A federal civil rights lawsuit has been filed against the city and a group of 25th district police officers.

31-year-old Erick Fields says he was fixing his car in his own garage last year, when police snuck onto his property and shot him in the stomach. The west side Chicago man reportedly needed multiple blood transfusions and emergency surgery to save his life. And he’s saddled with half-a-million dollars worth of medical bills in a shooting that his lawyer says was completely unjustified.

“The problem here is that they silently crept through his yard, onto the property of an innocent man,” according to civil rights lawyer Torreya Hamilton. “And then they shot him in his own garage without warning.”

Hamilton filed the civil rights lawsuit in federal court, Thursday morning.

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Federal judge Milton Shadur, who keeps a “Now, 3 for 10¢… Federal Judge!” sign beside him in his 23rd floor Chicago courtroom, summoned file-sharing lawyer John Steele to court this morning with those words. At issue was Steele’s representation of CP Productions, an Arizona porn producer suing 300 anonymous individuals for illegally sharing a film called (ahem) Cowgirl Creampie.

Shadur had already had enough of this particular litigation and had tossed the case not once but twice within the last few weeks. The first dismissal came because Steele had not actually served all defendants in the case within 120 days of filing it (Steele pleaded that he was still waiting on ISPs to turn over the names associated with the IP addresses he had provided).

via Judge eviscerates P2P lawyer: “I accepted you at your word”.

Jeffrey Colman, a Chicago lawyer, got a collect call Tuesday from a convicted murderer at Menard Correctional Facility in downstate Chester.

A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of Chicago and the surrounding area for The New York Times.

If only his clients at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp could have made similar calls.

Mr. Colman mentioned the call when I broached the latest news in the unseemly history of the camp set up after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Obama administration has flip-flopped, and as a result will wind up prosecuting the man accused of masterminding the attacks before a military commission at Guantánamo, in Cuba, not in a civilian court in the United States.

via Chicago Lawyers Caught Between Clients and Country – NYTimes.com.

The case involved CP Productions, “a leading producer of adult entertainment content within the amateur Latina niche.” The company ran a site called “Chica’s Place” from which a bit of material referred to as “Cowgirl Creampie” was allegedly downloaded illegally by 300 people. Though based in Arizona, CP Productions signed up with Steele, a Chicago lawyer, to bring the case.

Judge Milton Shadur was clearly annoyed that the litigation has been taking up his docket space. Back on February 7, he issued a memo saying, “It is an understatement to characterize [this case] as problematic in nature.” Four months after filing, Steele had still not contacted all of the case’s defendants. The judge wanted to toss the case.

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