Capital Accounts is an occasional chronicle of the intersection of politics and legal policy in Sacramento.
Prominent trial lawyers don’t seem to have a problem with Brown’s evolving position on medical caps. Peter Hinton, Allan Steyer, Frank Pitre, Joseph Cotchett, Niall McCarthy and James Sturdevant gave Brown’s campaign a combined $20,000 last week.
The Consumer Attorneys of California, however, has not endorsed an attorney general candidate yet.
TIME TO PANIC?
Perhaps when Jerry Brown and his odd array of political bedfellows get together they can snooze inside a panic room. A Southern California manufacturer of entry-resistant hideouts gave Brown’s campaign $5,600 in September.
American Saferoom Door Co. of Westlake Village provides its clients with “the single most important means for reliably separating the home owner or employees from intruders,” according to the company’s Web site.
It’s unclear why American Saferoom supports Brown. No one answered the company’s phone last week, and a message was not immediately returned.
Jerry Brown and a panic room? You can bet the Poochigian campaign is already thinking of ways to tie the manufacturer’s donation to Oakland’s soaring homicide rate.
SIGN LANGUAGE
It took three tries but legislative Democrats finally got the governor to sign a bill banning gag clauses in medical settlements.
Assembly Bill 2260 prohibits civil settlements that bar victims from complaining to the Medical Board of California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill late last week without comment.
In 2004 and 2005 Schwarzenegger vetoed two similar bills that would have banned gag clauses in settlements involving almost any licensed professional in California. The bills faced stiff opposition from engineers and landscape architects.
This year, AB 2260 author Assemblywoman Gloria Negrete McLeod, D-Chino, tried a different tack. She tailored her bill to affect only doctors and surgeons. She also tacked on marginally related � but less controversial � language tightening restrictions on unlicensed foreign doctors working in California medical schools.
The cut-and-weave approach worked, despite legislative Republicans’ opposition.
Schwarzenegger also shunned his GOP allies in signing two other legal bills. The first shifts oversight of unaccredited and correspondence law schools from a state bureau on postsecondary education to the State Bar. State Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Santa Ana, has said the Bar will provide more scrutiny of schools whose students have historically low Bar exam passage rates.
The second signed bill requires a criminal court judge, at the request of either party, to tell jurors that they shouldn’t let their biases against someone’s “gender identity” or six other characteristics influence their decision. Known as the “anti-panic strategy” bill, AB 1160 was drafted after the 2004 criminal case against three men accused of killing Newark resident Gwen Araujo ended in a mistrial. The defendants argued that they panicked and killed Araujo after learning she was transgendered.
Schwarzenegger signed the bills without comment, so his rationale is unclear. But it’s hardly the first time this year that Schwarzenegger has strayed to the left of the Republicans’ party line. The general election is just five weeks away.
