"Is Gollum good or evil?"

That's the headline of this nerdy fan-boy NY Times piece.

A Turkish man’s freedom may hang on a question put to a panel of “Lord of the Rings” experts: Is Gollum evil?

More significantly, was it an insult to compare Turkey’s president to the slimy, bug-eyed creature from the films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy?

A physician, Dr. Bilgin Ciftci, is accused of sharing a meme that juxtaposes Gollum, as played by Andy Serkis (and advanced digital effects), with Recep Tayyip Erdogan in several situations: while laughing, while surprised, while eating. Insulting the president is a crime under Turkish law.

The punishments were swift. Dr. Ciftci lost his job with the Public Health Institution of Turkey after sharing the meme, and he faces a two-year prison sentence, the Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman reported. After a judge said he did not know enough about the Tolkien creature to make an appropriate decision, five experts were ordered to conduct an investigation into Gollum’s moral character before the next phase of the trial begins in February.

Michael D. C. Drout, an English professor at Wheaton College who edits an annual review of Tolkien’s works, is observing the situation from America. He said that those experts will be assessing the most complicated character in the English writer’s already complex world.

“I don’t think there’s any consensus that Gollum is evil,” Mr. Drout said in an interview. “He is the most tragic character in ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ ”

Middle Earth, the place where Gollum began his life as a creature named Sméagol, is full of complex characters and allegiances. But a single gold ring, forged with a dark lord’s evil powers, has the power to rule them all. Sméagol catches a glimpse of the ring, murders for it, and possesses it for centuries until it is mislaid and found by another hobbit. Sméagol struggles to redeem himself, but his obsessive bloodthirst for the ring wins out. He accidentally destroys himself and the ring, but also saves Middle Earth in the process. (It is the hobbit hero Frodo who gets most of the credit.)

“The context is this: Gollum accidentally, not intentionally, saves the entire world,” Mr. Drout said.

RIP Shelby Highsmith

Senior United States District Judge Shelby Highsmith passed away yesterday.   Judge Highsmith served in the United States Army from 1949-1955 before graduating from the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law with an LL.B. in 1958.  Judge Highsmith was in private practice in Missouri before relocating to Florida and entering private practice.  Prior to his appointment to the federal bench, Judge Highsmith served as chief legal advisor to the Governor's War on Crime Program, Florida, special counsel for the Florida Racing Commission, and served as a circuit judge for the 11th Judicial Circuit (Dade County) from 1970 to 1975.  Judge Highsmith joined the federal bench in 1991 where he served with distinction until his retirement on December 31, 2008.     


On a personal note, I was assigned to his courtroom as a young AFPD and learned a great deal from him. He had a big heart and took great interest in teaching the young lawyers before him how to practice law with dignity. 

"Virtual Concierge" case to jury

It's before Judge Hurley in West Palm Beach.  From the PBPost:

After a nearly two-month trial and two days of closing arguments, a federal jury on Wednesday finally began deciding whether a Palm Beach County couple and their business partner set out to bilk thousands of investors out of $80 million in a Virtual Concierge scheme operated out of plush offices west of Jupiter.
After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury of 10 women and two men signaled they are in for the long haul.

Virtual concierge kiosks in Jupiter last year. (Bruce R. Bennett / The Palm Beach Post)

With dozens of charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering to weigh against Joseph Signore, his estranged wife, Laura Grande-Signore, and their business partner, Paul Schumack, the jurors sent out a note, indicating that they don’t expect to reach a verdict Thursday.
Instead, they told U.S. District Judge Daniel Hurley, they will deliberate Thursday, take Friday off and continue their work Monday.
Their scheduling announcement came as attorneys representing the three continued to insist their clients had done nothing wrong. Hurley rejected the attorneys’ pleas to throw out the charges that had already been sent to the jury.
“When you add the constellation of facts together, isn’t that enough to send to the jury for a decision?” Hurley asked Schumack’s attorney rhetorically, rejecting his request for a judgment of acquittal.
The defense attorneys spent most of the day trying to persuade jurors that federal prosecutors had woven together a disparate array of circumstantial evidence in hopes of proving the three never intended to produce the electronic kiosks much less install them in sports arenas, hotels, casinos, hospitals or other venues.

