Dead Men File No Petitions

From the newsletter of law firm Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth: “And last but not least, there’s the story of a Florida AM station whose renewal was granted earlier this year.
“An objector had argued that that application shouldn’t be granted because of an alleged ‘usurp[ation]’ of control of some other station by the renewal applicant, but the Commission rejected that objection because, well, it didn’t have anything to do with the station whose license renewal was the subject of the application.
“Never saying die – literally – the objector sought reconsideration with a petition supposedly signed by the objector himself on April 3, 2006. We say ‘literally’ there because, in its opposition to the petition, the renewal applicant demonstrated that Mr. Objector had in fact died in June, 2004, almost two years before his ‘signature’ appeared on the reconsideration petition.
“Since the uncontradicted evidence (the Objector, surprisingly enough, didn’t respond to the charge that he was, in fact, dead) established that the Objector’s death predated the filing of the petition, the Commission dismissed the petition.”