Legal Ethics

Eastman Kodak Co. is seeking to nullify all federal court rulings since 1981 in Polaroid Corp.'s $5.7-billion patent-infringement suit, claiming the presiding judge has a conflict of interest because her husband's late mother owned about $100,000 worth of Kodak stock. In a motion filed in U.S.

After only a few hours of testimony, the State Bar on Wednesday dropped all charges against former San Francisco Mayor Joseph L. Alioto, but left his son, Joe M. Alioto, still accused of misconduct in the same 1975 antitrust case. Alioto immediately thanked the Bar court "for a just and fair trial which has resulted inevitably in complete vindication. . . . I was confident I could prove the charges were nothing more than vicious and baseless attacks on my reputation and my practice."

Until five years ago, flamboyant Wall Street lawyer Harvey Myerson was as renowned for his lavish lifestyle as he was for the high-profile corporate clients he represented. That's when one of them blew the whistle. Shearson Lehman Hutton, the major client of Myerson's law firm, went to federal authorities with suspicions that Myerson had overbilled for several years. A subsequent criminal trial in 1992 put Myerson out of business and into prison, convicting him of stealing more than $2.

First, the tragedy. Then life's seamier side crept into this impoverished dot of a town on the Texas border. Enter the ambulance-chasers. This was the site of one of the worst school bus crashes in history. As a bright yellow bus, packed with about 80 students, was making its way to the nearby town of Mission last September, it was hit by a soft drink truck and plunged into a water-filled gravel pit. Twenty-one students were killed and dozens more were injured.

A Ventura lawyer already facing drug charges may be in more trouble for asking female job applicants to sign a contract allowing him to engage in "sexual acts, touching, lewd behavior, etc." Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury confirmed Thursday that he will ask the State Bar to investigate the contract that attorney Douglas Andrew Palaschak admits he wrote.

At least 10 women paid a heavy price for deals the district attorney's office made with a jailhouse informant. They were kidnaped or raped. Some of the county's most respected career prosecutors made the deals, twice persuading judges to release the informant, Stephen Jesse Cisneros, from jail. Cisneros, a mentally disturbed sex offender, was in jail each time for attempted rape. In each case, prosecutors traded him his freedom for information he provided on murder cases.

Six attorneys who curried favor with a hearing officer for the state Department of Motor Vehicles by buying him meals, giving him money or offering other help will not be criminally prosecuted, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office announced Tuesday. In a report on the office's 17-month investigation, Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Healey said prosecutors believe that former Long Beach hearing officer Michael R.

A convicted murderer won a new trial Thursday because of his wife's secret sexual relationship with the Woodland Hills lawyer who defended him against charges that he arranged the killing of the woman's first husband. A state Court of Appeal, in the first ruling of its kind, held that the "on-and-off affair" between attorney William C. Melcher and his client's wife during the trial created a conflict of interest violating the right to effective counsel.

Over the last 14 months, five federal judges have ruled that Thomas Lee Goldstein, a 54-year-old former Marine imprisoned 24 years for murder, was wrongly convicted, largely on the word of an unreliable jailhouse informant. Yet even after a Dec. 4 ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that Goldstein should be released without bail, he remains in custody of Los Angeles County officials.

Attorney Pat Beall felt torn by nagging doubts. His client, William (Pop) Campbell, had privately confessed to him that he alone killed a barber during a robbery in this small town near Athens in the piney woods of Georgia's Madison County. But another man, Henry Drake, had also been convicted of the murder, largely due to Campbell's testimony. An innocent man was sitting on Death Row. Drake was not his client, Beall reasoned. Lawyers had to focus on their own client's best interests.