New York Paralegal Blog

CHICAGO—One current and three former Chicago police officers who were members of the disbanded Special Operations Section (SOS), an elite city-wide unit, were charged today with federal civil rights violations for allegedly presenting false information and testimony to conceal unlawful searches or arrests during which hordes of cash were often stolen between 2003 and 2006. Two of the former officers were also charged with federal tax offenses, and one of them, Jerome A. Finnigan, is also facing a charge that was filed against him previously for allegedly planning the murder-for-hire of a former fellow officer who was a potential witness against him. The civil rights charges are new, and the other three defendants were charged with federal crimes for the first time today, following a lengthy joint state and federal investigation of the activities of rogue officers within the disbanded special unit. Seven other former officers assigned to the SOS have previously pleaded guilty to state c...

(openPR) CHICAGO – A jury in Chicago has found two Johnson & Johnson subsidiaries liable in the death of a Cicero, Ill., woman who died while using a Duragesic® patch, and ordered the companies to pay her family $16,560,000. The verdict in the case involving 38-year-old Janice DiCosolo, a mother of three, was delivered in Judge Thomas Flanagan’s courtroom in the Cook County Circuit Court, after a three-week trial. When Mrs. DiCosolo died on February 15, 2004, she was using a Duragesic patch that her doctor prescribed to reduce the almost constant pain she experienced as a result of a neurological condition called reflex sympathetic dystrophy. Duragesic is a patch containing a gel form of the drug fentanyl, which is 100-times stronger than morphine. More...