Hot on the heels of a precedent-setting victory at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which allowed families to sue for pre-death pain and suffering damages on behalf of a loved one killed during a civil rights violation by law enforcement, Orange has had no shortage of headline-grabbing cases.
When Los Angeles teenager Christian Rodriguez was erroneously labeled a gang member and subjected to an injunction barring him from being outside after 10 p.m., Orange challenged all 26 Los Angeles gang injunctions containing such curfews on grounds they violated constitutional rights to peaceably assemble and travel freely. Rodriguez v. City of Los Angeles, CV 11-01135 (C.D. Cal., filed Feb. 7, 2011).
"They lost before I filed the case," Orange said, noting that in 2007 a state appellate court struck down the same curfew language in a Ventura County injunction. "Either nobody ever did the research and figured out it was illegal, or they did but weren't willing to challenge it because their client wasn't a straight-A student on a Housing Authority scholarship."
The city agreed to stop enforcing the curfew and establish a $30 million job training and tuition plan for the 5,700 class members. In an unusual move, the parties agreed to make the class benefits transferable to a family member and to provide class members the right to petition a judge to remove them from the injunctions altogether. Such requests are normally taken and decided by prosecutors.
Orange also succeeded in untangling the intellectual property of late entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., after children from a first marriage revealed the existence of a trust in 2012 said to grant them name and likeness rights.
"Reconciling that trust with a will that had already been probated and confirmed as granting those rights and more to family from the second marriage was difficult," Orange said.
He secured 62.5 percent of those rights for client Manny Davis, only child of the deceased second wife, and brought in friend and artist Lionel Richie to persuade all heirs to pool their rights for a Davis Jr. biopic produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura under Richie's musical direction.
— America Hernandez
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