DID WALMART DISCRIMINATE AGAINST A MILLION WOMEN?

It’s an really, REALLY unfun month for big corporations trying to dodge lawsuits from gaggles of angry women.

First Walmart. Monday’s New York Times editorial explains the matter well.

For nine years, Wal-Mart has fought to stave off a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company has long discriminated against its female workers in pay and promotions. So far it has avoided a trial on the merits of the issue. The battleground instead is whether the million or so women who have worked for Wal-Mart since 2001 really constitute a class, which the company vigorously disputes. In 2004, a federal district court judge said they did, and in April the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling the case could proceed.

Now Wal-Mart has taken the class issue to the Supreme Court. It is probably a smart legal move, given the court’s clear tendency to rule in favor of corporations, particularly when big classes or discrimination claims are involved. We hope the court resists the temptation to toss out the case, which would force women to file lawsuits one by one. Wal-Mart’s employment practices deserve a full hearing.

Agreed.

It seems the whole thing started when nine women working for WalMart realized that they were being paid less than men who did the same work, plus the guys were being promoted more often.

A district judge who found in favor of the women noted that, according to statistics, women working in Walmarts in every region of the country were being similarly underpaid when compared to their male counterparts.

What the Supremes will have to decide is whether that means every one of the one million woman working at Walmart have been discriminated against. In other words, do the female workers at Walmart constitute a class? Or should their suits be—as a very jittery Walmart hopes—simply taken on a case by case basis.

One million women in a class action suit would make the Walmart action the largest employment discrimination lawsuit in American history—a stellar designation that Walmart would prefer to avoid.

WHICH BRINGS US TO PREMPRO—FEWER WOMEN SUING, BUT BIG POTENTIAL PAYOUTS

PremPro is the hormone replacement drug that, at one time, was the most popular on the market. It is made up of Premarin, a form of estrogen that is made from the urine of pregnant mares (gross, but there you have it), and Provera, a form of artificial progesterone.

Wyeth made Premarin, Upjohn, Provera. Wyeth eventually packaged the two together as PremPro. And, for years, doctors prescribed by the bucketful.

Around 20 years ago, however, some of the nation’s more research-savvy OB/GYNs stopped prescribing PremPro when other hormone replacements drugs were developed that more closely mimicked the body’s own original hormones, and thus were deemed safer (and had fewer side-effects).

Still the preponderance of American doctors continued to go with the familiar PremPro. To date, it is estimated around 6 million women worldwide have taken the drug.

Then in 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative made headlines when they stopped a massive study (sponsored by the National Institute of Health), after they found that women in the study who took PremPro were more likely to get breast cancer than those who did not.

PremPro-taking women with breast cancer wondered if Wyeth had suspected the risks and ignored them. Lawsuits resulted. Then more lawsuits.

Pfizer bought Wyeth around a year ago (and Upjohn in 2003)– along with it, as many as 9000 lawsuits filed by women with breast cancer who claimed that PremPro was, at least in part, to blame for their illness—and that Pfizer/Wyeth hid what they knew of its dangers..

At first, Wyeth/Pfizer was able to get a bunch of suits dismissed, but now the stronger suits are arriving in court, and the tide appears to have turned.

Out of the 12 cases that have thus far gotten in front of a jury, the score is Pfizer 5, women 7. (Here’s the result of one such case from last year., in which the jury concluded that the drug company purposely hid the risk of cancer.)

At the end of last week, Pfizer settled another case before trial.

Monday, a Pennsylvania Superior Court gave plaintiffs another win when she ruled that the two-year statue of limitations for women who allege their breast cancer was caused by PremPro started, not from the day they were diagnosed with cancer, but from the day the Women’s Health Initiative study was released.

Stay tuned. This issue is far from over.

On Tuesday, lawyers for 31-year old Cameron Douglas, the son of actor Michael Douglas, cut a deal with federal prosecutors for charges that the younger Douglas had moved quite a bit of meth and some cocaine over a three year period, plus been caught with heroin when he was supposed to be under house arrest. Under federal sentencing guidelines, the minimum for a crime like his was 10 years in lock-up. Again, that’s the minimum. In a Federal District Court in Manhattan, Douglas got half that: a 5-year sentence.

The NY Times reports on the Douglas story. And here’s what the AP had to say.

So did his famous family help? Oh, sure. Of course. It is preposterous to think otherwise. More likely having a family who could afford a smart lawyer, and who also knew how to make a good emotional case in 37—count ‘em—letters of support helped the most. There are a lot of federal judges who are sick to death of handing down monster sentences to people who are addicts looking to support their habit. Douglas appeared to be dealing in more quantity than that. But the letters explained that he was a poor little, famous parent-stunted, drug-addicted rich man/boy—yadda, yadda, yadda. Or whatever it was that Michael Douglas wrote. Gee, Officer Krupke and all that. And it’s likely true.

