Thursday, March 11, 2010

Court dismisses ACORN suit vs. 'pimp,' 'hooker,' Breitbart.com; plaintiffs missed service deadline

A state court in Baltimore has dismissed ACORN's lawsuit against James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Breitbart.com LLC after the plaintiffs failed to serve the complaint on the defendants within Maryland's 120-day limit.
ACORN v. O'Keefe Docket

It was with great fanfare that ACORN, along with two recently-fired employees of its Baltimore office, sued last September over the surreptitious taping of the employees advising O'Keefe and Giles on running a prostitution business out of a house. ACORN's general counsel, Arthur Schwartz, told the Washington Post at the time that the defendants, young filmmakers O'Keefe and Giles, plus Andrew Breitbart's Breitbart.com LLC, which disseminated the videos, had committed "clear violations of Maryland law" against audio recording without consent from all parties. But ACORN appears to have lost interest in the case since filing it, confirming my suspicion that it was little more than a press release on pleading paper.

Under Maryland Rule 2-507(b), "An action against any defendant who has not been served or over whom the court has not otherwise acquired jurisdiction is subject to dismissal as to that defendant at the expiration of 120 days from the issuance of original process directed to that defendant." That's exactly what the court did March 4, with no apparent notice from the media that covered the filing of the lawsuit. The court's dismissal was without prejudice, meaning that the plaintiffs could theoretically re-file. But, as I argued shortly after it was filed, the lawsuit has substantive flaws that go well beyond the plaintiffs' apparent lack of interest in pursuing it.

9 comments:

  1. Well it's gonna be how the "fine folks" at Media Matters try and spin this one ...

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  2. Please specify that, regarding ACORN, you are discussing James O'Keefe III.

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  3. ACORN didn't have a chance in Hell to win a law suit against these heros.ACORN/SEIU are Communist outfits bent on taking America down...they scream and yell racism and every other ism when they are caught...but until the Progressive/Liberal Democrats cut all GOVT ties with them and investigate them criminally..we will be stuck with them....However...as long as Obamna is in office that won't happen either because he is neck deep in ACORN and SEIU.

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  4. You're dead on with your assessment. In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they are not. SEIU/ACORN (who can tell the diff?) filed the suit based upon the theory that people would remember how 'wronged!' they were by these kids; in practice they were never going to air their dirty laundry. Well done to the kids and you.

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  5. ACORN will always back off their threats of lawsuits. There is a little process called "discovery", and that would force ACORN to open up their books to the other side... and that is something they can never afford to do.

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  6. SteveCan said...
    "Well it's gonna be how the "fine folks" at Media Matters try and spin this one ...
    March 11, 2010 12:41 PM"

    They are going to claim it had something to do with the leap year.

    Granted there hasn’t been a leap year, but no one who believes Media Matters would know that or figure out how to look it up.

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  7. It is appalling to me how much everyone in the conservative and mainsteam media have ignored the fact that O'Keefe and Giles edited the tapes to alter the questions and responses in order to craft an air of criminality. See the Proskauer Rose and the Brooklyn DA reports ("The unedited videos have never been made public. The videos that have been released
    appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms.Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding" http://www.proskauer.com/files/uploads/report2.pdf). Acorn and the specific staffers smeared have a prima facie case of defamation against these clowns.

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  8. @Anonymous 8:16:

    The plaintiffs did not plead defamation for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who actually read the entire transcript, which Big Government made available: http://biggovernment.com/2009/09/10/complete-acorn-baltimore-prostitution-investigation-transcript/

    More here:
    http://patterico.com/2010/03/01/debunking-some-emerging-acorn-liberal-myths/

    ReplyDelete

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