11th Circuit rejects Don Siegelman again

Here's the opinion by visiting Judge Ebel, a senior 10th Circuit judge.  The Montgomery Advertiser has this report on the former Alabama Governor:

A federal appeals court Wednesday denied former Gov. Don Siegelman's bid for a new trial, saying he relied on arguments that judges rejected in an appeal from his co-defendant in their 2006 trial on bribery and corruption charges.
Siegelman argued that the district court should have considered whether then-U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, who recused herself from Siegelman's investigation in 2002, had honored the recusal. Former HealthSouth CEO
Richard Scrushy made the same arguments in his motion for a new trial, citing emails from a whistleblowers in which Canary suggested a gag order be placed on Siegelman during the trial; forwarded an email on its coverage and approved a staffing decision.
The three-judge panel rejected Scrushy's argument in 2013, writing "there is no evidence that Canary's emails influenced any decisions made by the U.S. Attorney's office in prosecuting Scrushy." In the former governor's case, the court wrote that it had to follow its decision on Scrushy.
"Regardless of whether Canary possessed a stronger conflict of interest with respect to Siegelman, our determination in Scrushy that there was no evidence that Canary influenced the prosecution team , , , binds Siegelman on this appeal," the opinion said.
The three-judge panel also rejected Siegelman's arguments that his sentence had been miscalculated, saying the district court made no error in sentencing him to 78 months in prison.

News & Notes

1.  Follow up on the "intactivist" post from yesterday.  The lawyer decided to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit.  From the Sun-Sentinel:

A federal lawsuit concerning a circumcision fight between two South Florida parents suddenly ended Wednesday when the attorney for the 4 1/2-year-old boy and his still-jailed mom decided the case appeared hopeless.
Thomas Hunker, who represents mother Heather Hironimus, notified U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra that the month-old case has been voluntarily dismissed, and the notice prevents the case from ever being filed again in the court.
In a message posted on a Facebook page dedicated to the boy and his mom and directed at circumcision opponents, Hunker wrote they decided to quit because, "Unfortunately, Judge Marra was not only not sympathetic, he seemed quite hostile toward our position."
Hunker added that proceeding with the federal lawsuit would surely result in "an unfavorable order which could potentially hurt the cause and future efforts to establish a child's right to object to circumcision. I hope you understand and agree that under the circumstances, this was our only available option."
Finally, the attorney said the focus must be to "conserve resources to help Heather get out of jail and preserve her custody rights. That is my mission now."

2.  District Judges like asking other district judges for help.  From the NY Times:

 Federal district judges are often described as the quintessential deciders, whether from the bench or in written opinions. But what happens when a difficult question arises, the parties are in sharp disagreement, and the answer is not obvious?

Turns out they often rely on a rarely discussed resource: the jurist-to-jurist lifeline.

Interviews with more than a dozen judges in Manhattan’s Federal District Court show that almost all have telephoned colleagues when they were puzzled by legal questions or other issues, or have been on the receiving end of the game-show-like call for help.

“I can tell you that everyone calls colleagues for advice, particularly when we get gnarly jury notes,” said Chief Judge Loretta A. Preska, a member of the bench for more than two decades.

The practice is longstanding: Judge Pierre N. Leval, a district judge for 16 years before he was elevated to the federal appeals court in 1993, said that shortly after he became a trial judge, he asked a colleague, “What do you do when you’re stumped?”

The colleague scribbled four digits on a scrap of paper and handed it to him — it was the phone extension for Judge Edward Weinfeld, a legal legend on the court.

“Put it on your desk in the robing room and call him when you’re stuck. We all do it,” Judge Leval remembers his colleague saying.

In a recent trial in Manhattan, Judge Katherine B. Forrest ruled against the government on the admissibility of a particular document, but after a break, she said she had changed her view.

“I spoke to three colleagues — judges here,” she explained.

The defense lawyer objected, but Judge Forrest indicated that it was important that she get it right, and drawing on the expertise and experience of fellow federal judges was sometimes useful “when one is pressed for time in dealing with these kinds of issues.”

“Indeed, a lot of us call each other,” she said. “People call me a lot, including more senior judges.”

Shocker -- her colleagues said to rule for the government!  Oy!

