Did UCSD deal in good faith with C.H.E. Cafe?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 22, 2014 CONTACTS: Bryan Pease, Esq. (619) 723-0369 bryanpease@gmail.com Rene Vera (619) 865-8696 grveraxxx@gmail.com

MEDIA ADVISORY

SAN DIEGO – On Tuesday, October 21, 2014, at approximately 10:00 a.m., San Diego Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal issued a ruling in favor of UCSD in the eviction lawsuit filed by the Regents of the University of California/UCSD at the behest of a select core of administrators (“Administration”) against the C.H.E. Café Collective over the use of the iconic 34-year old, vegan, student-controlled venue and creative space, the C.H.E. Café.

Upholding the Collective’s main legal theory, Judge Bacal rejected the Administration's claim that the dispute resolution provisions of the lease did not apply to the termination at issue in this case. However, she also found there was insufficient evidence that a formal request for dispute resolution had been made by the Collective, thus permitting the Administration to terminate the lease at will. Yet, the Administration had acknowledged a request for dispute resolution had been made but had argued it was mooted by a previous lawsuit filed by the Collective that was later dismissed.  In addition, the Collective was reassured in various conversations that it was protected by a ‘holdover status’ provision in the lease and that it did not need to worry about an eviction. 

Completely disregarding these earlier reassurances, the University filed its eviction lawsuit and argued in court that dispute resolution was never formally requested by the Collective.  

Ignoring the true facts and history of negotiations, the Administration was able to convince the Judge that the formal requirements for invoking dispute resolution had not been followed by the Collective, and the Court ultimately held that thus the Administration had a right to terminate the lease with the Collective.   

"I am glad the judge sided with our position that the dispute resolution provision portion of the lease applied to this termination," stated Bryan Pease, attorney for the Collective. "I am just a bit perplexed that the basis for ruling in favor of the University was lack of evidence that dispute resolution had been requested, when there was evidence before the Court that it had been, and when both parties addressed it in closing arguments. The University misled its own students throughout the last several years by consistently asserting that dispute resolution did not apply, and that the Collective did not need to formally request dispute resolution as part of the lease terms. Unfortunately, apparently applying the same tactics, the University was able to convince the Court that it had the right to evict the Collective at will.”   

Katherine A. Bacal is a judge for the Superior Court of San Diego County in California. She was appointed by former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in January 2008 to succeed Thomas C. Hendrix. 

Education

Bacal received a bachelor's degree from the University of Redlands and a J.D. from the University of Texas at Austin^.

Career

• 2008-2017: Judge, Superior Court of San Diego County
• 2000-2008: Attorney, Baker & McKenzie
• 1991-2000: Attorney, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher^[1]

Due to daughter's Facebook post, headmaster who sued for wrongful termination won't get $80,000 from Gulliver Preparatory School

A school administrator who says one thing and then immediately does the opposite?

It's good I was sitting down when I read this article.

Of course, Mr. Snay's and his dishonesty were probably of service to the trustees of Gulliver Prep for many years. I doubt that dishonesty is the reason the school let him go. More likely, he made the wrong parent angry.

I'm guessing he wasn't as tolerant of dishonesty among the students as he was with himself.

It appears that the school settled to avoid a legal battle. It would have been embarrassing for the school to have to reveal in court what really went wrong.

And I suspect that Mr. Snay didn't need the $80,000. He preferred to embarrass the school. I don't believe that he admonished his daughter to keep quiet about the agreement. And what about Mrs. Snay? Why didn't she warn her daughter to keep quiet? She was in on it, too, it would seem. She admits to helping her husband make the decision to tell the daughter about the settlement.


Patrick Snay's wife with daughter Dana
Dana Snay’s Facebook Post Cost Her Dad $80,000
American Wire
Posted by: Steven Kenniff
March 1, 2014

After Patrick Snay had sued the Gulliver Preparatory School for wrongful termination, and won, he was supposed to keep his settlement a secret. That was part of the deal when the school agreed to pay the former employee approximately $10,000 in back wages and an additional $80,000 out of court settlement. If Snay did not keep the deal a secret, he would lost the additional settlement. That should have been easy, except for one little problem. Patrick Snay had a daughter who attended and recently graduated from Gulliver Preparatory School, and she couldn’t “keep her mouth shut” about the settlement on Facebook.

