Quick Hits (3/8)

This story reports that China is taking steps to reduce judicial bribe-taking: "'Judicial justice represents the base line for social justice, but when judges take bribe money from lawyers working for the parties involved in lawsuits, the dignity of law and authority of justice eroded and tarnished,' said Li Guoguang, a NPC deputy and vice president of the Supreme People's Court."    . . .     Professor Lester Brickman, a long-time critic of plaintiffs' lawyers, doesn't have much nice to say about the new suits filed against the Thai government and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for failure to issue tsunami warnings after the Indonesian earthquake.    . . .     The Ninth Circuit reversed a death sentence because the prosecutor, who's now a judge, had cut a deal with a witness's lawyer to drop a charge in exchange for certain testimony -- but only if the witness's lawyer wouldn't tell the witness about the deal.  That way, the witness could testify with a clean conscience that he hadn't made that particular deal.  Although the dissenting judges were appalled by the conduct, they believed that any such falsehood was besides the fact, since the jury was aware that the testifying witness had been given transactional immunity for participation in all the crimes at issue.  The case was Hayes v. Brown, 05 C.D.O.S. 1972.  You know it's an amazing opinion when it begins, "[W]e consider whether a prosecutor's knowing presentation of false evidence and failure to correct the record violate a criminal defendant's due process rights."