3.  Judge Altonaga did not need to call her colleagues on this one where the government isn't complying with its discovery obligations in the civil terrorism case.  From the AP:

A federal judge sternly blamed the U.S. government Tuesday for lengthy delays in a lawsuit filed by a Pakistani-American man accusing the U.S. of malicious prosecution in a terror financing case.
U.S. District Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga agreed with Irfan Khan's lawyer that the Justice Department's tactics have caused months of unnecessary delays. Altonaga said much FBI evidence released about its investigation into Khan's alleged ties to the Pakistani Taliban is heavily redacted and useless.
"It's virtually like providing nothing," Altonaga said at a hearing. "It's sort of like shooting in the dark."
...Altonaga decided Tuesday to suspend various deadlines until the classified material is sorted out, likely scrapping the current October trial date as well.
"This is a very old case, gentlemen. I fault the government," she said. "You let me know when you're good and ready."

Intactivists!

Ah, Florida (via the Sun-Sentinel):

A federal judge will get 10 days advance notice before a 4 1/2-year-old boy at the center of a circumcision battle is set to have the procedure, the father's attorney promised Monday.
U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra — hearing an emergency request from an attorney for the boy and his now-jailed mom, Heather Hironimus, to block the surgery already cleared by two state courts — had inquired about the child's whereabouts and the status of the circumcision.
"The child is healthy and well," said Ira Marcus, attorney for father, Dennis Nebus. He told the court the boy is staying with his dad in a "safe and secure" location, has not yet been circumcised, and would not be operated on before telling Marra first.

"Mr. Nebus is entitled to some finality," Marcus said, arguing the boy's parents' legal fight has gone on long enough. "And you know what? The child is entitled to some finality."
But Thomas Hunker, hired by Hironimus to represent the child, urged Judge Marra to step in and protect the boy from "physical harm," brain damage or worse from an elective procedure that is not medically necessary for him and violates his Constitutional rights.
"This is a potentially life and death situation," Hunker said, contending that the child doesn't respond well to general anesthesia and is prone to scarring that could further harm his genitals if he survives. He further argued the procedure to remove the foreskin from the boy's penis is not "reversible" and violates his right to bodily "integrity."
Marra concluded a 75-minute hearing without ruling on the bid for a temporary restraining order against the circumcision — or Nebus' motion to throw the case out of federal court.
Several times, Marra peppered Hunker with questions about why he should hear a case that had already been decided in the father's favor by state circuit and appellate courts. "So you want me to take a fresh look at what was already done by the state court?" Marra asked.
***
On Friday, the attorney filed for the restraining order until the resolution of a federal lawsuit that was filed on the boy's behalf on April 13. The lawsuit states the boy's rights were violated because he hasn't had a psychological examination or an independent guardian to speak on his behalf in court as the mother requested, along with other claims.
The lawsuit lists as defendants his father, Judge Gillen, and Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw. Attorneys for Gillen and Bradshaw urged Marra to remove them from the case.
Meanwhile, Hunker also filed in state court Friday an emergency motion on behalf of Hironimus to freeze all state judicial orders and court proceedings in the long-running custody battle while the matter is pending in federal court.
In March, Gillen ruled Hironimus had committed a "direct, contemptuous violation" of court orders by continuing work with circumcision opposition groups — called "intactivists" — that have "plastered" the child's photos and name "all over the Internet."
During Monday's hearing, a small group of the mother's supporters stood outside the courthouse in West Palm Beach.
"I've been an advocate for all human beings to have bodily autonomy," said Rebecca Boni, a mother of two young children from Boca Raton. "To me it's so obvious it blows my mind the [state] judge decided to side with the father."

Supreme Court reverses 11th Circuit in Henderson v. United States

9-0.