Patrick Snay believed that he should tell his daughter, Dana Snay, about the settlement because she was a former student of the school at the time of her father’s wrongful termination. Patrick believed that his daughter suffered mental anguish due to the school attempting to lash out at her father through Dana. To help Dana have closure on the issue, Patrick told Dana about the out of court settlement, and had apparently agreed to pay for a European vacation for the girl.

In a typical teenage outburst, Dana Snay took to her Facebook account to brag about the settlement and tell her friends what she was going to get out of the money. Dana wrote the following message on her personal Facebook profile:

“Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver. Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.”

Sadly for the Snay’s, the school found out about Dana’s outburst and did not pay the out of court settlement. They claimed that because Dana posted the status update to Facebook in reference to the settlement, that he broke his agreement to keep it a secret. A settlement court agreed that the Facebook post was enough proof for the school to not have to pay the Snay’s their $80,000 additional settlement portion due to Patrick breaking the clause.


Ex-headmaster who won $80,000 age discrimination settlement against his school LOSES entire payout after his daughter posted 'SUCK IT' message on Facebook
By Ashley Collman
Daily Mail
27 February 2014

Patrick Snay, 69, worked at Gulliver Preparatory for several years when his contract was not renewed in 2010 He claimed age discrimination and won a settlement of $80,000 from the school

Patrick Snay is now the headmaster at another school while daughter Dana is studying at Boston College

The former headmaster of a pricey Florida prep school lost his discrimination case against the school when his daughter decided to brag about the $80,000 deal on Facebook.

Patrick Snay was the headmaster of Gulliver Preparatory in Miami for several years when they decided not to renew his contract in 2010.

Snay, now 69, claimed the $30,000- a-year school was discriminating against him based on his age and that they retaliated against his daughter Dana, then a student at the school.

Let go: Patrick Snay (left) worked at Gulliver Preparatory for several years when they decided not to renew his contract in 2010. He claimed they discriminated against him based on his age (he is now 69) and won a settlement

Good deal: Gulliver attorneys initially agreed to pay Snay checks of $10,000 in back wages; $60,000 for his attorneys and an $80,000 settlement

In November 2011, the school agreed to settle with Snay, paying checks of $10,000 in back wages, $60,000 to his attorneys and a $80,000 settlement.

But Snay never got a dime after Dana boasted about the win on Facebook - violating the deal's confidentiality agreement.

'Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver,' she wrote to her more than 1,200 friends. 'Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.'

That post was seen by current and former Gulliver students, and eventually made its way back to the school's attorneys.

Four days after the deal was signed, Gulliver notified Snay that he wouldn't be getting any of the settlement...

While Snay initially won an order to enforce the agreement, Gulliver appealed and won the right not to pay in Florida's Third District Court of Appeals yesterday.

'Snay violated the agreement by doing exactly what he had promised not to do,' judge Linda Ann Wells said. 'His daughter then did precisely what the confidentiality agreement was designed to prevent.'

As part of the agreement, Snay promised not to tell anyone about the agreement besides his wife.

In his deposition, Snay said he felt he needed to tell his daughter because she suffered 'psychological scars' from her time as a student at Gulliver and knew that he was mediating with the school's attorneys.

'We knew what the restrictions were, yet we needed to tell her something,' he said.

Snay is now headmaster at $20,000-a-year Riviera Preparatory School in Coral Gables. His daughter is now studying at Boston College, according to her Facebook.

Snay can still file a motion for rehearing and appeal to the Florida Supreme Court in the case.

Tony Robbins event ends in 'wails of pain' as attendees walk on hot coals

UPDATE: THE SCIENCE OF WALKING ON COALS
(SEE ORIGINAL STORY AT BOTTOM OF POST)

Burning Question: Why Do People Walk Across Hot Coals? By Piper Weiss Yahoo News July 23, 2012 In 1986, motivational speaker Tony Robbins explained his fire walking ritual to a captivated audience: "People have gotten first, second and third degree burns . . . Some have had skin grafts and three people have died...None of them attended my seminar." As of Thursday, that's no longer true. During a four-day seminar in San Jose, California entitled "Unleash the Power Within," 21 participants in Robbins' famed "fire walk experience" suffered injuries, including second and third degree burns. ...But physicist Bernard Leikind, who tried Robbins' fire walk years ago, has a different theory of why walking across burning coals is often less dangerous than it seems.

