Sad day.

Welcome back.

We start year 12 with this cool article from the Herald about Fane Lozman, who has this message for his town:  Fane Lozman returns, Thank you... U.S. Supreme Court 

From the article:

“I want to make a statement,” he said. “I want people to see who I am and then they can look up the case to find out more.”
Lozman’s troubles began when Riviera Beach “arrested” his houseboat in April 2009 and later destroyed it. Lozman, a former Marine Corps officer, argued that the city couldn’t regulate his home as a maritime vessel.
His houseboat had been moored at the Riviera Beach marina after Hurricane Wilma destroyed his former marina in North Bay Village in 2005. The structure did not have an engine and was equipped to be connected to sewer lines on dry land.
In 2013, the Supreme Court, by a 7-2 vote, overturned an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, deciding that Riviera Beach didn’t have the jurisdiction to have his boat seized. He said he still hasn’t recovered his financial losses — including the cost of the boat — from the city, and hopes he will soon.

Meantime, Justice Sotomayor is kicking some ass (via NYT):

The Supreme Court term had barely gotten underway in early November when Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued her first dissent. A police officer’s “rogue conduct,” she wrote, had left a man dead thanks to a “‘shoot first, think later’ approach to policing.”

Justice Sotomayor went on to write eight dissents before the term ended last week. Read together, they are a remarkable body of work from an increasingly skeptical student of the criminal justice system, one who has concluded that it is clouded by arrogance and machismo and warped by bad faith and racism.

Only Justice Clarence Thomas wrote more dissents last term, but his agenda was different. Laconic on the bench, prolific on the page and varied in his interests, Justice Thomas is committed to understanding the Constitution as did the men who drafted and adopted it centuries ago.

Justice Sotomayor’s concerns are more contemporary and more focused. Her dissents this term came mostly in criminal cases, informed as much by events in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 as by those in Philadelphia in 1787.

She dissented again in January, from Justice Antonin Scalia’s final majority opinion. Joined by no other member of the court, she said the majority in three death penalty cases might have been swayed by the baroque depravity of the crimes. “The standard adage teaches that hard cases make bad law,” she wrote. “I fear that these cases suggest a corollary: Shocking cases make too much law.” 

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article87493917.html#storylink=cpy

Happy 11th birthday to the blog

Tomorrow the blog turns 11 years old, which is very old in blog years!  It's been pretty cool covering the District ... we are at 3000 posts and counting. 

The very first post 10 years ago asked for President Bush to appoint a Floridian to the Supreme Court.  Although the Court did get its first Hispanic jurist, it did not get a Floridian.  Hopefully one day soon!

Thanks to all of you for reading, sending me tips, and commenting.  

Judge Paul Huck's Court Observer Program a success

Every summer, Judge Huck holds a really cool seminar for summer interns/clerks.  Here are some pictures from this year's event:

Lighthouse = wet foot (UPDATED w opinion)

UPDATE -- here's the 35-page opinion. Some good stuff.  Here's the conclusion:

“We acknowledge, as a widely-accepted truth, that Cuba does violate human rights and fundamental freedoms and does not guarantee the rule of law to people living in Cuba.” Gonzalez I, 212 F.3d at 1353. “The principal human rights abuses include[] the abridgement of the ability of citizens to choose their government; the use of government threats, physical assault, intimidation, and violent government-organized counterprotests against peaceful dissent; and harassment and detentions to prevent free expression and peaceful assembly.” Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights & Labor, U.S. Dep’t of State, Cuba 2015 Human Rights Report 1, available at http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/253217.pdf. Twenty-four Cuban migrants boarded a boat slightly over a month ago in hopes of reaching the United States, the land of freedom and opportunity where their families and friends had ventured before them, a place where “all men are created equal” and where the “certain unalienable rights” of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are held sacred. The Declaration of Independence para. 2 (1776). There is no doubt that these Cuban migrants and their families have spent the pendency of this litigation dreaming of those opportunities in the spirit of the Cuban hero and poet José Martí: “I dream with open eyes both night and day; I always dream.”15
The Court neither approves nor disapproves the Executive Branch’s decision that the Cuban migrants in this case do not qualify for refugee processing as dry foot arrivals to the United States. Developments and revisions of immigration and foreign policy are left to the political branches of the government. However, the Coast Guard’s informal adjudication in this case does not contradict Congress’s policies in the INA nor the President’s executive actions in securing our borders. And Plaintiffs have not been deprived of any constitutional rights to which they are presently entitled.

 15 “Yo sueño con los ojos abiertos, y de día y noche siempre sueño.” Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology 21 (Stephen Tapscott ed., Elinor Randall trans., Univ. of Tex. Press 1996) (capitalization modified).

Interesting decision by Judge Gayles.  Via the Miami Herald:

After more than five weeks bobbing offshore in a Coast Guard cutter, 21 Cuban migrants are headed back to Cuban soil.
Federal Judge Darrin Gayles ruled Tuesday that the U.S.’s “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy does not extend to the American Shoal lighthouse six and a half nautical miles off Sugarloaf Key. The 21 migrants, two of which are women, fled Cuba and landed on the lighthouse, sparking an eight-hour standoff with the Coast Guard crews while they refused to climb off the 109-foot tall structure.
Once they climbed off the lighthouse and into the Coast Guard boats, the U.S. government said the structure didn’t count as American soil and tried to send the migrants back to Cuba.

 

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-keys/article86407227.html#emlnl=News_Alert#storylink=cpy