Advanced Crime Scene Investigation Workshop Sep 29, 08 - Oct 2, 08 An extensive 40 hour advanced evidence collection workshop designed to enhance experienced Crime Scene Search
Case Studies in Environmental Medicine (CSEM) The Case Studies in Environmental Medicine (CSEM) are publications designed to increase the primary care provider's knowledge of hazardous substances in the environment
Crime Scene Reconstruction Date: November 3-8, 2008
Location: Metropolitan Police Institute
This 6-day course presents the latest techniques in the systematic and methodical documentation of physical evidence at a crime scene.
Buried Body and Surface Skeleton Workshop Date: October 13-17, 2008
Location: Metropolitan Police Institute
This comprehensive 40-hour course is designed to instruct crime scene investigators, detectives, crime laboratory analysts, and others in the field of forensic science, the skills needed to successfully examine and recover human remains at the crime scene.
Today's Supreme Court opinion in Indiana v. Edwards is available on the Court's website. The case deals with the issue of the marginally competent defendant who is mentally able to stand trial but not to represent himself, yet he insists he wants to do just that, invoking the 1975 decision in Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806.
Today's decision recognizes that the Faretta right is not absolute. The "consensus" on which it was based was formed by cases that recognized there were limits, and that mental competence is one of those limits. See slip op. 9-10, CJLF Brief 7-14.
The decision appears to provide for leeway for states to set their own standards.
Godinez involved a State that sought to permit a gray-area defendant to represent himself. Godinez’s constitutional holding is that a State may do so. But that holding simply does not tell a State whether it may deny a gray-area defendant the right to represent himself—the matter at issue here.
This was a major theme of CJLF's brief. The Constitution should not be a tightrope where the slightest movement in either direction results in a constitutional violation. Between the extremes that may be considered fundamentally unfair, and thus constitutional issues, there should be a very broad channel within which states may make different choices as a matter of policy. The Court's bottom line today says "permits," not "requires":... Read More
Predictions of Kennedy v. Louisiana: Yesterday, Corey Rayburn Yung posted his prediction for the Supreme Court's decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana. In his post, Yung states that while he had earlier predicted that the Court might strike down Louisiana's law allowing the death penalty for child rape by "narrowing the class of defendants", Yung now predicts the Court's decision will focus on whether the death penalty for child rape is "cruel and unusual." Yung predicts the Court will "fudge" rather than "overrule" Coker. (We at CJLF do not think that either fudging or overruling is required, as Coker quite clearly left the present question open.) Yung predicts the Court will issue a 5-4 decision in favor of the state, with Kennedy as the swing vote. We could know Monday if his prediction is right...
The 5-4 United States Supreme Court decision in Boumediene is a significant loss for America but a significant boon to the McCain presidential campaign.
The slimmest of majorities issued an outrageous judicial activist decision that endangers America and allows Senator McCain to put the issue of justices front and center in the presidential campaign.
That majority ridiculously ruled that (1) the Gitmo detainees, aliens all, have habeas rights under the United States Constitution that can only be suspended through a valid invocation of the Constitution's suspension clause; (2) the procedures set up by the Detainee Treatment Act passed by Congress and signed by the President are not an adequate substitute for review of habeas claims in Article III courts; and (3) therefore the denial of federal court jurisdiction over detainee habeas claims amounts to an unconstitutional suspension of the detainees' habeas rights.
Senator McCain previously pledged to appoint justices like Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., both of whom joined Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in dissent, while Senator Obama voted NOT to confirm EITHER Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Alito and would appoint judicial activists.
Excerpts (citations omitted) from Justice Scalia’s dissent (joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas and Alito):
"Today, for the first time in our Nation's history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war…. The writ of habeas corpus does not, and never has, run in favor of aliens abroad; the Suspension Clause thus has no application, and the Court's intervention in this military matter is entirely ultra vires."
"The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court's blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today. The President relied on our settled precedent in Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950), when he established the prison at Guantanamo Bay for enemy aliens."
