an "integrity/public corruption investigation". Apparently, Spitzer was involved in what was described as the high-profile "Emporers Club VIP," which was accused last week of offering prostitutes to wealthy clients, some at $5,500 an hour.

The wiretap transcript with Spitzer and "Lewis" (whom allegedly was an agent of the prostitution service) purportedly reads:

Lewis said that "Kristen" would go directly to room 871.

Again, allegedly, the story goes that Client 9 wanted a high-priced prostitute named Kristen to come to Washington on a 5:39 p.m. train from Manhattan. The instructions were that alllegedly, the door to the hotel room would be left ajar and train tickets, cab fare, room service, and the minibar were all on him.

That transportation across state lines created federal jursidiction over the matter because such conduct may be violative of the Mann Act.  Additionally, Spitzer purportedly paid for the prsotitution services through a direct charge to his bank account to a vendor of anonymous origin.  The frequency of those charges and their amount triggered bank officials to notify the Federal government of potentially suspicious activity.

Spitzer said:

"I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong,"  "I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself."

The case is being handled by prosecutors in the Public Corruption unit of the U.S. Attorneys' Office.  This one is going to go on for awhile.

John M. Hanamirian