Eviction Attorney Arlington Texas

California's sentencing law violates the right to a jury trial because it allows judges to add years to a prison term based on their own fact-finding, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday in a case that will force the state to re-examine basic questions of crime and punishment.

The 6-3 ruling could take four years off the 16-year sentence of a convicted child molester from Contra Costa County who challenged the law, and it could shorten the terms of several thousand other prisoners who were given maximum sentences by judges.

It also requires the state to change its sentencing law while it struggles to contain the soaring costs of an overcrowded prison system.

"This is an opportunity to take an in-depth look at how things are functioning,'' said new Attorney General Jerry Brown, who as governor signed the 1977 law that the court struck down.

In a case with shades of the ongoing Hewlett-Packard spy scandal, a former HP executive claims the Silicon Valley giant secretly paid the former president of rival Dell Inc.'s Japanese division for trade secrets about Dell's competing entry into the lucrative printer business.

The bombshell industrial espionage charges are part of a countersuit filed Friday in federal court in Tyler, Texas, by a former HP vice president, Karl Kamb. He is among four high-ranking ex-HP employees accused by the company in a $100 million civil suit of stealing confidential company technology to launch a competing flat-screen TV business.

Hewlett-Packard claims it learned of the alleged fraud in 2004 when Kamb's wife subpoenaed the company's records for their divorce proceeding, and in the process requested information about Kamb's secretive business enterprise.

London (January 24, 2007) -- Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker LLP, a leading international law firm, announced today that it has advised Addax Petroleum Corporation ("Addax") in connection with the $1.6 billion re-financing of its banking facilities.

Addax is an independent, international oil and gas exploration and production company and this medium term refinancing of its external debt will allow it to develop further its West African oil fields and may assist with possible future acquisitions. This transaction is one of the largest "borrowing base" facilities completed in the oil and gas market. The lending syndicate was led by BNP Paribas S.A., Natixis SA and Standard Chartered Bank.

The transaction was led out of the firm's London office by partner Keith Wilson, who was assisted by asssociates Will McCallum and Jiten Tank.