"[I]n response [to the Court’s 2006 ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld,], Congress, at the President's request, quickly enacted the Military Commissions Act, emphatically reasserting that it did not want these prisoners filing habeas petitions. It is therefore clear that Congress and the Executive—both political branches—have determined that limiting the role of civilian courts in adjudicating whether prisoners captured abroad are properly detained is important to success in the war that some 190,000 of our men and women are now fighting…. What competence does the Court have to second-guess the judgment of Congress and the President on such a point? None whatever. But the Court blunders in nonetheless. Henceforth, as today's opinion makes unnervingly clear, how to handle enemy prisoners in this war will ultimately lie with the branch that knows least about the national security concerns that the subject entails."
"What drives today's decision is neither the meaning of the Suspension Clause, nor the principles of our precedents, but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy. The Court says that if the extraterritorial applicability of the Suspension Clause turned on formal notions of sovereignty, 'it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal constraint' in areas beyond the sovereign territory of the United States. That cannot be, the Court says, because it is the duty of this Court to say what the law is. It would be difficult to imagine a more question-begging analysis.… Our power 'to say what the law is' is circumscribed by the limits of our statutorily and constitutionally conferred jurisdiction. And that is precisely the question in these cases: whether the Constitution confers habeas jurisdiction on federal courts to decide petitioners' claims. It is both irrational and arrogant to say that the answer must be yes, because otherwise we would not be supreme."
"Putting aside the conclusive precedent of Eisentrager, it is clear that the original understanding of the Suspension Clause was that habeas corpus was not available to aliens abroad, as Judge Randolph's thorough opinion for the court below detailed. t is entirely clear that, at English common law, the writ of habeas corpus did not extend beyond the sovereign territory of the Crown."
"Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of-powers principles to establish a manipulable 'functional' test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson's opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner. The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today."
Excerpts (citations omitted) from Chief Justice Roberts' dissent (joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito):
"Today the Court strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants. The political branches crafted these procedures amidst an ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough debate. The Court rejects them today out of hand, without bothering to say what due process rights the detainees possess, without explaining how the statute fails to vindicate those rights, and before a single petitioner has even attempted to avail himself of the law's operation. And to what effect? The majority merely replaces a review system designed by the people's representatives with a set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date. One cannot help but think, after surveying the modest practical results of the majority's ambitious opinion, that this decision is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants."
"It is grossly premature to pronounce on the detainees' right to habeas without first assessing whether the remedies the DTA system provides vindicate whatever rights petitioners may claim."
"Simply put, the Court's opinion fails on its own terms. The majority strikes down the statute because it is not an 'adequate substitute' for habeas review, but fails to show what rights the detainees have that cannot be vindicated by the DTA system.
"The only issue in dispute is the process the Guantanamo prisoners are entitled to use to test the legality of their detention. Hamdi concluded that American citizens detained as enemy combatants are entitled to only limited process, and that much of that process could be supplied by a military tribunal, with review to follow in an Article III court. That is precisely the system we have here. It is adequate to vindicate whatever due process rights petitioners may have."
"The Court today invents a sort of reverse facial challenge and applies it with gusto: If there is any scenario in which the statute might be constitutionally infirm, the law must be struck down."
"[In the majority’s view,] any interpretation of the statute that would make it an adequate substitute for habeas must be rejected, because Congress could not possibly have intended to enact an adequate substitute for habeas. The Court could have saved itself a lot of trouble if it had simply announced this Catch-22 approach at the beginning rather than the end of its opinion."
"So who has won? Not the detainees. The Court's analysis leaves them with only the prospect of further litigation to determine the content of their new habeas right, followed by further litigation to resolve their particular cases, followed by further litigation before the D. C. Circuit—where they could have started had they invoked the DTA procedure. Not Congress, whose attempt to 'determine—through democratic means—how best' to balance the security of the American people with the detainees' liberty interests, has been unceremoniously brushed aside. Not the Great Writ, whose majesty is hardly enhanced by its extension to a jurisdictionally quirky outpost, with no tangible benefit to anyone. Not the rule of law, unless by that is meant the rule of lawyers, who will now arguably have a greater role than military and intelligence officials in shaping policy for alien enemy combatants. And certainly not the American people, who today lose a bit more control over the conduct of this Nation's foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges."
