Attorney Gloria Allred, perhaps best know as a zealous advocate for women and women’s rights – and who unbeknownst to many represented Mackenzie Phillips in her divorce and was on Michael Jackson’s enemies list – spoke to Chris Yandek of the CYInterview.com about Roman Polanski saying, “He had the opportunity to live a good life, to be successful in his professional life, but to escape and avoid and the justice system – and now his time has run out. He needs to return and to face justice. And those who are supporting him may have different motives.”

Allred went on to question whether or not Hollywood big shots would support other child predators like Polanski, “I wonder if those who signed a petition in support of Roman Polanski intend to sign other petitions in favor of other sexual predators or is it just a rich and famous sexual predator who may have chosen to support.” She went on to add, “Roman Polanski can direct a movie, but he can’t direct the judicial system. He can produce a movie and he can’t produce necessarily the result he wants in the judicial system because that’s beyond his direction and control.”

She wants people to understand that Roman Polanski is not the victim, “He needs to serve his time. I think there is a lot of defense spin going on out there and allegations against a judge who’s deceased and can’t defend himself. I think there are those that are trying to make Roman Polanski the victim. He’s not the victim. There is a victim in the criminal case and that was a 13 year old, then 13 year old and the other victims are the people of the State of California whose law was violated.”

Chris Yandek is the editor of CYInterview, an outlet that features high profile interviews from Hollywood, sports, and news makers. His interviews are featured by numerous mainstream broadcast, print, and online outlets.

http://www.cyinterview.com

The group on Monday asked the justices to review a lower court decision that favored the NFL team on a legal technicality.

Seven Native Americans have been working through the court system since 1992 to have the Redskins trademarks declared invalid. A U.S. Patent and Trademark Office panel ruled in their favor in 1999. But they've been handed a series of defeats from judges who ruled that the plaintiffs waited too long to bring their suit in the first place.

A lawyer for the group says he'd like to see the highest court decide whether the Redskins' name defames Native Americans.

Seconds after Obama named U.S. Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his choice to replace retiring Associate Justice David Souter, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Republicans would treat the nominee fairly, but would closely examine her record.

"We will thoroughly examine her record to ensure she understands that the role of a jurist in our democracy is to apply the law even-handedly, despite their own feelings or personal or political preferences," McConnell said.

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., the number two ranking Senate Republican quickly followed saying the nominee should be "neither pre-confirmed nor prejudged."

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said he looked forward to ensuring that Sotomayor "has the qualifications and temperament necessary" to be the next Supreme Court justice.

Shelby doesn't sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee which will hold the confirmation hearings, but the entire Senate must vote Sotomayor's confirmation.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, a moderate Republican congratulated Obama for "nominating a well qualified woman."

In his announcement, Obama said he hoped Sotomayor would be on the bench by the time the Court's fall term begins.

Senate Republicans are going to have a difficult time attempting to block Sotomayor's nomination to the High Court.

The Democrats control 59 seats in the Senate, and this could increase to a 60-seat supermajority by the time a confirmation vote occurs if Al Franken ultimately defeats Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., in that state's still-contested Senate race.

Sen. Arlen Specter changed parties this spring, leaving the Republicans for the Democratic majority, giving them their 59th seat. He had been the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and would have led the GOP scrutiny of Sotomayor.

Tuesday, he said he "applauded" Obama's choice.

"Her confirmation would add needed diversity in two ways: the first Hispanic and the third woman to serve on the high court," Specter said.

The fact that Sotomayor is the first Hispanic to be nominated to the Supreme Court would make any challenge to her being confirmed politically difficult for Republicans.

Given the increasingly large proportion of the voting electorate that Hispanic Americans account for, it would be difficult for the GOP to oppose her selection.

In November's presidential election, Obama made double-digit gains among Hispanic voters compared to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in the 2004 election.

That didn't stop conservative groups from quickly noting their opposition to Sotomayor's nomination.

"Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written," said Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, a coalition of conservative groups.

Hispanic groups on the other hand greeted Sotomayor's nomination warmly.

"Judge Sotomayor is an outstanding nominee with three decades of judicial experience who will be a brilliant Supreme Court justice who serves the nation well," the League of United Latin American Citizens said in a statement.

Which is, after all, why they are called con men.

Bernard Madoff, the Wall Street trader accused of running the biggest Ponzi scheme in history — $50 billion — dealt in more astounding numbers than others but shares many of the basic qualities of Ponzi swindlers through history, according to law enforcement authorities and others who have studied such scams.