But the sentence wasn’t entirely out of line. Surely, the judge and prosecutors cut him something of a break. But he cooperated—translation, he snitched, or tried to snitch (It isn’t quite clear). Had he been poor and a gang member, he’d have done a lot more time. I know someone of about Douglas’s age who was sentenced earlier this year and fell into precisely all the same categories as Douglas—short the famous friends and family, and stellar opportunities growing up. (He got caught dealing for a duration of several years, but was no where near top of the pile, non-violent charges, cooperated with prosecutors, I mean, unlike Douglas, he named names.) But the guy I know is a former gang member from the projects and is doing 14 years federal time (and very relieved at that sentence. He knew it could have been a lot longer). So let’s not pretend that the goddess of criminal justice is blind to influence.

Still, speaking purely personally, it is hard for me to resent the five year, cut-down jolt as I can see no particular public good served by a longer sentence. Five years means that Cameron Douglas has a chance at making a life for himself, becoming a productive tax payer and a decent man. Let’s hope he takes it.

Are there lots of instances where others are at least as deserving of that chance?

Yep.

Here’s one random example. There are many, many, many more,

The murder rate in Cuidad Juarez exceeds that of Baghdad.

And there is no one better equipped to take you to the heart of the disintegration of this once lively, now deadly city than Tuscon-based journalist/writer Charles Bowden who has been immersing himself in Cuidad Juarez off and on for 20 years.

The result is his newest book, Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields

Bowden is a dream of a prose stylist, a deep and fine cultural analyst, as well as terrifyingly gutsy as a reporter (read the chapter about his meeting with the sicario, the Mexican assassin, and you’ll understand what I mean).

For those of you interested in such matters, you have two opportunities this week to see and hear Bowden on the subject of Cuidad Juarez and his attempts to make sense of the ghastly violence running rife through this wounded and wounding city.

On Wednesday, 4/21, Bowden will be in conversation with my pal, KPCC’s Aldofo Guzman Lopez at the Los Angeles Central Library, 630 W. 5th Street, LA, 90071, at 7 p.m. (There’s no charge but reservations strongly recommended.)

AND, because this weekend is LA Times Festival of Books weekend (more on that as the week wears on, and yes you should come to the LATFOB, or you’re totally missing out and I’m really, really sad for you) Bowden is, of course, on a panel—being interviewed by none other than very good pal, Marc Cooper. The panel is on Sunday at 3 p.m. at UCLA’s Rolfe Hall. (Also free, and reservations also recommended.)

The panel, titled, Life on the Edge: Violence and the West, also features the marvelous Deanne Stillman.

PS: I will be moderating a panel of fantastically cool writers on Saturday, at 12:30 in Haines hall. So mark your calendars immediately. More about this later.

Also, my pal Tod Goldberg will be on a panel at 2 pm on Saturday at Young Hall and, since he’s much funnier than pretty much anyone I know (or anyone you know), and he’s also a wonderful fiction writer, you should go to that too, right after. (More on this later too.)

Okay, yes, yesterday was Earth Day.

But I’m sure you’ll be happy to know, that today is a National Call-In Day that is a big part of Crack the Disparity National Month of Advocacy—- a month-long coordinated push to eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine.

Unfortunately for the organizers—and those of us who believe this to be an important issue—”Crack the Disparity National Month of Advocacy” (CTDNMA???), just does not have the snappy ring of say….. well…Earth Day.

OR

Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day, which also occurs today.

OR

International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Okay, that has its own problems this year, I grant you—and it’s not until September anyway).

In any case, here are the instructions should you want to participate:

To participate call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard right now at 202.224.3121, and ask to speak to your representatives in the Senate and House. Urge them to support and co-sponsor H.R. 265, the Drug Sentencing Reform and Cocaine Kingpin Trafficking Act in the House and legislation in the Senate that eliminates the 100 to 1 disparity between crack and powder cocaine.

(I’m guessing that, if you call, given recent events, it’s probably best not to talk like a pirate…but if you call today, in addition to the above-mentioned days, it is National Talk Like Shakespeare Day, which opens a host of possibilities.

And then Friday, it turns out, is National Hairball Day so if you call tomorrow you could…..

….oh, never mind. Just call.)

This is a real contender for this year’s bad judgment Olympics. How do we hate what these school administrator’s did? Let us count the ways.

Here’s the story (Jason Song of the LA Times reports):

Porter Middle School administrators believed a boy was dealing pot on campus. So they allegedly sent a student to buy some.

The sting worked — to a point. The student successfully bought drugs and the administrators at the Granada Hills campus reported the incident to authorities.