The Justices who comprised the majority are the kind of activist justices that presumptive 2008 Democrat presidential nominee Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. would appoint.
The Justices who dissented are the kind of justices that Senator McCain would appoint: justices who would (1) interpret the law and the Constitution instead of make up the law, (2)deprive we the people of the right to govern ourselves and (3) refuse to use the power of the court to impose his or her personal or political agenda on the people.
The difference is critically important and stark.
The conclusion is clear: Voting for Obama would be insane. For the sake of America, "one Nation, under God," and constitutional fidelity, it must be McCain!
Michael J. Gaynor
Biography - Michael J. Gaynor
Michael J. Gaynor, born in New York in 1949, has been practicing law in New York for more than thirty years. A member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, he is now a solo practitioner and admitted to practice in the New York State courts, the United States District Court for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
In 1969 Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's innovative New College, then a three-year program supported by the Ford Foundation.
In 1972 Gaynor received his doctorate of jurisprudence degree from St. John's University School of Law. There he was in the top 10% of his class. He won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote an article on the Pentagon Papers case for the Law Review and two articles on obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer, in addition to overseeing the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law, then called "The Quarterly Survey of New York Practice."
The day after graduating from St. John's Law School, Gaynor joined Fulton, Walter & Duncombe, a Manhattan law firm with offices at Rockefeller Center. Gaynor worked with that firm, first as an associate and then as a partner, through 1996. He engaged in general practice, involving corporate law, federal and state litigation, mergers and acquisitions, trusts and estates law, tax law, and other areas of law, on behalf of the firm's clients, including International Flavors & Fragrances Inc., Carvel Corporation, Tenneco Inc., UniWorld Group, Inc., and Palisades Geophysical Institute, Inc., as well as substantial charitable organizations, other corporations and individuals.
In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed the law firm of Gaynor & Bass. For more than five years, Gaynor & Bass conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed upon appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The United States Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation. Bass, as a solo practioner, had filed the case on behalf of a group of freelance writers, and the United States District Court had granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment on liability.
He is a regular columnist at www.MichNews.com, www.renewamerica.us, www.webcommentary.com and www.postchronicle.comand has contributed to www.catholiconline.com, www.capitolhillcoffeehouse.com, www.yourcatholicvoice.com, www.intellectualconservative.com, www.starrjournal.com, www.therant.us, www.peoplepolitical.com and www.salon.com.
In 2005, Gaynor appeared as a guest on "Your World With Cavuto" (FOX Cable) to promote the eBay boycott that he initiated (see www.boycottebay.org/reports.html) and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the tragic Terri Schiavo case. He can be reached at GaynorMike@aol.com
The Health, Law and Society Program of the Columbia Law School is
pleased to announce a one day conference on Violence on Campus: Prediction,
Prevention and Response to be held on Friday, April 4, 2008 at the Law School.
The conference, which will feature academic experts from law and the social
sciences, policy makers and practitioners, is intended to bring together
professionals and academics to share knowledge and information, and to stimulate
research and innovative policy development in this area. We expect that
attendees will include university attorneys and administrators; counseling
center directors and staff; off-campus clinicians who work with students;
academics in mental health, law, and policy; students; and the
media.
With its grant of certiorari in the case of Chrones v. Pulido,
No. 07-544, the
U.S. Supreme Court ventures once more into the questions of habeas corpus,
harmless error, and deference to the state court's decision on direct appeal.
The Court addressed related issues last June in Fry v. Pliler, No.
06-5247.
The new case deals with the situation where a jury is given more than one path
to a conviction, of which one is right and the other wrong. The Supreme Court
addressed that situation in Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359
(1931).
Much water has passed under the harmless-error bridge since Stromberg.
In more recent cases, the Court has divided errors into "structural" and
"trial." Structural errors are reversible without any inquiry as to whether the
error was prejudicial in the individual case. Such errors are rare. Most errors
are judged under a harmless error standard. On direct appeal, an appellate court
asks if a federal constitutional error was "harmless beyond a reasonable doubt,"
the Chapman
test. On habeas corpus, and for nonconstitutional errors at any phase of review,
"an error is harmless unless it had substantial and injurious effect or
influence in determining the jury’s verdict," the Kotteakos/Brecht
test.(Fry, slip op., at 3, internal quote marks omitted.) More ...