"They seem trustworthy because of their charm, their command of finance and the unshakable confidence that they portray," said Jacob Frenkel, a former Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement lawyer. "The Bernie Madoffs of the world are the people you want to sit next to on an airplane."

Much like the original Ponzi schemer, Charles Ponzi. He was an Italian immigrant to Boston who worked as a waiter, bank teller and nurse before he talked investors into sinking their money into a complex — and, it turned out, bogus — scheme involving postal currency.

His short-lived swindle in 1919-20 cheated thousands of people out of $10 million but was so wildly lucrative for some early investors that he was hailed as a hero in the Italian community. He was convicted of mail fraud and sent to prison before being deported in 1934.

A Ponzi scheme, or pyramid scheme, is a scam in which people are persuaded to invest in a fraudulent operation that promises unusually high returns. The early investors are paid their returns out of money put in by later investors.

"It used to be called `robbing Peter to pay Paul,'" said Mitchell Zuckoff, a Boston University journalism professor who wrote a biography of Ponzi in 2005.

Ponzi's scheme became one of the most famous con games of his time, and his name has been attached to similar frauds ever since.

People who run Ponzis generally fall into two categories: hucksters like Ponzi who plan to cheat investors and get out quickly, often fleeing the country, and people who start a legitimate investment venture but lose money, then try desperately to cover it up and dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole. Ultimately, it all comes crashing down.

Some have speculated that Madoff — once a highly respected figure on Wall Street and a former Nasdaq chairman — falls into the latter category.

Bookish and bespectacled with a wise smile, Madoff had multiple homes, fancy cars and memberships at exclusive country clubs. He gave millions to charity from his own fortune.

California's Supreme Court ruled that the state's Good Samaritan law only protects people from liability if the are administering emergency medical care, and that Lisa Torti's attempted rescue of her friend didn't qualify.

Justice Carlos Moreno wrote for a unanimous court that a person is not obligated to come to someone's aid.

"If, however, a person elects to come to someone's aid, he or she has a duty to exercise due care," he wrote.

Torti had argued that she should still be protected from a lawsuit because she was giving "medical care" when she pulled her friend from a car wreck.

Alexandra Van Horn was in the front passenger seat of a car that slammed into a light pole at 45 mph on Nov. 1, 2004, according to her negligence lawsuit.

Torti was a passenger in a car that was following behind the vehicle and stopped after the crash. Torti said when she came across the wreck she feared the car was going to explode and pulled Van Horn out. Van Horn testified that Torti pulled her out of the wreckage "like a rag doll." Van Horn blamed her friend for her paralysis.

Whether Torti is ultimately liable is still to be determined, but Van Horn's lawsuit can go forward, the Supreme Court ruled.

Beverly Hills lawyer Robert Hutchinson, who represented Van Horn, said he's pleased with the ruling.

Torti's attorney, Ronald Kent, of Los Angeles didn't immediately return a telephone call.

Ira Isaacs readily admits he produced and sold movies depicting bestiality and sexual activity involving feces and urine. The judge warned potential jurors that the hours of fetish videos included violence against women, and many of them said they don't want to serve because watching would make them sick to their stomachs.

"It's the most extreme material that's ever been put on trial. I don't know of anything more disgusting," said Roger Jon Diamond — Isaacs' own defense attorney.

The case is the most visible effort of a new federal task force designed to crack down on smut in America. Isaacs, however, says his work is an extreme but constitutionally protected form of art.

"There's no question the stuff is disgusting," said Diamond, who has spent much of his career representing pornographers. "The question is should we throw people in jail for it?"

Isaacs, 57, a Los Angeles advertising agency owner who says he used to market fine art in commercial projects, calls himself a "shock artist" and says he went into distributing and producing films about fetishes because "I wanted to do something extreme."

"I'm fighting for art," he said in an interview before his federal trial got under way. "Art is on trial."

He plans to testify as his own expert witness and said he will cite the historic battles over obscenity involving authors James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence.

One of his exhibits, he said, will be a picture of famed artist Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," a porcelain urinal signed by the artist in 1917.

Diamond said Isaacs also will tell jurors the works have therapeutic value for people with the same fetishes depicted on screen.

"They don't feel so isolated," Diamond said. "They have fetishes that other people have."

Isaacs makes a brief appearance in one of the videos he produced; others that he distributed were imported from other countries.

The business has been lucrative. At one point, he has said, he was selling 1,000 videos a month at $30 apiece. Then his office was raided by FBI agents who bought his videos online with undercover credit cards.

The government obtained an indictment against Isaacs on a variety of obscenity charges, including importation or transportation of obscene material for sale. Prosecutors have declined to comment about the case.

