Judge Charles Breyer joins For the Defense Podcast for premiere of Season 3

 

FOR THE DEFENSE SEASON 3 LAUNCH U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer We're back! In this third season of For the Defense, I will be speaking with three fascinating and experienced judges who have a lot to say about the criminal justice system.  We launch today with Judge Charles Breyer.  You can access it on Apple, Spotify, or any other platform from our website here. In the first two seasons, we spoke with great criminal defense lawyers around the country about their most fascinating cases, including the late F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Roy Black, Michael Tigar, Tom Mesereau, Donna Rotunno, and so many others.  Then there was a bonus episode with Judge Jed Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.), which was a big hit.  So I decided to do this mini-season in which I speak to three judges about the criminal justice system from their perspectives.  After Judge Breyer (who hails from San Francisco), next week Robin Rosenbaum joins the show.  She sits on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and lives in South Florida.  And then we'll conclude the mini-season with Chief Judge William Pryor, another 11th Circuit Judge, who resides in Alabama. It's not too late to catch up on Seasons 1 and 2 if you missed them (both of which are approved for CLE credits in Florida).  This mini-season with judges also has been approved for CLE, and I will give out the code at the end of the third episode. Please send me your feedback -- and of course, subscribe, like and comment!  If you have a friend that would like to receive these updates, please have them sign up here.  Thank you! --David   Hosted by David Oscar Markus and produced by rakontur

Happy Birthday to the Southern District of Florida Blog!

Happy 16th (!!) Birthday to the Southern District of Florida Blog!  

Sixteen years ago in 2005, on the July 4 weekend, I started this blog and it's been a fun run of over 4,000 posts and over 5.2 million page views.  

I'm really proud of this project I started all these years ago and am so grateful for all of the connections and friends I've made through the blog.  This is a great legal community and it's really like a family that I am happy to be a part of.

To put the 16 years in perspective, when the blog was started:

The Wilkie Ferguson courthouse was not yet open.

Judge Zloch was Chief Judge of the District.

Mel Martinez was one of our Senators.

Alex Acosta had just been named Acting U.S. Attorney.

The Supreme Court had seven different Justices: Rehnquist, Scalia, Stevens, Souter, Kennedy, Ginsburg, and O'Connor.

There was no Twitter.

There was no podcasting.  (I now have one of my own, called For the Defense).

There was no Zoom.

My firm had one lawyer, me (it now has 6).

I had one daughter (I now have 3 and one headed to college!).

We still don't have a Floridian serving on the Supreme Court, which was the very first post! But that may change with Ketanji Brown Jackson as the leading candidate to replace Justice Breyer if he retires.

Thanks again to all of you for reading and for the tips. As Brian Tannebaum pointed out to me, the blog is now old enough to drive! I still very much enjoy keeping tabs on the most interesting and exciting District in the country.

“Bill Cosby is free; Ghislaine Maxwell should be too.”

 That’s the title of an op-ed I just wrote for the New York Daily News in light of the Cosby ruling.  From the conclusion to the piece:

The case against Ghislaine Maxwell is extremely weak — based on 25-year-old, uncorroborated allegations made only after Epstein died. A jury should reject those flimsy and stale charges. But in the event of a conviction, she should get relief on appeal for the same reason Cosby did — prosecutors should have to live up to the deals they make. As that court explained: “A contrary result would be patently untenable. It would violate long-cherished principles of fundamental fairness. It would be antithetical to, and corrosive of, the integrity and functionality of the criminal justice system that we strive to maintain.”

The Cosby case reaffirms that a prosecutor is bound to act with integrity and the public must be able to rely on his word. What a concept.

"Thank God that juries are smarter than judges."

That was criminal defense lawyer Frank Carson after he was charged with murder, went to trial that lasted 17 months, and was acquitted by a jury.  It's an amazing (and very sad) story, covered by the L.A. Times in these three articles, here, here, and here.  

Above is his mug shot, where he wouldn't give the prosecution the satisfaction of looking grim. Carson loved to stick it to the man.  And he believed that was payback after a long career of fighting and winning.  Sadly, he died shortly after winning his own trial, but not before he got to try another case as a lawyer.

This is how the third installment from the L.A. Times starts:

They were a year into the preliminary hearing with no visible end, and Frank Carson was close to despair. He was trapped where so many of his clients had been, alone in a chilly cell in a Stanislaus County jail. He had rebuffed every overture to cut a deal, to plead, to inform on codefendants in exchange for lenience.

But guilt pierced him. He blamed himself for the plight of his wife and stepdaughter, out on bail but charged in the so-called murder plot he had supposedly masterminded. He blamed himself for the continued incarceration of three other codefendants, former highway patrolman Walter Wells and Pop N Cork liquor store owners Baljit “Bobby” Athwal and brother Daljit “Dee” Atwal. All of them had refused to implicate Carson, telling prosecutors they had nothing to say.

“Boys,” Carson said one day, sitting before them in a courthouse holding room.

He had found a solution, he explained. He would take the blame, so they could go free. There seemed no other way out. He was in his 60s, with no kids; they were younger men, and fathers. The D.A. wanted him. What he did not tell them was that he had knotted up a sheet to keep under his pillow, to hang himself before they put him on a bus to prison.

“No, Mr. Carson,” his codefendants said. The brothers were Sikhs from the Punjab region of India. To let Carson take the blame for something he hadn’t done would dishonor the family, they explained — they’d be killed if they returned to their village.

Where is the Biden administration on the CARES Act and prisoners who were released during the pandemic?

 During the Trump administration, about 4,500 at-risk inmates were released during the pandemic.  But in the last few days of his presidency, Trump's DOJ said everyone needed to go back in when the crisis ended. It was a really weird decision.  Many have thought Biden would rescind that order, but he hasn't and has rightfully faced a lot of criticism because of it.  

In the meantime, BOP is doing BOP things... here's an article by the WaPo about a 76-year old grandmother who was released but taken back into custody because she was taking a class on word-processing and didn't immediately answer her phone.  Our system is so messed up... 

In the year she was out of prison, Gwen Levi, 76, was thriving.

After serving 16 years in different federal facilities for dealing heroin, Levi was allowed to leave last June and finish her 24-year sentence in home confinement under the supervision of federal prison officials. She moved in with her 94-year-old mother in Baltimore and volunteered at prisoner advocacy organizations, hoping for a paying job to come along. She was also building her relationships with her sons and grandsons.

But Levi’s season on the outside ended June 12 after she attended a computer word-processing class in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. A Federal Bureau of Prisons incident report said she was out of contact for a few hours with the officials supervising her.

Levi is now at the D.C. jail awaiting transfer to a federal facility, according to her attorney, Sapna Mirchandani, of Maryland’s Office of the Federal Public Defender.

“There’s no question she was in class,” Mirchandani said. “As I was told, because she could have been robbing a bank, they’re going to treat her as if she was robbing a bank.”

Also, your favorite blogger was on 20/20 Friday night.  Here's a short clip from the two hour episode if you are interested.