Famed attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs dodged criminal contempt charges last month that stemmed from Hurricane Katrina litigation when a U.S. district judge granted his request for a dismissal despite acknowledging that “a cloud of impropriety” surrounded Scruggs' actions.

The ruling by Senior U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson is just the latest action in a case that began in 2005 with a pair of adjusters/sisters, Cori and Kerri Rigsby. The two were contracted by independent claim-adjusting firm E.A. Renfroe to work State Farm claims that were reported following Katrina. But when they suspected State Farm of committing bad faith against policyholders, the sisters copied thousands of pages of documents and shared them with Scruggs, the U.S. attorney for Southern Mississippi, the FBI, and the producers of the television show, 20/20.

The criminal contempt charges against Scruggs involved these documents. When Judge William Acker, Jr., ordered an injunction requiring the documents to be returned to Renfroe, an alleged meeting took place between Scruggs and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, which resulted in Hood “requesting” the documents from Scruggs. The end result is that this request enabled Scruggs to maintain access to the documents, with the implied reason being that it could be used as a leveraging tool to settle cases with State Farm (it is alleged that this took place without the Rigsby sisters' knowledge). The ethics of the situation were blurred due to the fact that a personal relationship existed between Scruggs and Hood. Scruggs could never ask Hood to request the documents; Hood was required to make that decision on his own. But prosecutors allege that Scruggs did exactly that.