A two million dollar lawsuit against former Newton County Sheriff Ron Doerge has been pushed back a week.
Documents filed today in U. S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri indicate the trial for former inmate Donald R. Allen's lawsuit against Doerge will begin June 27 and continue through July 5 at the U. S. District Courthouse, 222 N. John Q. Hammons Parkway, Springfield.
Each party will be required to have all exhibits, motions, and a list of all witnesses ready by May 16, according to the court document.
Though many lawsuits against Doerge based on conditions in the jail have been dismissed over the years, Donald Richard Allen's suit has been winding its way through the federal court system since June 2, 2000. Allen's complaint stems from the way Doerge, head jailer Bob Sullivan and others responded to his request for medical treatment, according to the lawsuit. Allen's stay in the Newton County Jail began on Jan. 19, 2000. "I stated that I had emphysema and I need medication for this condition," he said. "I had my wife provide them with my medication and they refused to allow me access to it or refused to give it to me during med calls."Allen said I was not given access to grievance forms to lodge his complaints.He said he wants to see "a policy change within the Newton County Jail to insure no one else is treated in this manner."
Allen is asking for $1 million in damages and an additional $1 million in punitive damages.
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Diamond R-4 Board of Education members are scheduled to review the results of the 2003-2004 audit when they meet 7 p.m. today in the high school hospitality room. No mention was made on the agenda if any decision will be made on a proposal to require drug testing of student athletes, but that doesn't mean it won't be discussed. Diamond school officials make a habit of providing only a barebones agenda and only listing the people who will make presentations and not any of what they will be talking about. High School Principal Jim Cummins, who has been researching the topic, is listed on the agenda.
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A McDonald County inmate has been given until Feb. 4 to return civil right complaint forms against the sheriff's department to U. S. District Court Judge Gary A. Fenner. William Shayne Poole is suing former McDonald County Sheriff Robert Evenson, who was defeated in his re-election attempt and one of his deputies who apparently has a penchant for correcting the grammar and spelling on prisoners' grievance forms.
In his lawsuit, Poole asks for an audit of the prison commissary, claiming money is missing from inmate accounts. He claims prison officials did not allow him to receive medication, causing him to have seizures and forcing his hospitalization.
As reported last month in The Turner Report, Poole said he filled out a postage request form to send a letter to the circuit clerk, but it was "brought back and torn up in front of me by Michelle Amos."Lt. Amos also ignored staff memos to provide Poole with his medication, he claimed.Poole also sent in grievance forms filled out by him and two other prisoners, all of which he indicates were corrected by Lt. Amos, though the deputy's signature on the forms is virtually illegible. In one dated Dec. 12, 2003, she denied a request by Poole to use the canteen and to see the sheriff, scolding him for not spelling using and sheriff correctly. Someone should have gone over her work since she wrote, "periods and commas need to correctly," then with a flourish, added, "Denied- ask your lawyer."Another Poole grievance, dated Dec. 4, was returned with an "F" grade and "-50" written on it. Poole was complaining about a deputy not giving him soap to shower with and being disrespectful toward him, even though Poole was told if he wouldn't play with the soap he could probably have some.On the same day, inmate Don Barkfelt also received an F, according to a copy of a grievance form entered into Poole's petition. Barkfelt wrote, "Was refused soap to take a shower and was very out of line with his language with us this morning." Lt. Amos replied, "Great story and introduction, but need and ending to this story.The third grievance filed over the soap situation, submitted by Joe Darryl Andrews, was also graded F. "English helps" and "sentence doesn't make sense" were written on the grievance form. "Please rewrite the request so it can be read and written correctly."Poole claims that when he filled out a form to file his lawsuit, it was torn to pieces in front of him by Lt. Amos.
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Former Hollinger Inc. CEO Lord Conrad Black will be interviewed as part of an investigation into financial wrongdoing at the company, according to an Associated Press article. Hollinger at one time owned The Neosho Daily News and The Carthage Press.
The article said investigators will spend about four months reviewing files before interviewing Black. Company officials claimed in SEC filings that Black systematically looted his company of millions and millions of dollars, including requiring newspaper companies that bought the small newspapers he sold in the 1990s to sign non-compete clauses that were totally unnecessary.
A report filed by the company to the SEC indicates that the sale terms when The Daily News and The Press were sold in 1998, during the creation of Liberty Group Publishing, also required Liberty officials to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for non-compete clauses.