SCOTUSblog has the details:

After oral argument, the outcome in Henderson v. United States wasn’t really in doubt. The entire Court had expressed skepticism of the idea that a firearm owner convicted of a felony couldn’t lawfully sell his weapons on the open market, or transfer them to an independent third party. Today, in a crisp eight-pager by Justice Elena Kagan, the Court unanimously ruled in favor of the firearm owner. Along the way, the Court ironed out some significant legal wrinkles. Of special note, the Court clarified that felons can be entitled to the benefits of equity in federal court.
When an individual surrenders his firearms to police and is later convicted of a felony, what happens to the firearms? The weapons can’t go back to the felon, because federal law prohibits felons from possessing firearms. Yet the felon still owns the weapons, which could have considerable financial, sentimental, or historical value. Understandably enough, many felons in this situation would like to sell or transfer their firearms, rather than let Uncle Sam indefinitely possess them. The question before the Court in this case was whether federal law gave felons that right to transfer.
In the decision under review, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit had ruled against transfer based on a broad view of “constructive possession” – roughly, the idea that someone can lack physical possession of an object but still exert enough control over it to count as possession for purposes of law. The court of appeals had also seemed to say that a convicted felon lacked “clean hands” and so could not take advantage of any form of equitable relief, including equitable transfers of property.
Today, however, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the firearm owners by allowing them to transfer their weapons to independent third parties, including to have the weapons sold on the open market. As Justice Kagan succinctly explained, this is a pragmatic solution that accords with the statute’s text and purpose, and also has the benefit of fitting snugly with common sense.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

In the 11th Circuit, you can find out your oral argument panel two weeks before the argument.  But it's not like that in every circuit.  Zoe Tillman covers the interesting differences here:

Judge Frank Easterbrook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit prefers the element of surprise. At least for oral arguments.
The Seventh Circuit, based in Chicago, doesn't reveal the identities of the judges assigned to a case until the morning of oral arguments. Lawyers, Easterbrook said, should "prepare to face the circuit as a whole."
"Even with this policy, many lawyers try to make judge-specific arguments ('You wrote the opinion that said…') and have to be reminded that opinions speak for the court, not for their authors," the judge said in an email to The National Law Journal. "Ad hominem arguments are out of place."
The Seventh Circuit is in the minority. Of the 13 federal appeals courts, only three — the Fourth, Seventh and Federal circuits — wait to disclose the three judges assigned to a case on the day it is argued. The other circuits reveal their panels days or weeks in advance.
In the First Circuit in Boston, lawyers get a week's notice. In the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis, one month. The D.C. Circuit, until recently, had the most generous policy: The court announced the panel when it set a date for arguments — several months ahead of the hearing. Last year, the court switched to notifying counsel 30 days out. It formalized the change this month in its handbook.

OK, OK, it's a slow news day.  But not as slow as the Herald, which is covering how bad traffic is on the front page.  

If you are looking for something to watch, check out the new movie by Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman, Dawg Fight, which is now on Netflix.  The Hollywood Reporter covers it:

Dawg Fight, director Billy Corben’s new film about the backyard bare-knuckle fight scene, debuts on Netflix this weekend. But for Corben and his producing partner Alfred Spellman, best known for their 2006 doc Cocaine Cowboys, an online bow proved the right fit for their particular brand of street-smart filmmaking.
“As we started looking at how we wanted to release it, theatrical was just not a very appealing option,” says Spellman, who along with Corben founded their Rakontur banner in 2000. Explains Corben, “The whole purpose of this subculture is these guys uploading this footage to the Internet. So the audience for this type of content is already on line — the gamer crowd, the fight fan crowd. So it seemed just kind of obvious to go where they were.”
Since first meeting up in high school more than 15 years ago, Corben and Spellman have forged a unique career by focusing on what Carben admits is often “more pulpy, pop-culture-oriented subject matter” and then riding the successive waves through which such movies have been delivered to eager audiences. “We’ve watched the business shift now through four incarnations,” says Spellman. “We started out going to Sundance. At Sundance, we realized your audience is the seven or eight people who are the acquisition execs. And then we went through the DVD boom, catching the last wave with Cocaine Cowboys. After the recession and the technological upheaval, we did a lot of TV commissions — we’ve done now three 30 for 30s for ESPN and a four-hour miniseries for VH1.” And with Dawg Fight, they’ve moved on to streaming-on-demand. “We’ve kind of been early adopters in figuring out new media trends, some that work out and some that don’t,” adds Corben.

En banc Berry v. Leslie case settles before opinion

This is a weird one -- the case involving the SWAT team storming the barbershop for licensing violations was settled after oral argument but before the opinion issued.  Here's the en banc order dismissing the case.