Fortunately, Dr. Meehan's May 12, 2006 report signaled that not all
results had been included in it and the defense appreciated it, sought
the underlying documentation promptly, finally obtained it, ascertained
that multiple male DNA from others had been found and used that to
expose former Durham County, North Carolina Nifong as a despicable
liar, resulting in his removal from the case, disbar and jailing for a
day and the exoneration of the wrongly and wrongfully indicted Duke
Three.
Will the federal civil suit finally brought last year
by the Duke Three (David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann)
against the City of Durham, Michael B. Nifong and the DNA Security
Defendants (DNA Security, Inc., Dr. Richard Clark and Dr. Brian
Meehan), among others, be dismissed as against the DNA Security
Defendants?
The
Duke Three alleged in the suit that the DNA Security Defendants had
violated their civil rights and were liable for malicious prosecution,
obstruction of justice, intentional infliction of emotional distress
and negligence.
The brief submitted on behalf of DNA Security,
Inc. and Dr. Clark on January 15, 2008 (Brief) forcefully argued for
dismissal of every cause of action alleged against the DNA Security
Defendants.
The Brief listed the following as admissions by the
Duke Three: (1) "DSI accurately conducted testing that established that
no DNA evidence existed to support the claims of the alleged rape
victim...against Plaintiffs"; (2) "DSI accurately conducted testing
that contradicted Mangum's claim that she had not had sexual
intercourse with anyone other than Plaintiffs in the days leading up to
the alleged rape": (3) "DSI and Meehan reported all of the results of the DNA testing to Nifong and the police";
(4) "Meehan prepared a written report, as directed by Nifong, regarding
any matches between the rape kit samples and the DNA samples provided
by the lacrosse players": (5) "DSI produced to Nifong, who then
produced to the criminal defendants, all of the underlying, raw
data from the DNA sampling"; and (6) "Meehan truthfully testified in
court about how the DNA testing and reporting occurred".
The
Brief acknowledged that the Duke Thre had described Dr. Meehan's May
12, 2006 report as "false and misleading," but noted that they had not
cited "any statements in the report that they contend were not true"
instead "apparently contend that the report was 'false' because it did
not contain every opinion formed by DSI."
Alas, (1) DNA Security,
Inc. was retained by Mr. Nifong, not the Duke Three; (2) Dr. Meehan was
Mr. Nifong's expert witness, not the expert witness of any of the Duke
Three; and (3)in North Carolina (and elsewhere), expert witnesses
apparently have absolute immunity against suits like the Duke Three's
federal civil suit instead of a duty to report directly to prospective
criminal defendants or criminal defendants and a liability for failing
to do so.
If North Carolina wants expert witnesses to have a duty
to prospective criminal defendants or criminal defendants, it
apparently needs to create one, by statute, and spell it out clearly,
and prospectively, not retroactively.
The problem was that Mr.
Nifong "misrepresented to defense counsel and the court that the [May
12, 2006] written report contained all of DSI's conclusions," and the
DNA Securities Defendants are not responsible for what Mr. Nifong did
and did not do.
The law is based on the assumption that
prosecutors are righteous persons, not rogues, and therefore does not
provide a civil remedy for every wrong.
Unfortunately for the Duke Three, the law is not as helpful to them as they (and many others) want it to be.
Brief:
""[I]n this case as in every other, the prosecutor alone was
constitutionally charged with disclosing any exculpatory evidence. The
Constitution imposes no duty on non-prosecutorial parties, especially
expert witnesses, to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence to a
criminal defendant. Indeed, at most, those witnesses should disclose
potentially exculpatory information to the prosecutor, whose duty it
becomes to determine, in the exercise of legal judgment, whether
disclosure is warranted."
I believe that a witness who appreciates that he or she is dealing with a rogue prosecutor should do more, but the brief makes a persuasive case that neither the Constitution, nor federal law, nor North Carolina law obligates a witness to do so and the Duke Three now need to rebut it, if they can.
