11th Circuit issues 112 opinion reversing one of its own

The case is United States v. Farley, and I confess that I haven't read the whole thing yet. What struck me is that the court reverses Judge Beverly Martin, the newest member of the 11th Circuit, in an opinion she wrote as a district judge. She held at the district level that a 30-year min/man sentence was unconstitutional as cruel and unusual. The 11th Circuit, per Judge Carnes, reversed. This case might have legs to the Supremes...

We're second...

... to Rhode Island?!!

I demand a recount.

Well, we're trying to be first, with 41 arrests today. Here's the Herald coverage of all the mortgage fraud stuff going on.

So, will UBS settle? Trial is "looming" Monday. Judge Gold will have one last status conference this Friday.

BLT has a number of interesting posts, including this one on 11th Circuit nominee Beverly Martin. Looks like she will be confirmed...

Effective closing or a lemon in the Representative Jefferson case? We'll find out shortly. Here's the BLT coverage:

Lemons have an odd way of sprouting in the legal lexicon. Lemon laws protect car buyers. The Lemon test helps govern the separation of church and state. And today, lawyers for ex-Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) introduced what might be called "the lemon defense."
In closing arguments this afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Washington defense attorney Robert Trout told the jury that the FBI had targeted Jefferson in a sting operation, in which the bureau tried to catch him paying bribe money to the vice president of Nigeria. But when the money turned up in Jefferson’s freezer instead of the vice president’s house, Trout said, investigators realized they had "a lemon of a case."
"They decided they wanted to make lemonade out of lemons," the Trout Cacheris name partner continued on. “And before you can do that, you’ve got to squeeze a lot of lemons. And so they squeezed some lemons."
The "lemons" squeezed by the FBI, Trout said, were the witnesses who would eventually testify that they bribed Jefferson to use his congressional connections to set up business deals in Africa.

Obama nominates Beverly Martin to Eleventh Circuit

President Obama has nominated District Judge Beverly Martin to fill Lanier Anderson's seat on the Eleventh Circuit. She's been a district judge in the Northern District of Georgia since 2000 and before that was the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia for three years. She has sat by designation a couple of times on the Eleventh Circuit, the most noted case being Buckley v. Haddock, the taser case in which she dissented. (She wanted the video appended to the opinion, but the Court refused. After that, someone uploaded it to YouTube). She has a sense of humor -- check out this footnote (via Law.com): "Essentially, in the spirit of an old Woody Allen joke, Southern requests more time to finish a deposition that it apparently believes has not been very helpful." Then, invoking the joke from the 1977 movie "Annie Hall," she goes on, "Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says, 'Yeah, I know; and such small portions.'" A Macon native, Martin graduated from Stetson University and the University of Georgia School of Law.