The panel decision by Judge Rosenbaum (her first published opinion) was a good one, which started this way:

 It was a scene right out of a Hollywood movie.  On August 21, 2010, after more than a month of planning, teams from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office descended on multiple target locations.  They blocked the entrances and exits to the parking lots so no one could leave and no one could enter.  With some team members dressed in ballistic vests and masks, and with guns drawn, the deputies rushed into their target destinations, handcuffed the stunned occupants—and demanded to see their barbers’ licenses.  The Orange County Sheriff’s Office was providing muscle for the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation’s administrative inspection of barbershops to discover licensing violations.   We first held nineteen years ago that conducting a run-of-the-mill administrative inspection as though it is a criminal raid, when no indication exists that safety will be threatened by the inspection, violates clearly established Fourth Amendment rights.  See Swint v. City of Wadley, 51 F.3d 988 (11th Cir. 1995). We reaffirmed that principle in 2007 when we held that other deputies of the very same Orange County Sheriff’s Office who participated in a similar warrantless criminal raid under the guise of executing an administrative inspection were not entitled to qualified immunity.  See Bruce v. Beary, 498 F.3d 1232 (11th Cir. 2007).  Today, we repeat that same message once again.  We hope that the third time will be the charm.

Judge William Pryor concurred and dissented from the opinion, with this intro:

I agree with the majority opinion that the search of the barbershop exceeded the scope of a reasonable administrative inspection and that the barbers presented evidence that Corporal Keith Vidler, as the supervisor, violated their clearly established constitutional rights. I also agree that Brian Berry presented evidence that Deputy Travis Leslie, who handcuffed Berry and patted him down, violated his clearly established constitutional rights. But Edwyn Durant, Reginald Trammon, and Jermario Anderson presented no evidence that Deputy Travis Leslie violated their constitutional rights. Even though the inspection of the barbershop appeared to be “a scene right out of a Hollywood movie” (Majority Op. at 1), we cannot bend the law to resolve this appeal with a feel-good ending from a boxoffice hit. The law entitles Leslie to qualified immunity against any barber who failed to present evidence that Leslie personally deprived him of a clearly established constitutional right. Durant, Trammon, and Anderson failed to prove an affirmative causal connection between their specific injuries and Leslie’s conduct. For that reason, I respectfully concur in part and dissent in part. 

News & Notes

1.  Gang members arrested in Broward, via Paula McMahon.

2.  @_FloridaMan is the subject of this fun NY Times article by Lizette Alvarez.  A bunch of other Florida men are quoted -- Billy Corben, Roy Black, Dave Berry, and Carl Hiaasen:

California’s kumbaya vibe is absent here, and so is Texas’ ideological fervor. With so many transplants, allegiances lie elsewhere. New arrivals are often shocked to find that South Florida is segregated, cliquish, brazenly rude and typically indifferent to most annoyances, including its maniacal drivers.

“That’s the most common misconception about Florida — that we are a melting pot,” said Billy Corben, who has made several Florida-esque documentaries, including “Cocaine Cowboys,” about the rise of cocaine violence and capitalism here in the 1970s and 1980s. “We are more akin to a TV dinner, where sometimes the peas spill over into the mashed potatoes.”

“As long as the Champagne is flowing and the checks are clearing,” he added, “nobody asks a lot of questions here about anything.”

Drugs and the weather are also culprits. The steaminess adds to the seaminess. And outdoor living makes for easy viewing and recording. As Mr. Barry put it, people do drugs and act erratically elsewhere. “But it’s not warm outside all the time everywhere,” he said. “In Ohio, they stay indoors.”

Here, reinvention remains the national pastime, which is why hucksters and criminals do quite nicely.

“As they say,” Mr. Corben remarked, “Los Angeles is where you go when you want to be somebody. New York is where you go when you are somebody. Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else.”

3.  The Steve Chaykin ethics seminar is this Friday at U.M.  Looks to be a good conference in spite of the fact that yours truly will be speaking on social media.  

4.  Bernie Roman is out as the Miccosukee's lawyer.  Via the DBR:

"We have been notified this morning … that we no longer represent the Miccosukee tribe and that I am no longer their tribal attorney," Roman said, according to a transcript of Thursday's hearing.