Rosenbaum vs. Martin

And Rosenbaum gets the visiting district judge from Alabama to join her opinion, affirming a denial of a motion to suppress in a child porn case.

It's a fascinating debate between two of our "new" 11th Circuit judges involving whether a lost cellphone has been abandoned. There's all sorts of interplay with the cellphone cases (like Riley) and older 11th Circuit law on standing.

Even though many have claimed that the court has taken a turn to the left with the new judges, this opinion shows pretty definitely that it has not, especially on 4th Amendment issues.

From the majority:

To be clear, we do not suggest a Fourth Amendment jurisprudence of
“finders keepers; losers weepers.” Loss is not the same thing as abandonment.
And loss alone cannot support a finding of abandonment. Nor does the filing of a
claim for a lost item and the replacement of that item with the resulting insurance
money, in and of itself, demonstrate an intent to abandon. Instead, we must view
all of the facts and consider the totality of the circumstances to determine whether
an intent to abandon may objectively be discerned.

And Martin's dissent:

Courts must distinguish between the everyday use of the term
“abandonment” and its use in a context that may result in the loss of Fourth
Amendment protections. Here, Mr. Johnson and Ms. Sparks ended their efforts to
recover their lost cell phone only after several days of active searching. Although
this might colloquially be referred to as “abandonment,” it is not nearly what is
necessary to show abandonment so as to deprive someone of their Fourth
Amendment protections.
***
But a person may not abandon property for Fourth Amendment purposes by
mere loss, carelessness, or accident, where he has made reasonable efforts to
reclaim the property. See, e.g., Ramos, 12 F.3d at 1026 (11th Cir. 1994) (finding
no abandonment where the defendant left a briefcase in a temporarily leased
condominium a few hours after the scheduled checkout and telephoned the
condominium office the next day to seek the briefcase’s return). In light of their
repeated efforts to reclaim it, Mr. Johnson and Ms. Sparks demonstrated no intent
to abandon the cell phone.4
The fact that they could have conceivably done more is simply
not sufficient, in my view, to constitute abandonment under the Fourth
Amendment.

SDFLA Cyber Monday Deals!

You get free blog posts!

Here's what's happening:

-- More legitimate complaints about Congress not doing anything, especially with our federal judge nominees ("Even routine business was neglected this year, and 2016 won’t be better. The Senate has confirmed 135 Obama executive nominees this year, but many more are languishing in Congress. One of these is for the vacant post of undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, for which Mr. Obama nominated someone in April. By comparison, in George W. Bush’s seventh year, a Democratic Senate confirmed 234 nominees in 2007. Meanwhile, only 10 judicial vacancies have been confirmed this year, leaving 66 benches open, the slowest pace for confirmations in more than half a century.")

-- The NY Times explains how to prosecute abusive prosecutors.  ("It is absolutely essential to bring rogue law enforcement officers to justice, particularly in a post-Ferguson world in which violations of constitutional rights have come under intense scrutiny. However, the government’s focus on abuses by law enforcement officials leaves the burden of curbing abuse by judges and prosecutors to private individuals. This is a responsibility few lawyers are willing to accept, in large part because the United States Supreme Court has made pursuing a civil case against a prosecutor or judge practically impossible.")

-- The Sun-Sentinel covers this "inside job", uncovering a $3 million heist. ("When armed robbers took off with more than $3 million from an armored truck company's South Florida depot, investigators suspected the crime was an inside job.It would take the FBI and prosecutors years of digging to solve the case. Now, three Palm Beach County men have pleaded guilty to the Sept. 15, 2012, heist at the old Garda Logistics armored truck building on Garden Road in Riviera Beach.").