Jean Rosenbluth, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at University of Southern California, said such prosecutions were rare until the creation of the U.S. Department of Justice Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. Child pornography cases are handled by a separate unit.

"The problem with obscenity is no one really knows what it is," she said. "It's relatively simple to paint something as an artistic effort even if it's offensive."

The test of obscenity still hinges on a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which held that a work is not legally obscene if it has "literary, artistic, political or scientific value."

Jurors also are asked to determine whether the material in question violates standards of what is acceptable to the community at large.

"This task force was quite controversial and many in the Department of Justice felt that it was a waste of resources," Rosenbluth said. "Because of the pressure, they seem to have chosen the worst cases they can find to prosecute."

Each of the four counts against Isaacs carries a five-year maximum prison sentence. Prosecutors also are seeking forfeiture of assets obtained through his video sales. Two of the original six counts were dropped.

"A lot of this is about sending a message — `Don't make this stuff. Don't put it on the Internet. We don't want it here,'" Rosenbluth said.

Rosenbluth said prosecutors would be emboldened to pursue similar cases if Isaacs is convicted, though there would be lengthy challenges on appeal.

In an unusual twist, the trial is being presided over by the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Alex Kozinski, under a program that allows appellate judges to occasionally handle criminal trials at the District Court level. Kozinski is known as a strong defender of free speech and First Amendment rights.

Eight men and six women were chosen for the jury Tuesday. Two will be designated alternates later. The panel was to hear opening statements Wednesday before viewing the movies.

When jury selection began Monday, he urged prospects to be open about their opinions and incurred an onslaught of negative statements. Within the first hour, he dismissed 26 men and women who said they could not be fair to the defendant because they were repulsed by the subject matter. By day's end, half the panel of 100 had been excused.

"I think watching something like that would make me physically ill, nauseous," said one woman. "It's affecting me physically now just thinking about it."

One man fired angry comments at the ponytailed Isaacs.

"Hearing stuff about feces made me sick and the defendant looks like my ex-business partner who did some of these things. He looks guilty as sin to me," said the man. "It turns my stomach thinking about it."

Several prospects marched up to the judge's bench for private conferences when he told them that the films also involved violence against women. They, too, were excused, as were several who cited their religious beliefs.

Asked how long they would have to watch the movies, Kozinski told them it would be about five hours and "I will be there watching with you. This is part of the job we're doing."

Fonza Luke had worked as a nurse for Baptist Health System's Princeton Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama, for 26 years when the human resources department summoned her to a meeting about a new "dispute resolution program." Nurses, housekeepers, and lab techs crammed into a conference room where hospital administrators presented a form and told them to sign. Signing meant agreeing to submit any future employment-related complaints to an arbitrator hired by the hospital and waiving the right to sue in court. Refusing to sign meant they'd be fired.

Luke had known the arbitration agreement was coming, and she didn't like the idea one bit—"I just think it's unfair to be made to do something like that," she says. Sobefore going to the conference room, she slipped away to a pay phone and called her lawyer. He said, "Don't sign it. You'll be signing your rights away," she recalls. Luke turned in the form without a signature in quiet protest. A few weeks later, the hospital again ordered her to sign, and again she refused. Despite repeated threats, the hospital didn't fire her, at least not then.

Three years later, Luke traveled to Atlanta for a continuing-education class recommended by her coworkers. When she returned, the hospital fired her for "insubordination" because she had been cleared to take just one day off, not two. For 30 years, Luke had been an exemplary employee. Her personnel file was full of praise for her performance; a review three weeks before the firing called her a "role model." Many of the younger, white nurses Luke worked with had taken unapproved leave, she observed, and kept their jobs. So Luke filed a race and age discrimination complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (eeoc), which conducted a lengthy investigation, upheld her complaint, and recommended that Luke file a civil rights suit in federal court, which she did in 2003.

That's when the surprise came: Baptist Health argued that Luke had given up her right to sue back in 1997 when the hospital presented the arbitration agreement—even though she'd refused to sign. Simply by continuing to show up for work, Baptist's lawyers said, she'd agreed to the terms. Acting contrary to established contract law, which requires both parties to consent to a contract before it becomes binding, a federal judge accepted the hospital's argument. Luke was forced to take her civil rights case before Baptist's hired arbitrator, who dismissed it in short order. She had no right to appeal. She'd lost not only her job but, because she hadn't yet reached retirement age, part of the pension she'd worked toward for most of her adult life. Now Luke works night shifts at two health care facilities to make up her lost salary.