But although Los Angeles Police Department officers are investigating the suspected marijuana dealer, they also are scrutinizing the three administrators who allegedly orchestrated the buy, said Michel Moore, an LAPD deputy chief, on Wednesday.

It is a felony to ask a minor to buy drugs.

The administrators have also been reassigned by the Los Angeles Unified School District to positions away from the Granada Hills campus, which was named a California Distinguished School in 2007, while the investigation is ongoing. In a letter to parents, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said the school’s principal, an assistant principal and dean had been removed.

Thankfully, the kid whom the administrators recruited to be their narc, is not being investigated by anybody.

Read the rest.

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AND IN OTHER STUPID ADMINISTRATOR NEWS: It seems that the Corona del Mar school administrator who spiked the drama department’s idea of putting on the musical RENT has since relented.
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(Note: The kid in the photo has nothing to do with this situation. He’s just a random middleschooler.)

LAST WEEK I ASSIGNED some of my smart USC students to each write a 300-word news story explaining one of the propositions that will appear on the California ballot on Tuesday.

Below you’ll find clips from the resulting commentaries, with still more to come tomorrow.

(USC student Holly Villamagna’s assessment of Prop. 11, posted earlier, may be found here.)

ALSO TOMORROW, A FULL LIST OF ENDORSEMENTS.

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first…PROP. 6

Proposition 6 is a 30-page monster that is arguably the worst thing on the November 4 ballot—even worse, in some ways, than the loathsome Prop. 8 because the social and fiscal razor-blades it contains are so perniciously disguised.

When students, Sarah Eigner, Dina Diaz, and Chelsea Dunlap, researched the issue, they got quickly to the heart of the complicated and deceivingly written proposition (and they did it with out any nudging or cues from me).

Here’s what they wrote:

Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Riordan is the director of anti-gang operations for City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo’s office, and a former federal prosecutor. In other words, the guy is not anybody’s bleeding heart when it comes to gangs.

Yet, he is a nuanced thinker on the subject, and together with Delgadillo, Riordan has written a thoughtful article for Wednesday’s Daily Journal, the publication that LA’s lawyers, judges and other legal types all read religiously.

Riordan sent the article over to me figuring, quite rightly, I might find it interesting. I did, indeed, and thought you’d be interested as well.

(NOTE: The Daily Journal may be accessed by (really expensive) subscription only, so I have posted slightly longer excerpts than I usually do.)

In the article, the men talk about the fact that Mexico is experiencing a huge and very violent rise in gang activity. As a consequence, they write, the Mexican government is being sorely tempted to react to their new gang crisis with methods that are heavy-handed in the extreme. They point out that the purely hard-core/shock-and-awe approach to gangs is precisely the strategy that has repeatedly been shown not to work.

(Think Daryl Gates’ Big Blue Hammer.)

When it comes to gangs , the use of a bludgeon alone—i.e. enforcement without prevention and intervention—inevitably produces of host of unintended consequences—many of which could easily blow back toward us, and not in a good way, say Riordan and Delgadillo.

Now here are those excerpts:

The images are all too familiar: random kidnappings, police officers assassinated by criminal gangs, journalists killed in cold blood as retribution for their latest investigations, and, even judicial officers murdered for their roles in the criminal justice system. All this amid cries of foul play from victims alleging both criminal and official misconduct.

These are not scenes from the Iraq War or from Colombia’s showdown with the Pablo Escobar syndicate in the late 1980s. They are drawn directly from today’s headlines in Mexico, and from the border cities of Juarez, Nogales and Tijuana, the latter a mere three-hour drive from downtown Los Angeles. Indeed, this past weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported that children in Tijuana are suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder due to the alarming levels of violence there.

While the U.S. media has covered the violence, the Mexican government’s response, both legal and extralegal, has largely been overlooked. But Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon has openly declared “war” on drug gangs, and the mayor of Nogales, in Sonora, has called for the use of “heavy-handed” tactics akin to the surge in Iraq.

Make no mistake: Mexico is now undergoing a fundamental legal, as well as political, crisis; and the fabric of its legal system is being tested. As a result, current events in Mexico should be cause for close attention in our local legal community and perhaps even closer scrutiny.

[SNIP]

Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, the Washington Post Magazine ran an excellent cover story about one man out of the thousands upon thousands of low-level offenders who have served or are serving very long sentences for dealing crack cocaine. Here’s how the story begins:

ON HIS 18TH DAY OF FREEDOM, Michael Short awakened before dawn. In prison, corrections officers had paced the halls at night, jingling keys and shining flashlights. Now Mike slept fitfully, even in a king-size bed.

