Lawyer Who Won $2M for Libeled Jurist Is Now 'Junkyard Dog for Aggrieved Judges'
A $2.1 million libel verdict that attorney Howard Cooper won for a Massachusetts judge has made him a go-to-guy for irked jurists in a multi-state region.
Judges usually can’t directly reply to inaccurate media accounts without risking a legal ethics charge. But they can ask–and have asked–Cooper to pursue defamation claims on their behalf, according to the Boston Globe.
In addition to bringing at least two such judicial libel suits, Cooper, a 50-year-old partner of Todd & Weld in Boston, has also settled at least five more, according to the newspaper.
He’s also become a go-to guy for defamation claims by plaintiffs in other lines of work after winning a stunning $2.1 million for Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy in 2005 that transformed the attorney, as the Globe puts it, “into a combination of patron saint and junkyard dog for aggrieved judges.”
While some say judges should expect to take a certain amount of criticism as part of their job, Murphy pointed to hate mail he received after he was reported by the Boston Herald to have said, based on a third-hand account, that a 14-year-old rape victim should simply “get over it.”
Now-retired Virgin Islands Superior Court Judge Leon Kendall says he brought Cooper in from 2,500 miles away to sue the Virgin Islands Daily News over articles about his bail rulings because no local attorney had handled such a case, the Globe reports.
After winning a $240,000 verdict (since reversed by the trial judge, although Kendall says he plans to appeal), the judge calls his decision to retain Cooper “one of the best decisions I made in my life.”
