Wednesday happenings

1.  Nice win for Marc Seitles and Ed Kacerosky, which is covered by John Pacenti in the DBR:

For Seitles, it was the equivalent of going all in during a poker round. He waived attorney-client privilege and laid out what he had for prosecutors. Seitles decided to take "a different road with this case" for the man who was Colombia's air security secretary from 2002 to 2005.
"I never worked harder on something in all my life," he added.
The U.S. attorney's office had no comment on the charge being dropped. The document dismissing the charge Friday supplied no explanation.
Both Seitles and Kacerosky started working pro bono, knowing Ortega's family could no longer afford the long hours it took to root out the truth. Even though the government said it had a cooperating witness, Kacerosky found a co-defendant who told him authorities had arrested the wrong Carlos.
They went through hundreds of hours of phone calls. They found Colombian authorities mixed up not only two airplane brokers named Carlos, but a third who was nicknamed Carlos.
Ortega's family was in tears when they picked him up outside jail.

2.  The lawyer under the microscope of Judge Turnoff took 5 more than 80 times.  Via The Sun-Sentinel:


Disbarred lawyer Emmanuel Roy got a chance Tuesday to explain himself in a South Florida case where a federal judge found Roy behaved so outrageously that he should return $275,000 in exorbitant fees to a former client.
Instead of explaining, Roy invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination — more than 80 times in less than an hour — when called to testify in federal court in Miami Tuesday by the lawyer who is now representing Roy's former client.
"I'm exercising my Fifth Amendment right," Roy said in response to questions from lawyer Paul Petruzzi.
The answer was the same regardless of the question — does Roy have any bank accounts, has he hidden assets in other people's names, does he currently live with his wife, could he identify himself in a photograph? It got so repetitive that Roy, who is also facing mortgage fraud charges in New York, abbreviated his answer to "Exercising my Fifth Amendment right" over and over again.

3.  Jay Weaver covers Judge Moore's decision concerning in-state tuition prices for students who live in Florida but have non-resident parents:

A federal judge in Miami has ruled the state is discriminating against potentially thousands of U.S. citizens who live in Florida, by charging them higher out-of-state tuition as nonresident students simply because their parents may lack legal U.S. residency.
U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore found Tuesday that Florida's rule classifying such students according to their parents' undocumented immigration status violates the Constitution's equal protection provision.
"By virtue of their classification, (these Florida students) are denied a benefit in the form of significantly lower tuition rates to the state's public post-secondary educational institutions," the judge found in a 19-page opinion that was highly critical of the state's policy.
"This creates an additional obstacle for (them) to attain post-secondary education from one of the state's public institutions that is not faced by other residents."
Moore, who was nominated by President George H.W. Bush and confirmed in 1992, further found the policy "does not advance any legitimate state interest, much less the state's important interest in furthering educational opportunities for its own residents."

Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2012/09/04/2675656/judge-rules-against-florida-policy.html#storylink=cpy