It was a damp, gray Tuesday late in February. He slipped on a pinstriped shirt that hid his tattoos, slid his feet into shiny new loafers and rubbed coconut oil into his hair, cut razor-straight at the temples and flecked with gray. He was 36, with a basketball player’s long-legged gait and the lined brow of a man well acquainted with consequences. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he nervously knotted a silver-and-white tie that his girlfriend had bought him at Macy’s.

….Over breakfast, he practiced the testimony he was scheduled to deliver that afternoon before a congressional subcommittee:

My name is Michael Short. I am here because in 1992 I was sentenced for selling crack cocaine. Before that, I had never spent a day in prison. I came from a good family. I had no criminal history. I was not a violent offender. But I was sentenced to serve nearly 20 years. I was 21 years old.

The writer, Vanessa Gezari, has done a masterly job of using a compelling human story about one person’s experience to illuminate the whole issue of drug sentencing reform—including how we came to have penalties for crack cocaine offenses that are so much more severe than for any other controlled substance.

I think you’ll find it to be a really interesting and worthwhile read, at the end of which you’ll know a lot about an important issue that is deeply intertwined with the future of American incarceration policy.

BUT THERE’S MORE….

On Monday at noon, journalist Gezari participated in an online Q & A with readers. The transcript of the discussion may be found here.

In 2001 Education Week told this story about the Bush Administration’s decision to be hard core in its enforcement of one part of the Higher Education Act.

When police found a small amount of marijuana residue in her car the day before her 19th birthday, Marisa Garcia was handed a ticket and sent on her way. After she was convicted of drug possession and paid a $415 fine, Ms. Garcia thought the incident could be put behind her.

But the California State University-Fullerton student later discovered that her minor scrape with the law had cost her much more: Ms. Garcia ended up losing her eligibility for federal student financial aid because of a change three years ago in the Higher Education Act.

“It was the first time I had ever been in trouble with the law,” said Ms. Garcia, who worked extra hours in a flower shop and turned to her family to help pay her tuition and expenses. “When I found out that if I was a murderer or child molester I would still be eligible, I really got mad.”

Hard to blame her. With cases like Garcia’s in mind, college students, financial-aid associations, and civil rights groups have been working since then to challenge or overturn the provision—with no luck. (335 organizations from American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers to the United Church of Christ favor overturning it.)

According to Ed Week, even Republican Congressman Mark Souder, the guy who introduced the 1998 legislation, has indicated that the law was never intended to “reach back” and affect students with past drug convictions. It was meant, said Souder’s office, to derail applications if kids were convicted of drug crimes while they were applying for aid. (An explanation that has its own illogic, but whatever.)

Yesterday one of the constitutional challenges to the law finally had its day in court, but the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected it. A new Ed Week blog post has the details (and here’s the ruling itself).

Constitutionality aside, why in the world would we want to punish a kid for some past transgression—particularly a kid who is trying to go to college?

Remember that the average high school graduation rate in America’s largest cities is at 50 percent, with cities like Baltimore, Cleveland and Detroit graduating even fewer. It would seem that if a kid does graduate and wants to go to college, we should be moving heaven and earth to help.

But instead we’ve got this idiotic provision that since 2001 has reportedly denied aid to approximately 200,000 students.

These are the days when I start to think some of our lawmakers really don’t like our nation’s children very well.

PS: And how has the media covered the story? Other than Ed Week and the wonkiest law blogs—I’ve found nothing. (Obviously, there are more important topics to explore.)

Another of the talented LA Weekly writers who’ve migrated elsewhere in the past year is Jeffrey Anderson. Jeff is an emblematic example of that much too rare breed, the crusading reporter. He has great street instincts, lives to afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted and rarely meets a wrong he doesn’t long to right. (While at the Weekly, he wrote about, among other topics, political corruption in Bell Gardens and Cudahy.)

Now Jeff lives in Baltimore and works for the town’s LA Weekly equivalent, the City Paper.

Earlier this year, I posted links to Jeff’s three-part series that connected dots in the LA-Baltimore drug connection,

Now, Jeff and his colleagues have been working on an investigative series that feels like it’s pulled straight from The Wire. This look at Baltimore’s shadow world involves the nexus of drug trafficking, respectable business and local politics.

Jeff sent me a link to the latest in the series yesterday. It’s an intriguing tale that makes for great reading and likely has many more chapters yet to come. But it’s scary stuff for any reporter to dig into, especially when one is working for the alternative weekly, not the town’s Tribune-owned, lawyer-heavy paper of record.

Here are the links to the pieces of the story thus far so you can follow along, and cheer Jeff on as he continues to dig.

1. Flight Connections

2. One Angry Man

And from yesterday...

3. Grave Accusations.…. in which a now dead prosecutor calls a local business man a “violent drug dealer.” (This last one’s by Jeff’s colleague, Van Smith.)

Photo above of murdered Baltimore-based Federal Prosecutor Jonathan Luna