Fortunately,
Dr. Meehan's May 12, 2006 report signaled that not all results had been
included in it and the defense appreciated it, sought the underlying
documentation promptly, finally obtained it, ascertained that multiple
male DNA from others had been found and used that to expose former
Durham County, North Carolina Nifong as a despicable liar, resulting in
his removal from the case, disbar and jailing for a day and the
exoneration of the wrongly and wrongfully indicted Duke Three.
The
factual allegations of the Duke Three will be taken as true on the
motion to dismiss, but, the brief asserted, "[t]here is no allegation
that the DSI Defendants had any involvement with [Mr. Nifong's]
misrepresentations."
That would be a fatal flaw, if true.
Dismissal
is appropriate if a complaint does not "allege all of the elements of a
cause of action or facts sufficient to support such elements" (324 F.3d
at 765) or "the face of the complaint clearly reveals the existence of
a meritorious affirmative defense" (85 F.3d at 181).
As the
United States Supreme Court put it, a complaint should be dismissed
unless it includes "more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic
recitation of the elements of a cause of action...." (127 S. Ct. at
1965).
In deciding a motion to dismiss, the court need not accept
as true "unwarranted inferences, unreasonable conclusions, or
arguments" (213 F.3d at 180).
As the United States Supreme Court
wrote, on a motion to dismiss, courts "are not bound to accept as true
a legal conclusion couched as a factual allegation."
The Brief
essentially argued for dismissal as against the DNA Security Defendants
as follows: "Ultimately, Plaintiffs' allegations as to the DSI
Defendants come down to this. Even though the criminal defendants were
given both a report and all of the raw data generated by DSI, and even
though the DNA testing performed by DSI was accurate and exonerated
Plaintiffs, Plaintiffs do not like the way the report was written
(because it did not include information about DNA from males other than
the lacrosse players), and Plaintiffs object to the fact that the DNA
raw data was voluminous and difficult for the criminal defense
attorneys to understand (although the defense attorneys did understand
the data after some effort....Contorting those facts--taken at face
value at this stage of the proceedings--into a lawsuit against the DSI
Defendants is inappropriate. For...multiple reasons.... the claims
against DSI and Clark should be dismissed."
Have the Duke Three overreached?
The DNA Security Defendants say yes, because "expert witnesses are absolutely immune from suit," none owed a duty to the Duke Three and "Plaintiffs do not
allege that any of the DSI Defendants: (1) fabricated evidence; (2)
destroyed evidence; (3) made any false statements to the criminal
defendants; or (4) made any false statements to any court.
Brief:
"Under
long-established precedent, the DSI Defendants are entitled to absolute
immunity from all of Plaintiffs' claims , which arise from Meehan's
conduct (as the laboratory director for DSI) as an expert witness for
the State in the Criminal Action. A witness in a criminal
proceeding--whether a private citizen or a public official--has
absolute immunity from subsequent damages based on the witness's
testimony."
"Absolute witness immunity encompasses not just
activity at trial but also actions preliminary to trial and, indeed,
prior to the initiation of a prosecution. A witness has broad immunity
for actions taken 'in preparation for providing expert witness
testimony in the "due course of a judicial proceeding."'"
"The
justice system's interest in ascertaining the complete truth of matters
in dispute necessitates such a broad grant of immunity to potential
witnesses not only for their trial testimony, but also for their
participation in pretrial analysis."
Believe it or not, the Brief cited an appellate North Carolina case (Sharp v. Miller,
121 N.C. App. 616) for the proposition that "the application of
absolute immunity to claims about irregularities in expert witness
reports was so well established as to justify...sanctions"!
Did the Duke Three avoid the immunity problem by alleging a conspiracy?
A
Ninth Circuit case indicates that the answer is no: "[A]llowing a
plaintiff to circumvent...by alleging a conspiracy to present false
testimony would undermine the purposes served by granting witnesses
absolute immunity from damages liability under § 1983. Absolute witness
immunity is based on the policy of protecting the judicial process and
is 'necessary to assure that judges, advocates, and witnesses can
perform their respective functions without harassment or
intimidation."..."Any other holding would eviscerate absolute immunity
since a witness rarely prepares her testimony on her own." (201 F.3d at
1101-02)
Allowing immunity might strike us as outrageous in a
certain case, but the law is the law and in one case cited in the brief
it was held that a "laboratory expert had absolute immunity under
Section 1983 when, after discussions with prosecutors and officers, he
failed to disclose that two tests for victim's blood on defendant's
clothing were negative and instead testified that tests were positive."
