News & Notes

1.  Judge Turnoff's daughter is the news for doing good.  Wendy Atrokhov seems like a good egg!

2.  Apple rests.  The judge still isn't happy.  One quote: “I want to see papers, I don’t trust what any lawyer tells me in this courtroom.”  Yikes.

3.  DOJ finally agrees to free innocent prisoners.  Brad Heath of USA Today has the scoop:

The department confirmed Monday that it had instructed its lawyers to abandon legal objections that could have blocked — or at least delayed — the inmates from being set free. In a court filing , the department said it had "reconsidered its position," and that it would drop its legal arguments "in the interests of justice."

The shift follows a USA TODAY investigation in June that identified more than 60 people who were imprisoned for something an appeals court later determined was not a federal crime. The investigation found that the Justice Department had done almost nothing to identify those prisoners — many of whom did not know they were innocent — and had argued in court that the men were innocent but should remain imprisoned anyway.

Neither Justice Department lawyers nor defense attorneys would speculate Monday how many innocent prisoners eventually might be released. Some who were convicted of other crimes might receive shorter sentences; others might be tried for different offenses.

Chris Brook, the legal director of the ACLU of North Carolina, called the move "an encouraging first step," but said "much more has to be done for these wrongly incarcerated individuals." He said the department still had not offered to identify prisoners who were sent to prison for something that turned out not to be a federal crime.

4.  Jay Weaver covers "Queenpin":

The media have dubbed her the “Queen of the Pacific,” a rare woman who allegedly reached the top of the male-dominated Colombian-Mexican drug world with her feminine mystique.
She was featured in the famous drug ballad titled “The Queen of the Queens,” sung by a band called Los Tucanes de Tijuana. One line in the narcocorrido captured her essence: “The more beautiful the rose, the sharper the thorns.”
Her name: Sandra Avila Beltrán. The raven-haired 51-year-old — at least that’s what her arrest form says her age is — will appear in Miami federal court Tuesday for her arraignment and bond hearing. She was extradited last week from Mexico, where she had been arrested in 2007, on charges of conspiring to smuggle loads of cocaine into the United States more than a decade ago.
“She is very Cleopatra-ish, like the Queen of the Nile,” said Miami criminal defense attorney Lilly Ann Sanchez, who represented two other defendants in the same case. “She was able to maneuver her way in a man’s world and use the fact that she was a woman to her advantage in more ways than one.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/13/2950459/mexican-queenpin-faces-drug-charges.html#storylink=cpy