Salomon Melgen denied bail

 From the Palm Beach Post:

Despite claims by Melgen’s attorneys that he had no intention of fleeing to his native Dominican Republic, U.S. Magistrate James Hopkins denied their request to allow the 60-year-old doctor to post a sizable bond, secured by property worth millions, so he can help them prepare for his trial, now scheduled for Feb. 22.
“There are no combination of conditions that will reasonably assure the appearance of the defendant,” Hopkins ruled. “I will order that he be detained as a risk of flight.”
Not only does Melgen face a possible life sentence if convicted of 76 charges of health-care fraud but he, along with his longtime friend Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., is charged in New Jersey with operating a bribery scheme, Hopkins noted.
Further, he said, an extradition treaty between the U.S. and the Dominican may not cover health-care fraud. If Melgen decides to flee to his island homeland — where he has luxury homes, bank accounts and links to top government officials — prosecutors may never be able to bring him back to stand trial, he said.
Melgen, who federal prosecutors said earned $1 million a month treating patients at clinics in West Palm Beach, Wellington, Delray Beach and Port St. Lucie, smiled weakly at his wife, son and daughter as he was led from the courtroom in shackles. His wife, Flor, collapsed against the couple’s daughter Melissa in tears.

Seems hard to imagine that Melgen should be detained.  He's a 60-year old doctor with no criminal history.  I would expect that he gets bail from the district judge, especially since he already got bond in New Jersey where the judge found that he was not a risk of flight. 

Lindsay MacDonald selected for Stuart A. Markus award

Friends and readers of the blog know that my family set up an award in my Dad's name at the University of Miami School of Law.  The Stuart A. Markus Award recognizes an individual student each year for outstanding work in one of the School of Law’s in-house clinics. The winner is selected by vote of the in-house, live-client clinic directors.  The first award went to Bethany Bandstra.

This year the Markus Award went to Lindsay MacDonald, a student in Rebecca Sharpless’ immigration clinic. Highlights of her clinical work include: litigating a habeas petition in U.S. District Court for a transgender Haitian woman that challenged the legality of her prolonged immigration detention; writing the Eleventh Circuit briefs in the same woman’s asylum case; working on a motion to suppress in immigration court in a case where immigration agents profiled our client in violation of the Fourth Amendment; preparing two cancellation of removal cases in immigration court and litigating one to an adversarial merits hearing; litigating a legally and factually complex dependency case in Broward for an unaccompanied border child that required a deposition of her father as well as numerous court appearances over the course of many months; and authoring the Eleventh Circuit brief in a multi-issue case that is the most complex the Clinic has handled to date. Lindsay was scheduled this April to do the Eleventh Circuit oral argument in the transgender client’s case, but the court rescheduled the case until June. Lindsay has earned no fewer than 10 Dean’s Certificates/CALI awards or their equivalents in her classes and is third in her class of 412.

 

Stuart A. Markus (BED ’54, J.D. ‘57) practiced law in Miami for over 50 years.  Throughout his career, Stuart fought hard for his clients in every area of the law.  He never turned away a person in need, and helped countless people with practical, hands-on advice and representation that went far above and beyond the norm.  The Markus Award is given annually to a student who shares that caring spirit, and who has made a meaningful difference in someone’s life – which is something Stuart did every day.

Congratulations to Lindsay!

Appellate happenings

So everyone is talking about the Second Circuit opinion today which held that the Patriot Act did not authorize NSA to snoop on all of our phone call records.

In the meantime, everyone missed this D.C. Circuit case, which starts out with a Friends reference:

In an episode of the iconic 1990s television show Friends, Joey Tribbiani tries to dissuade Rachel Green from moving to Paris. Joey asks Rachel to flip a coin. If he wins the coin flip, she must agree to stay. Rachel flips the coin; Joey loses. When later recounting the story to Ross Gellar, a befuddled Joey says, “[w]ho loses fifty-seven coin tosses in a row?” Friends: The One with Rachel’s Going Away Party (NBC television broadcast Apr. 29, 2004). Before Ross can answer, Joey explains Rachel’s rules: “Heads, she wins; tails, I lose.” Id.

"There is no support for the assertion that Watkins had a First Amendment right to sing any sort of song in the post office lobby while standing in the service line."