..."You're walking on things with poor thermal conductivity and poor heat capacity," he says in a Scientific American video. "Even though the coals are at a high temperature, they don't have as much energy as you might think and aren't good at putting it into your foot."

According to Leikand, you don't need confidence or a heightened mental acuity to fire walk successfully, you just need science and a little bit of luck. "Throughout the course of the walk, energy moves from embers to feet, then the walkers' blood carries some away," Leikand tells Yahoo! Shine. "If the energy carried away doesn't equal the energy moving in, then the tissue's temperature will increase... The degree of a burn arises from a combination of temperature and time...If they make it to the end before any damage occurs, the fire walk was successful."

As to why so many weren't successful, Leiklind speculates: "Some people may have walked slowly. Some people may have stepped out of the path of earlier walkers into deeper, hotter coals. Some people may have jammed embers between their toes. The organizers may have built their ember beds differently than they had before, perhaps on a different surface. Gusts of wind might have increased the rate of combustion. It's really hard to say." He does believe other participants who suffered less severe burns may not have even reported injuries. "They just would have headed for home and visited their physicians or the emergency room later."...



Walking on hot coals is not something I can imagine myself doing, but I think I understand how people do it. (Oprah succeeded!) The feat is accomplished, I believe, through concentration, confidence and relaxation. I suspect that those who succeed are able to maintain a steady transfer of weight, keeping a fast, even rhythm and steady pressure of their feet on the coals. If you don't believe it will work, it won't. Maybe it's also a bit like the old English legal test for truth in which a hot coal was placed on the tongue of an accused person to find out if he was innocent or guilty. Theoretically, an innocent person would be relaxed (hmmmm--not necessarily!) and would have a normal, wet tongue, but a stressed, guilty person would have a dry tongue. The innocent would not be burned.

Twenty-one people in California tried walking on coals, and wound up the unhappy victims of old-fashioned peer pressure.

Did twenty-one people suddenly forget all they had learned from Tony Robbins about mind-over-matter control of their bodies? Yes, I think they lost faith (and concentration!) when they heard other people screaming.

So why didn't they back off and say, "I think I'll pass this time. Maybe another time."

That's where the peer pressure came in. It seems that herd instinct took over when mind control was lost.

People stayed in line, kept walking, and ended up miserable. Let's not laugh at them. Normal people do exactly this every day. (We suffer economically, but we don't even institute banking regulations, much less put some bankers in jail. It's business as usual.)

And why didn't somebody step in and stop the catastrophe at the Tony Robbins seminar? Because our normal, everyday culture tells us not to question authority, to keep a low profile, to keep quiet. Lately we've had a lot of books calling this "girl culture", but boys are taught the same thing, just not to the same degree.

Whistle-blowers are too often ignored, and too often punished. If one of the supervisors had stopped the event, would he or she have been fired? If one of the participants had tried to stop it, would he have been thrown out?


Tony Robbins event ends in 'wails of pain' as attendees walk on hot coals
Over 20 people treated for burns after multi-day motivational event encourages attendees to take a leap of faith on coals
Matt Williams in New York
guardian.co.uk
21 July 2012

Burnt soles rather than cleansed souls awaited attendees at motivational speaker Tony Robbins's latest life coaching seminar, with 21 people needing treatment after a painful walk across coals.

During a four-day gathering in California entitled Unleash the Power Within, the famed lifestyle guru encouraged participants to take a leap of faith and test their luck on the red-hot surface.

Emergency services were called to deal with the fall-out, as many in the group suffered second- and third-degree burns. Three needed hospital treatment, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

"I heard wails of pain, screams of agony" one witness told the newspaper.

"First one person, then a couple minutes later another one, and there was just a line of people walking on that fire. It was just bizarre, man," Jonathan Correll, 25, said.

The injured fire walkers were among thousands who attended the Robbins event. As part of the multi-day seminar, a crowd were led to a park where 12 lanes of hot coals had been laid out.

A brochure for the Unleash the Power Within event suggests that once you overcome the fear of walking on coals of between "1,200 and 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit" you can "conquer the other fires of your life with ease".

A spokesman for the San Jose fire department told the San Jose Mercury News that it does not recommend that people undertake the endeavour.

Robbins has used fire-walking throughout his career as a motivational speaker and life coach.

