Polk Law Blog

As reported here and elsewhere, the conviction of former Scott Lake Elementary principal John Stelmack was overturned recently by the Second District Court of Appeals (“DCA”). In an earlier post, I described the facts and legal arguments involved in this case. Briefly, Stelmack was convicted of possession of child pornography for images of children’s heads [...]

The text of the newly proposed bill to enable the state to move forward on the purchase of rail from CSX for Sunrail has finally been posted! (EDIT: Here is the house page for its version, with analysis.) During the last go around, I had a nagging desire to dig up the CSX agreement and [...]

Gov. Crist vetoed the so-called “State Farm” bill, HB 1171, which would have provided the state’s more fiscally sound insurance companies with the leeway to issue homeowner’s insurance policies largely free from rate regulation. I have spent a considerable amount of time reading as much as I can find about this bill and confess that [...]

The Ledger reported recently about the sentencing of a Davenport resident to the mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison for firing a gun to run his daughter’s boyfriend out of the house.  It’s not hard, looking at the text of the law itself, to predict a problem of exactly this sort. As a result, one [...]

This past legislative session, HB 903 was passed which restored a cap on plaintiff’s attorney’s fees in workers’ compensation cases. This bill was heavily lobbied on both sides, pitting various business organizations and insurance companies against the plaintiffs’ workers’ comp attorneys and certain unions. Was the lofty rhetoric spewed by either side accurate? Does the [...]