Grandma's House

Good evening everybody! To start you off tonight, here's a little story from the Left Coast Report:

Everybody wants to get into the act. This includes Justice Robert Gigante, who just happens to sit on the bench in a Staten Island, N.Y., trial courtroom.

Gigante has been in the news before. As head of the Staten Island Democrats, he was apparently the one who leaked the news that Hillary Rodham Clinton was going to seek a New York Senate seat.

This time Gigante is garnering attention for some unusual judicial behavior.

Gil Lederman recently found himself a defendant in Gigante's courtroom. Lederman is a physician who once treated the soft-spoken, introspective Beatle George Harrison.

The doctor gained fame because reportedly while Harrison was on his deathbed, Lederman asked him to sign a guitar. George's widow, Olivia, accused Lederman of duress.

Lederman was in Gigante's courtroom because he had been accused of malpractice. The doc defendant was seeking to move the trial, claiming that he could not get a fair trial in the area because of the bad publicity surrounding the Harrison matter.

Judge Gigante ruled that the case be moved to the New York state capital of Albany and did so with lyrical flair. He wrote, "With apologies to the late George Harrison":

"Something in the folks he treats
Attracts bad press like no other doctor

He's in our jurisdiction now
He gets Beatle autographs somehow

And all I have to do is move this trial
Somewhere they don't know George Harrison

If this case I were to keep
Defendant would gently weep."

The Left Coast Report will take a judge who writes bad lyrics over one who writes bad law any day.

I wonder how long it took the judge to come up with these lyrics. He could probably get a job writing for some of the new groups out there, you know the ones who couldn't rhyme if all the letters were the same.