In a statement, the Robbins Research International told the newspaper: "We have been safely providing this experience for more than three decades, and always under the supervision of medical personnel … We continue to work with local fire and emergency personnel to ensure this event is always done in the safest way possible."

Duke University reaches settlement with falsely-accused lacrosse players

CNN reports:

(CNN) -- Duke University has reached an undisclosed settlement with three former lacrosse players who were falsely accused of rape, the school announced Monday.

"This past year has been hard for many people who care about Duke -- for students, faculty, staff, alumni, families and friends -- and for the three students and their families most of all," the Duke board of trustees said in a written statement.

The three students posted a statement on Duke's Web site saying, "We hope that today's resolution will begin to bring the Duke family back together again, and we look forward to working with the university to develop and implement initiatives that will prevent similar injustices and ensure that the lessons of last year are never forgotten."

David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann were accused of sexually assaulting an escort-service dancer at a party in March 2006.

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper reviewed the case and exonerated the three men in April 2007, saying the charges never should have been brought against them.

The prosecutor who brought those charges, Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, was disbarred Saturday by a disciplinary panel that said he violated the majority of at least 19 ethics offenses in prosecuting the case...

Does our justice system work?

It is right that our legal system treats those who stand accused of crimes as innocent until proven guilty, but we don't have a law that says no one must ever accuse anyone of anything. If that were the case, there would be no point in having laws. Before the legal system can come up with either a “guilty” or a “not guilty” verdict, a prosecutor has to make an allegation of guilt. It’s bad enough that our flawed justice system often allows those with money and/or power to get away with serious crimes. But it’s even worse that our decision-makers conduct business behind closed doors.

Perjury Lawsuit hearing in East County on Feb. 16, 2007

Can lawyers suborn perjury with impunity?

That is the current public policy. But Maura Larkins has filed a lawsuit to change this policy.

I've put my complaint online. I'll try to scan the exhibits as soon as possible and put them online, too.


Click here to see the lawsuit.

Quote from pleadings:

The crime committed by defendants is particularly harmful to the public good because it involved two law enforcement officers.

In his dissent in Briscoe v. LaHUE, Justice Marshall stated:

"A police officer comes to the witness stand clothed with the authority of the State. His official status gives him credibility and
creates a far greater potential for harm than exists when the average citizen testifies.

The situation is aggravated when the official draws on special expertise. A policeman testifying about a fingerprint identification or a medical examiner testifying as to the cause of a death can have a critical impact on a defendant's trial.

At the same time, the threat of a criminal perjury prosecution, which serves as an important constraint on the average witness' testimony, is virtually nonexistent in the police-witness context.

Despite the apparent prevalence of police perjury, prosecutors exhibit extreme [460 U.S. 325, 366] reluctance in charging
police officials with criminal conduct because of their need to maintain close working relationships with law enforcement
agencies. The majority thus forecloses a civil sanction in precisely those situations where the need is most pressing."

Castle Park Elementary teachers should not be sued for perjury

Should teachers from Chula Vista Elementary School District be sued for perjury?

Of course not.

But their lawyers should. These lawyers, including Daniel Shinoff and Kelly Minnehan of Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff & Holtz, and Beverly Tucker of the California Teachers Association legal department, not only intimidated the teachers before their testimony, but instructed them to cover up the truth.

What teachers am I talking about? I'm talking about some of the teachers which the San Diego Union Tribune wrote about in articles and editorials published from the late summer of 2004 through February 2006. Editor Karen Winner and Don Sevren deceived readers into thinking that the problem was limited to the school principal, even though this principal came to the school after teachers had become embroiled in crimes and misdemeanors.

The teachers remind me of Osama Awadaliah, an honors student at San Diego State University, whom no one suspects of terrorism. NO ONE. But he was prosecuted for doing what Castle Park teachers did: denying being associated with criminals. Mr. Awadaliah had the misfortune to be acquainted with one of the 9/11 terrorists. He admits this. The US Attorney has prosecuted him because he denied being acquainted with a second terrorist. This is a silly way to spend tax dollars. No wonder Mr. Awadaliah's trial ened on May 4, 2006 with a hung jury. Even if he were guilty, he was merely doing what Castle Park teachers did: denying his association with criminals. In fact, officials admit that when they went to question him, he had no involvement in any crime. This is more than can be said for several Castle Park teachers.