So tennis great Serena Williams is being fined $175,000 for her obscene tirade against a lineswoman during this year's U.S. Open.

Take that, Jerry Garcia.

Suits & Sentences dislikes speech fines; particularly those, as in Williams' case, that are imposed on athletes for their verbalizations during competition. Witness, for instance, $10,000 fines imposed several years ago by the National Hockey League on two coaches who dared to publicly criticize referees.

Speech suppression is rarely a good idea; speech suppression by a monopoly that aims to fashion a particular public image for the purpose of maximizing profit is especially obnoxious. Just sayin'.

The Williams' fine, though, does provoke consideration of who else has been financially dinged for daring speak what's on their fevered mind. A very useful Washington Post chart from several years back, for instance, identified the Federal Communications Commission's fines imposed between 1970 and 2004. 

The first fine cited was imposed April 1, 1971 on radio station WUHY. The fine imposed: $100. The offense: priceless. As the summary states:

"Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia utters string of profanities."

In other words: spontaneous expressions uttered by a frustrated perfectionist in the midst of a performance are to be punished.

The FCC went on to pound broadcasters and radio personalities of much less talent with much bigger fines, from a $500,000 fine imposed for shock jock Howard Stern's 1993 "discussion of the size of actor Richard Gere's penis, among other sexual matters," to a $715,000 fine imposed in 2004 after "Bubba the Love Sponge describes sexual activity between cartoon characters, include George and Jane Jetson."

Of course, Jane Jetson was kind of hot...

An estimated 100,000 people reportedly bought tax breaks through the late, unlamented National Audit Defense Network. One by one, they continue to face the reckoning.

On Monday, it was Wayne and Nanette Risley's turn. The California couple lost their challenge in Tax Court; they are liable for about $11,000 in tax deficiencies and another $2,300 or so in penalties.

Here was the deal:

The Las Vegas-based National Audit Defense Network billed itself as a conglomerate of former Internal Revenue Service agents, enrolled agents, certified public accountants, and tax attorneys who could help U.S. taxpayers pay no federal income tax.

OK, the Las Vegas bit might have been the first clue that some funny game was afoot.

Anyway, the NADN informed participants that they could qualify for significant tax benefits by forming a Web site and then paying the NADN to modify the Web to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Somehow, this was supposed to render the participants eligible for tax credits and deductions.

It didn't.

Suits & Sentences will just flat-out assert: there must be attorneys working on the case McKesson Corp. v. Islamic Republic of Iran who were not yet born when the case was first filed in 1982.

And this case that makes Charles Dickens' Jarndyce and Jarndyce look like a day in traffic court still keeps chugging along. A weary sounding U.S. District Judge Richard Leon noted Monday:

"In its 27 -year history, this case has reached the United States Court of Appeals five times."

In his latest procedural decision Monday, an important one, Judge Leon concluded that McKesson can proceed with it case. Stated the judge:

"McKesson does have a cause of action under Iranian law...customary international law continues to provide McKesson with a cause of action...and the act of state doctrine does not apply in this case."

In brief -- very brief, McKesson accuses Iran of appropriating a dairy business established back in 1960. A 2000 trial concluded that McKesson was owed $20 million but there have been ongoing disputes ever since.

Convicted bank robber Ronald Mitchell is the epitome of the abusive litigant. As the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals noted Friday:

"(Mitchell) has filed at least sixty-five unsuccessful lawsuits and appeals in the federal courts, virtually all of
which challenged the legality of his conviction."

Vexing!

And in the ruling, the appellate panel rejected Mitchell's latest effort to proceed in forma pauperis. In other words, citing Mitchell's vexingly long litigation history, the appellate court said he'll have to pay his full court fees if he wants to continue.

But here's the thing. It appears that while Mitchell lost his latest court bid, his student counsel -- Sara Kaiser of the Georgetown University Law Center -- secured some useful precedent for other prisoners. Here's why.

Even as it rejected Mitchell's suit, the appellate panel led by Judge David Tatel concluded that "prisoners who face imminent danger of serious physical injury" may be exempted from the limits imposed on abusive prison litigants. As the panel states:

"Although IFP status may be constitutionally denied to prisoners who have abused the privilege...recognizing an imminent danger exception eases any constitutional tension that might result  from denying access to the courts to prisoners facing life threatening conditions."

