Wednesday notes ICYMI edition

1.  The Wilkie Ferguson Courthouse was closed yesterday for two hours while the feds dealt with a suspicious package.  This happens on a daily basis at the state courthouse and it doesn't cause lockdowns for two hours where no one can get out of the building.  What took two hours and why is it safer to lock people up in the building for two hours?

2.  The 11th Circuit website is down as we speak, but there were a few interesting opinions earlier this week.  One was by D.C. Circuit Judge Ginsburg on structuring, which really expanded what constitutes structuring.  Judge Rosenbaum thought the D.C. judge for the 11th Circuit (joined by her former boss Judge Marcus) went too far:

During oral argument in this case, the Court, in effect, asked counsel for the government whether a salaried person who earned $9,000 a week and deposited it in cash weekly, intending at least in part to evade the reporting requirement, committed the crime of structuring under 31 U.S.C. § 5324(a)(3). The government suggested that such a person did. Today the Court embraces this construction of § 5324(a)(3) as the law.
Granted, most of us do not have the problem of trying to figure out what to do with our $9,000-per-week salary, but this same logic applies to any weekly salary payment under $10,000. And it does not end with weekly salary payments. As a result of today’s ruling, in this Circuit, no matter how small a sum of money a person may possess or otherwise enjoy a right to control—even if only a few dollars—he may find himself facing structuring charges if he goes to the bank often enough to create the appearance to the government of engaging in a pattern of financial transactions of $10,000 or less. I suppose that we will discover in the coming years how frequent a bank visitor one must be to imperil himself, but, in any case, it is clear today that § 5324(a)(3) has taken on a far broader reach than Congress ever intended.

3.  Judge Rosenbaum wrote the majority of this other interesting opinion dealing with a dispute in the Glock family.  And yes, she fires away with lots of gun metaphors.  But I like the pop culture references like footnote 2:

Within four years of their arrival in the United States, Glock firearms worked their way into American pop culture in Die Hard 2, when Bruce Willis’s character John McClane made the remark, “That punk pulled a Glock 7 [sic] on me. You know what that is? It’s a porcelain gun made in Germany. Doesn’t show up on your airport X-ray machines, here, and it cost more than you make in a month.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099423/quotes (last visited Aug. 15, 2015). Ironically, the statement was factually inaccurate in just about every way.

Yippee Ki Yay!