See also
- Rodney King beating, another later Los Angeles major police brutality case.
- History of the Armenian Americans in Los Angeles
- Armenian diaspora
Garo Mardirossian | |
|---|---|
| Born | Garo Mardirossian 1956 (age 67–68) |
| Nationality | Armenian-American |
| Alma mater | B.A. Economics, University of California, Los Angeles; J.D., Whittier Law School |
| Occupations | |
| Years active | 1981–present |
| Employer | Mardirossian & Associates Inc. (formerly known as Law Offices of Garo Mardirossian) |
Garo Mardirossian (born 1956) [1] [2] [note 1] is a prominent Armenian-American lawyer practicing in Los Angeles. [1] Mardirossian has had significant law cases involving personal injury, civil rights, complex litigation, product liability, and constitutional law. Several of the cases he has been involved in have brought national and international attention, including the Dole bridal shower [1] and Thomas beating cases by different police agencies. The Dole Family case involved many victims, including the television celebrity female wrestler known as Mt. Fiji (Emily Dole), [3] [4] [note 2] and resulted in the highest monetary jury award against a policing agency in U.S. history. [1] [2] [note 3]
Rodney Glen King was an African American man who was a victim of police brutality. On March 3, 1991, he was severely beaten by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) during his arrest after a high speed pursuit for driving while intoxicated on the I-210. An uninvolved resident, George Holliday, saw and filmed the incident from his nearby balcony and sent the footage, which showed the unarmed King on the ground being beaten after initially evading arrest, to local news station KTLA. The incident was covered by news media around the world and caused a public uproar.
Loyd Jowers was an American restaurateur and the owner of Jim's Grill, a restaurant near the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. For the first 25 years after the assassination of King, Jowers testified that he was in the restaurant at the time of the assassination, a fact supported by the other witnesses in the restaurant.
Johnnie Lee Cochran Jr. was an American attorney best known for his leading role in the defense and criminal acquittal of O. J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. He often defended his client with rhymes such as "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit!" during the Simpson trial.
The McMartin preschool trial was a day care sexual abuse case in the 1980s, prosecuted by the Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner. Members of the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were charged with hundreds of acts of sexual abuse of children in their care. Accusations were made in 1983; nevertheless arrests and the pretrial investigation took place from 1984 to 1987, and trials ran from 1987 to 1990. The case lasted seven years but resulted in no convictions, and all charges were dropped in 1990. By the case's end, it had become the longest and most expensive series of criminal trials in American history. The case was part of day-care sex-abuse hysteria, a moral panic over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Mark John Geragos is an American criminal defense lawyer and the managing partner of Geragos & Geragos, in Los Angeles.
The 1992 Los Angeles riots were a series of riots and civil disturbances that occurred in Los Angeles County, California, United States, during April and May 1992. Unrest began in South Central Los Angeles on April 29, after a jury acquitted four officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) charged with using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King. The incident had been videotaped by George Holliday, who was a bystander to the incident, and was heavily broadcast in various news and media outlets.
Gerald Leonard Spence is a semi-retired American trial lawyer and author. He is a member of the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame, and is the founder of the Trial Lawyers College. Spence has never lost a criminal case before a jury either as a prosecutor or a defense attorney, and did not lose a civil case between 1969 and 2010. He is considered one of the greatest lawyers of the 20th century, and one of the best trial lawyers ever. He was described by Richard Falk as a "lawyer par excellence".
The Rainmaker is a 1995 novel by John Grisham, his sixth.
The People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson was a criminal trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court starting in 1994, in which O. J. Simpson, a former National Football League (NFL) player, broadcaster and actor, was tried and acquitted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. The pair were stabbed to death outside Brown's condominium in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles on the night of June 12, 1994. The trial spanned eleven months, from November 9, 1994, to October 3, 1995.
Stuart Hanlon is an attorney based in San Francisco, California who represented San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr, Geronimo Pratt and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Stephen Yagman is an American federal civil rights lawyer, and general advocate, including criminal defense and habeas corpus. He has a reputation for being an exceptionally zealous advocate in cases regarding allegations of police brutality. He has argued hundreds of federal civil rights cases before a jury, and has been involved in over a hundred and fifty federal appeals and certiorari petitions before the United States Supreme Court.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD), officially the County of Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, is a law enforcement agency serving Los Angeles County, California. LASD is the largest sheriff's department in the United States and the third largest local police agency in the United States, following the New York Police Department, and the Chicago Police Department. LASD has approximately 18,000 employees, 9,915 sworn deputies and 9,244 unsworn members. It is sometimes confused with the unrelated Los Angeles Police Department which provides law enforcement service within the city of Los Angeles, which is the county seat of Los Angeles County.
Carl Edwin Douglas is an American civil rights, wrongful death, personal injury, employment, and criminal defense attorney specializing in police misconduct cases. He is best known for being one of the defense attorneys in the O. J. Simpson murder case, who were collectively dubbed the "Dream Team". Douglas was the managing attorney at the law office of Johnnie Cochran Jr., before leaving to establish The Douglas Law Group in 1998. The practice is now known as Douglas / Hicks Law. Douglas' other notable clients have included: singer Michael Jackson, actors Jamie Foxx and Queen Latifah, and former NFL safety Darren Sharper.
M. Gerald Schwartzbach is an American criminal defense attorney.
Kelly Thomas was a homeless man diagnosed with schizophrenia who lived on the streets of Fullerton, California. He died five days after being severely beaten by six members of the Fullerton Police Department whom he encountered on July 5, 2011, in what was later described as "one of the worst police beatings in [US] history."
Benjamin Lloyd Crump is an American attorney who specializes in civil rights and catastrophic personal injury cases such as wrongful death lawsuits. His practice has focused on cases such as those of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Keenan Anderson, Randy Cox, and Tyre Nichols, people affected by the Flint water crisis, the estate of Henrietta Lacks, and the plaintiffs behind the 2019 Johnson & Johnson baby powder lawsuit alleging the company's talcum powder product led to ovarian cancer diagnoses. Crump is also founder of the firm Ben Crump Law of Tallahassee, Florida.
Emily Dole was an American athlete, actress and professional wrestler. She is best known for her appearances with Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling under the ring name Mountain Fiji.
Stanley Martin Weisberg is a former prosecutor and Los Angeles County Superior Court judge known for presiding over the trials of the police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King, and of brothers Lyle and Erik Menéndez, in the trial for the murder of their parents. In a number of cases, he made controversial rulings that were subject to criticism.
Conspiracy theories about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a prominent leader of the civil rights movement, relate to different accounts of the incident that took place on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the day after giving his final speech "I've Been to the Mountaintop". Claims soon arose over suspect aspects of King's assassination and the controversial role of the alleged assassin, James Earl Ray. Although his guilty plea eliminated the possibility of a trial before a jury, within days, Ray had recanted and claimed his confession was forced. Suspicions were further raised by the confirmation of illegal surveillance of King by the FBI and the CIA, and the FBI's attempt to prompt King to commit suicide.
The Loyd Jowers trial, officially the King family vs. Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators, was an American wrongful death civil suit brought by the family of Martin Luther King Jr. against Loyd Jowers, following his claims of a conspiracy in the assassination of the civil rights leader in 1968. The jury would eventually decide in 1999 that there was a conspiracy perpetrated by Jowers and other conspirators, including various United States government agencies, to murder King and frame James Earl Ray as a patsy.
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