Mitchell couldn't make this cut, but other prisoners in the future might. So here's a case, it seems to Suits & Sentences,  that Kaiser and her fellow student counsels -- James E. Burke, Tony Diab and Prashina Gagoomal -- as well as professor Steven H. Goldblatt might reasonably consider a short-term loss and a long-term victory.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has now delivered a victory for Washington, D.C. police accused of violating the constitutional rights of Washington, D.C. protesters.

Mass arrests will now be easier than ever.

In a ruling Friday, a somewhat divided three-member appellate panel partially reversed a trial judge's 2008 decision that the police had acted improperly when they conducted a mass roundup of demonstrators. Activist Sarah Carr and others had filed a class action suit, alleging the January 2005 roundup violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights, in part because police hadn't individually identified wrongdoing by each individual picked up in the sweep..

U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle had partly agreed, ordering the arrest records expunged. But now the appellate panel says: No so fast.

The panel members go into considerable detail about the riotous behavior of some demonstrators -- "Commander (now DC chief, Cathy) Lanier saw a number of marchers use their flaming torches to set fire to debris in trash containers along the street and the undercover officer witnessed marchers spray painting buildings and cars" -- before reasoning that police acted appropriately.

The bottom line: You will be judged by your associations if you are part of a crowd. Or, as the appellate court stated:

"Police witnesses must only be able to form a reasonable belief that the entire crowd is acting as a
unit and therefore all members of the crowd violated the law. A requirement that the officers verify that each and every member of a crowd engaged in a specific riotous act would be practically impossible in any situation involving a large riot."

A lawsuit charging that notorious well-known Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt, Jr. facilitated Iraqi acts of terror by paying bribes is now being transferred to Wyatt's home turf.

On Thursday, in what appears to be a victory for Wyatt's defense team, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. agreed to toss the lawsuit over to the Southern District of Texas. Reasoned Judge Kennedy:

"The major activities associated with the surcharge scheme that underlies plaintiffs’ claims, including the execution of oil contracts, occurred in Houston."

This case is amazing, though perhaps a long shot. Odelia Abecassis and other plaintiffs claim Wyatt and several oil companies knowingly paid illegal surcharges to the Government of Iraq and knew that the surcharges would be used to support and promote terrorist attacks.

Surcharges. That's one word for it. Wyatt ultimately pled guilty and served time in prison on charges related to illegally paying millions of dollars to Saddam Hussein's regime in exchange for rights to Iraqi crude oil. According to the lawsuit, "defendants knew that the Saddam regime used this money to initiate a 'financial reward and incitement program which rewarded the families of ‘martyrs’ and suicide bombers' in an effort to “'incentivize' acts of terrorism."

Showing this knowledge, and demonstrating a link between the surcharges and the terrorist incentive program appears pretty challenging, to Suits & Sentences' amateurish way of thinking. In any event, it's now going to be resolved near Wyatt's neck of the woods.

Hollywood. The land of broken dreams and broken promises. Where you hold your friends close and your enemies closer. Where betrayal and backstabbing comes with the turf. Where..

You catch the drift. We're totally talking Noir City.

So now, add Kristen Lewandowski to the roster of the disenchanted. A case recently decided by a Department of Labor Administrative Review Board lays bare Lewandowski's sobering introduction to the ways of the entertainment world. Unfortunately for Lewandowski, she lost her whistleblowing complaint against Paramount Pictures. Fortunately for those who seek to understand how the real world works, her complaint sheds light on the business.

Paramount hired Lewandoswki in May 2005 as a story editor in its Literary Affairs Department in New York. She was responsible for reading books and attending theater productions, and then advising Paramount executives about which might be turned into motion pictures.

Sounds kind of fun, though it's probably a real grind.

Lewandoswki reported to then-vice president Patricia Burke. She subsequently claimed, though, that Burke was leaking the contents of the production memos to employees of other potential producers like Scott Rudin. Lewandowski complained and was subsequently fired; she says, for blowing the whistle.

Burke left Paramount in January 2008, after 17 years; she since joined a firm called InkWell.

The Administrative Review Board, though, determined that Lewandowski's complaints about alleged corporate disloyalty didn't really relate to defrauding shareholders. Hence, she wasn't covered by the federal whistleblowing statute.

Fine. All Suits & Sentences is saying is: Hollywood reporters and insiders might want to check out the complete case file on this baby.