Ft. Lauderdale federal courthouse progress

Good news for federal practitioners in Ft. Lauderdale... we are a step closer to a new federal courthouse.  Here’s the Sun-Sentinel coverage, which also mentions that Sen. Nelson is now aiming to get a new one built in West Palm Beach as well:

Celebrating the award of $190 million to replace the aging Fort Lauderdale federal courthouse, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson has set his sights on getting money for a new one for West Palm Beach, too.

Nelson requested U.S. District Judge William Dimitrouleas ask Chief Judge Michael Moore to form a task force to spearhead the effort for a new West Palm Beach district courthouse. Dimitrouleas is chairman of the task force created about a decade ago for Fort Lauderdale’s effort.

“We’re going to have to do the same for West Palm Beach because it has an old federal courthouse as well,” Nelson said during his Fort Lauderdale courthouse appearance Wednesday with Mayor Dean Trantalis and court officials. The West Palm Beach courthouse, built in 1973, is at 701 Clematis St.

Nelson said a site decision for the new downtown Fort Lauderdale courthouse could come from the General Services Administration as early as June and “then let’s get this project going.” He took a tour of the courthouse while officials pointed out many of the leaks that have plagued the building.

Reuben Cahn goes to DC

Reuben Cahn—the Defender in San Diego, the former first assistant here in the SDFLA, and all around good guy—argued in the Supreme Court today.  It looks like it was an interesting argument and that Reuben did very well.  Here’s the review from SCOTUSBlog:

The first case for argument in the Supreme Court this morning has a very interesting underlying issue: whether a policy of shackling all criminal defendants at pretrial appearances in a federal district court is constitutional.
But as United States v. Sanchez-Gomez comes before the justices, the questions presented are more procedural in nature, including whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had the authority to review the “interlocutory” appeal of a group of detainees after the federal district court upheld the U.S. Marshals Service restraint policy in the Southern District of California, which is based in San Diego.
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If Kedem comes across as the strait-laced, able Washington lawyer for the prosecution, Cahn has a bit of a Southern California vibe in his voice and manner.
“We believe the courtroom really is a sacred space,” he says, sometimes sticking his hand in his pocket and swaying back slightly from the lectern. “We believe judges control that space and assure that individuals come before the court with dignity and with autonomy and with their liberty interest protected, and that there was a well-established right at common law that, under this court’s precedent, is incorporated in the Due Process Clause to appear before courts free of bonds.”
Cahn mentions the notorious Newgate prison in London, where for centuries detainees faced “terrible conditions, shackled hand and foot, and without question, their bonds would be struck off for their arraignments.”

ICYMI CA11 Judge Julie Carnes to retire on June 18

Pretty surprising news announced late Friday afternoon — Julie Carnes, appointed by President Obama in 2014, is retiring.  This will give President Trump his third appointment to the 11th Circuit (Newsom, Branch) and a real opportunity to shape the small court.

It also shows a big difference between Obama and Trump.  If the measure is quickly filling openings with young judges who share your judicial philosophy on courts, Obama was slow and ineffective with his judicial appointments, while Trump  has been very successful. He has been aggressive, appointing young Federalist Society members in a relatively quick manner.  The Julie Carnes seat, for example, was open for quite some time before Obama cut a deal to put a right-leaning judge on the court, who only stayed for a few years.  Say what you will about Trump, he has been much more effective for his party on judicial appointments.

Carnes says she is going to “render substantial judicial service as a senior judge.”  That’s very nice, but she is also giving Trump an opportunity to replace her with a judge who will sit on the court for a long long time.

News and notes, Ultra Spring Break edition

It's Ultra time in downtown Miami, which means the lawyers will be fleeing around lunchtime today. And then it's spring break next week.

Scott Rothstein is writing his own motions. Paula McMahon has the interesting story here:

Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein is imprisoned and disbarred from practicing as an attorney but it hasn’t stopped him from flexing his jailhouse lawyer muscles – on his own behalf.

Rothstein, 55, personally filed court documents on Thursday in his bid to try to force the feds to reduce his 50-year prison sentence.

Rothstein, who pleaded guilty to orchestrating a $1.4 billion Ponzi scheme, first had to obtain permission from Senior U.S. District Judge James Cohn to file his own court pleadings.

The judge consented and Rothstein, who is being held in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ secretive witness protection program for inmates, typed up a 13-page legal argument and submitted it Thursday.

In other news, Colbert asked RGB whether a hotdog is a sandwich. This is pretty funny.

New Ft. Lauderdale federal courthouse is in the works

From the Sun-Sentinel:

A new federal courthouse for Fort Lauderdale is included in a massive $1.3 trillion federal spending agreement that has bipartisan support and is expected to be approved in the next few days.