The Duke Three have not claimed that the DNA Security Defendants affirmatively lied.
Did Dr. Meehan with Mr. Nifong and Durham police officers involve an actionable conspiracy?
Brief:
"Defendants' participation in a conspiracy is precisely the sort of
interaction between witness and prosecutor that is fully protected by
absolute witness immunity."
In addition, the Brief stated,
"PLAINTIFFS' SECTION 1983 CLAIMS FAIL BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT PREMISED ON
ANY DUTY OWED BY THE DSI DEFENDANTS," and elaborated: "Even if one
assumes that failing to discuss evidence in an expert report is
tantamount to withholding that evidence (even if that evidence is later
produced prior to trial), neither the Constitution nor state law
imposes any duty on the DSI Defendants to disclose potentially
exculpatory information directly to Plaintiffs. Under settled law, that
duty belongs to the prosecutor alone."
This is not a situation peculiar to North Carolina. As the Second Circuit held in Walker v. City of New York,
cited in the Brief, in dismissing Section 1983 claims against a police
department, witnesses have no "obligation with respect to exculpatory
evidence beyond disclosing that evidence to the prosecutor."
Bottom
line: Ironically, Dr. Meehan apparently did MORE than the law required
HIM and the other DNA Security Defendants to do as well as less than
the Duke Three (and their supporters) very understandably would have
preferred.Michael J. Gaynor
Biography - Michael J. Gaynor
Michael J. Gaynor, born in New York in 1949, has been
practicing law in New York for more than thirty years. A member of the
Association of the Bar of the City of New York, he is now a solo
practitioner and admitted to practice in the New York State courts, the
United States District Court for the Southern and Eastern Districts of
New York, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit.
In 1969 Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors
in Social Science, from Hofstra University's innovative New College,
then a three-year program supported by the Ford Foundation.
In 1972 Gaynor received his doctorate of jurisprudence degree
from St. John's University School of Law. There he was in the top 10%
of his class. He won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and
served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote an article on the Pentagon Papers case for the Law Review and two articles on obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer, in addition to overseeing the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law, then called "The Quarterly Survey of New York Practice."
The day after graduating from St. John's Law School, Gaynor joined
Fulton, Walter & Duncombe, a Manhattan law firm with offices at
Rockefeller Center. Gaynor worked with that firm, first as an associate
and then as a partner, through 1996. He engaged in general practice,
involving corporate law, federal and state litigation, mergers and
acquisitions, trusts and estates law, tax law, and other areas of law,
on behalf of the firm's clients, including International Flavors &
Fragrances Inc., Carvel Corporation, Tenneco Inc., UniWorld Group,
Inc., and Palisades Geophysical Institute, Inc., as well as substantial
charitable organizations, other corporations and individuals.
In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed the law firm of Gaynor
& Bass. For more than five years, Gaynor & Bass conducted a
general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented
corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably,
Gaynor & Bass prevailed upon appeal to the United States Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement
case, Tasini v. New York Times,
against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The United
States Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of
freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online
without permission or compensation. Bass, as a solo practioner, had
filed the case on behalf of a group of freelance writers, and the
United States District Court had granted the defendants' motion for
summary judgment on liability.
He is a regular columnist at www.MichNews.com,
www.renewamerica.us, www.webcommentary.com and www.postchronicle.com
and has contributed to www.catholiconline.com,
www.capitolhillcoffeehouse.com, www.yourcatholicvoice.com,
www.intellectualconservative.com, www.starrjournal.com, www.therant.us,
www.peoplepolitical.com and www.salon.com.
In 2005, Gaynor appeared as a guest on "Your World With Cavuto" (FOX Cable) to promote the eBay boycott that he initiated (see www.boycottebay.org/reports.html)
and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal
implications of the tragic Terri Schiavo case. He can be reached at GaynorMike@aol.com
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