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One of the best feature writers on any Missouri newspaper is Michelle Reagan who got her start when she attended Lockwood High School working for me at The Carthage Press. If you get a chance, check out the Features section on the Jefferson City News-Tribune website link, featured elsewhere on this page. Michelle wrote an excellent little profile of the family of former Missouri Governor Bob Holden as it prepared to leave the governor's mansion.
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I received quite a few comments when I ran a few items on people who left the local television markets and have gone on to other venues. I still have as many people coming to this site to find out about Malorie Maddox as I do about the other three hot topics, Ron Doerge, O'Sullivan Industries and the Nexstar-Cable One feud.
Of course, the names that have been most prominent have been former KOAM reporter Brian Williams, who recently replaced Tom Brokaw as anchor of the NBC Nightly News, and former KODE weather reporter Marny Stanier who has filed an age discrimination lawsuit after being fired by The Weather Channel after 15 years.
Another former local who has gone on to bigger things is former KSN sports reporter John Boruk, who is now a sports anchor and reporter at WDIV-4, the NBC affiliate in Detroit. Boruk was in the Joplin area close to 10 years ago, then spent time at KOLR in Springfield and about five years at Nashville, winning three local Emmys and was nominated for eight others in the process.
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The simultaneous editorials ran by Nexstar Broadcasting on KODE and KSNF at the beginning of the 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts Tuesday night was just another example of the nonsense of claiming that the two stations have different owners.
The simple fact is all of Mission Broadcasting's stations, including KODE, are operated by Nexstar and the lunacy of calling Mission Broadcasting an actual business instead of a thinly-disguised method of getting around Federal Communications Commission rules was spelled out thoroughly in an article in the Jan. 11, 2004, edition of the Akron, Ohio, Beacon Journal.
Mission Broadcasting is run out of the home of Rev. David Smith, pastor of the St. Paul Lutheran Center in Akron, according to the article, which describes the home of Mission Broadcasting as "the tidy white house on a quiet street."
To quote from the article, "Mission Broadcasting, despite its biblical-sounding name, is not a religious broadcaster. It owns an assortment of CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox affiliates. Its stations run the normal fare of college football games, reality shows, Seinfeld reruns and local news.
"The Smiths' house is not a television nerve center like CNN's headquarters in Atlanta. And it doesn't have transmission towers in the back yard. From the sidewalk, it looks like an ordinary house."
That's because, as the article points out, it is an ordinary house. Mission doesn't run TV stations, it holds station licenses and enters into agreements with Nexstar to run those stations, including KODE in Joplin and KOLR in Springfield.
The article describes the operation of the Nexstar-operated stations in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., which are similar to the way the Joplin stations are run. "The two stations have separate news anchors and reporters, but they share camera operators, live-satellite trucks, editors and engineers, and sometimes producers and directors."
This system has enabled Nexstar to dominate smaller markets, where owners are only allowed one station according to FCC rules. Even though the FCC treats Nexstar and Mission as two companies, Nexstar makes no efforts in its federal Securities and Exchange Commission filings to hide the fact that it is actually one. Nexstar guarantees Mission's debt, has options to buy all Mission stations at below-market rates if FCC rules are ever relaxed and receives virtually "all of the available cash generated by Mission's stations."
In the SEC documents, as noted earlier in The Turner Report, Nexstar officials claim to have a "controlling financial interest" in Mission.
This arrangement has not gone unnoticed by consumer advocates. In the Beacon Journal article, Liz Rose, a former FCC spokesman during the Clinton administration, gave her assessment of the Nexstar-Mission arrangement. "It sounds like a big loophole that hits a community exactly where it hurts," she said. "Companies that consolidate local TV business, in the face of rules that clearly prohibit it, have developed these clever, and I think, highly suspect legal fig leaves to defeat the obvious intent of the law. The losers are the citizens in those towns. The companies, to save money, are cutting back on local news, weather, and sports...the things that people really care about."
The article quotes Nexstar CEO Perry Sook as saying that David Smith "and his people" make all of the programming decisions for Mission and that he and other Nexstar officials have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
SEC documents indicate that Smith makes $200,000 a year as CEO of Mission. His wife also receives a salary, but Smith told the Beacon Journal that he has "no day-to-day responsibilities" with Mission. He did not know how many employees Mission had and couldn't explain his own company's business plan.
The Turner Report has learned that KODE employees are told to stick with the company line that Mission is actually in control of the station, but the company line is hard to accept since one year ago Mission Broadcasting had 65 employees at 12 stations, an average of 5.4 employees per station. It is hard to run a TV station with 5.4 employees.