News that the $190 million downtown project was part of the package reached the city Wednesday from U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, who phoned the city’s current and former mayors with the good news.
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The 39-year-old current courthouse at Broward Boulevard and Northeast Third Avenue has had a leaking roof and mold problems, doesn’t have sufficient office space and wasn’t designed for current federal security requirements. The courthouse has been No. 3 on the priority list for new courthouses since 2016.

The General Services Administration is conducting a feasibility study for the new courthouse that should be completed by June. It will then be up to the GSA to pick a site for the new courthouse.

In other news, the 11th Circuit held today that possession of a round of ammunition is not sufficient to conduct a search for a firearm. The suppression motion should have been granted. The case is United States v. Johnson. The court framed the issue this way:

This appeal requires us to consider whether the pat down of a burglary suspect and the identification of a round of ammunition in the suspect’s pocket constitutionally allowed the officer to retrieve the round and another item from the suspect’s pocket.

Newest 11th Circuit Judge Lisa Branch sworn in

Here are the cool pictures posted by Judge Stephen Dillard, who did the swearing in:

Judge Elizabeth L. “Lisa” Branch, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.. pic.twitter.com/xzkV4ep6db

— Chief Judge Stephen Dillard (@JudgeDillard) March 20, 2018

Imagine how prosecutors would react if your client gave this story

MUST WATCH: Ben Carson is actually pinning all of this on his wife: "I left it with my wife. I said, 'help choose something' ... The next thing that I, quite frankly, heard about it, was that this $31,000 table had been bought." pic.twitter.com/uYTPUihNFA

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) March 20, 2018

Federal Prosecutors take note

This blog often criticizes prosecutors and judges, but it's also important to highlight the good stuff going on as well.  Here's Philadelphia's new District Attorney trying to make change.  From Slate:

On Tuesday, [Larry] Krasner issued a memo to his staff making official a wave of new policies he had announced his attorneys last month. The memo starts: “These policies are an effort to end mass incarceration and bring balance back to sentencing.”

“These policies are an effort to end mass incarceration and bring balance back to sentencing,” Larry Krasner said in an announcement on Tuesday.

The most significant and groundbreaking reform is how he has instructed assistant district attorneys to wield their most powerful tool: plea offers. Over 90 percent of criminal cases nationwide are decided in plea bargains, a system which has been broken beyond repair by mandatory minimum sentences and standardized prosecutorial excess. In an about-face from how these transactions typically work, Krasner’s 300 lawyers are to start many plea offers at the low end of sentencing guidelines. For most nonviolent and nonsexual crimes, or economic crimes below a $50,000 threshold, Krasner’s lawyers are now to offer defendants sentences below the bottom end of the state’s guidelines. So, for example, if a person with no prior convictions is accused of breaking into a store at night and emptying the cash register, he would normally face up to 14 months in jail. Under Krasner’s paradigm, he’ll be offered probation. If prosecutors want to use their discretion to deviate from these guidelines, say if a person has a particularly troubling rap sheet, Krasner must personally sign off.

“It’s the mirror of a lot of offices saying, ‘If you don’t ask for the max you’ve got to get my permission,’ ” says David Rudovsky, a prominent Philadelphia civil rights attorney. For longtime career prosecutors, this will take some getting used to. “You want to be sure your assistants are actually doing it,” Rudovsky says.

Krasner’s lawyers are also now to decline charges for marijuana possession, no matter the weight, effectively decriminalizing possession of the drug in the city for all nonfederal cases. Sex workers will not be charged with prostitution unless they have more than two priors, in which case they’ll be diverted to a specialized court. Retail theft under $500 is no longer a misdemeanor in the eyes of Philly prosecutors, but a summary offense—the lowest possible criminal charge. And when ADAs give probation charges they are to opt for the lower end of the possible spectrum. “Criminological studies show that most violations of probation occur within the first 12 months,” the memo reads, “Assuming that a defendant is violation free for 12 months, any remaining probation is simply excess baggage requiring unnecessary expenditure of funds for supervision.” When a person does break the rules of probation, minor infractions such as missing a PO meeting are not to be punished with jail time or probation revocation, and more serious infractions are to be disciplined with no more than two years in jail.

In a move that may have less impact on the lives of defendants, but is very on-brand for Kranser, prosecutors must now calculate the amount of money a sentence would cost before recommending it to a judge, and argue why the cost is justified. He estimates that it costs $115 a day, or $42,000 a year, to incarcerate one person. So, if a prosecutor seeks a three-year sentence, she must state, on the record, that it would cost taxpayers $126,000 and explain why she thinks this cost is justified. Krasner reminds his attorneys that the cost of one year of unnecessary incarceration “is in the range of the cost of one year’s salary for a beginning teacher, police officer, fire fighter, social worker, Assistant District Attorney, or addiction counselor.”

 Unfortunately, Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump are doing the exact opposite.  Sessions is pushing for more min/mans.  And Trump is now calling for the death penalty in drug prosecutions.  Here's Krasner's memo.  It's worth a read.