That's the conclusion in this 11th Circuit unpublished decision, which starts out:

This case ensued after plaintiff-appellant Eric Watkins was asked to leave a post office and was denied service because he refused to stop singing. Watkins brought suit against defendant-appellee Jackie White, the postal employee who asked Watkins to leave and did not allow Watkins to purchase a post office box after he disregarded her instruction to stop singing. Proceeding pro se, Watkins appeals the district court’s order granting White’s motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, averring that White violated his right to free speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
On appeal, Watkins argues that he established a cognizable First Amendment claim because White retaliated against him for his exercise of free speech by ordering him to leave the post office and not permitting him to buy a mailbox while singing. Watkins contends that the lyrics to the song he was singing were “antigay” and that White restricted his speech based on its content. He further avers that White did not have the authority to restrict his speech. However, upon review of the record and consideration of the parties’ briefs, we find that the restriction on Watkins’s speech was reasonable and that White is entitled to qualified immunity. Thus, we affirm the district court’s dismissal of the case.

GUEST POST BY BRIAN TOTH ON USA v. QUARTAVIOUS DAVIS

Brian Toth wrote the following Guest Post on the en banc Davis case:

The Eleventh Circuit Decides United States v. Davis En Banc

In a decision that didn’t much matter for the individual defendant but mattered greatly for how law enforcement goes about its business in today’s technological age, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, sitting en banc, held today that the government didn’t violate Quartavious Davis’s Fourth Amendment rights by obtaining in accordance with a federal statute historical cell-tower information from the business records of a service provider without a search warrant and without a showing of probable cause. An earlier panel—authored by a judge sitting by designation and joined by Judges Martin and Dubina—concluded otherwise, but nonetheless affirmed Mr. Davis’s convictions because law enforcement had acted in good faith (an exception to the exclusionary rule). The Government sought rehearing en banc of the portion of the panel opinion holding that a Fourth Amendment violation occurred. Expectedly (sorry, David), the Government’s position carried the day.

Mr. Davis, a “prolific cell phone user,” made 86 phone calls a day from his cell phone during the course of a two-month period in which he and several others committed seven armed robberies in South Florida. As permitted by, and in compliance with, the Stored Communications Act, the Government sought and obtained a court order requiring MetroPCS to produce telephone records from that two-month period, which contained certain information about Mr. Davis’s telephone calls and about the cell towers that connected those calls. Before trial, Mr. Davis moved to suppress those records, asserting that their production was a search that required probable cause and a warrant. That motion was denied, and the Government used that information at trial to show that Mr. Davis was physically near the robberies when they occurred.

Writing the majority opinion for the en banc court, Judge Hull relied chiefly on the so-called third-party doctrine, which roughly holds that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in information that you voluntarily hand over to third parties (and thus no “search” of the information occurs within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment). Comparing Mr. Davis’s case to the facts in a pair of Supreme Court decisions concerning the third-party doctrine, Judge Hull explained that Mr. Davis didn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the cell-tower records:

For starters, like the bank customer in Miller and the phone customer in

Smith, Davis can assert neither ownership nor possession of the third-party’s

business records he sought to suppress. Instead, those cell tower records were

created by MetroPCS, stored on its own premises, and subject to its control. Cell

tower location records do not contain private communications of the subscriber.

This type of non-content evidence, lawfully created by a third-party telephone

company for legitimate business purposes, does not belong to Davis, even if it

concerns him. Like the security camera surveillance images introduced into

evidence at his trial, MetroPCS’s cell tower records were not Davis’s to withhold.

Those surveillance camera images show Davis’s location at the precise location of

the robbery, which is far more than MetroPCS’s cell tower location records show.

More importantly, like the bank customer in Miller and the phone customer in Smith, Davis has no subjective or objective reasonable expectation of privacy in MetroPCS’s business records showing the cell tower locations that wirelessly connected his calls at or near the time of six of the seven robberies.

Judge Hull’s opinion also concluded that even if obtaining the cell-tower records had constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment, the search was nonetheless reasonable:

Davis had at most a diminished expectation of privacy in business records made, kept, and owned by MetroPCS; the production of those records did not entail a serious invasion of any such privacy interest, particularly in light of the privacy-protecting provisions of the SCA; the disclosure of such records pursuant to a court order authorized by Congress served substantial governmental interests; and, given the strong presumption of constitutionality applicable here, any residual doubts concerning the reasonableness of any arguable “search” should be resolved in favor of the government. Hence, the § 2703(d) order permitting government access to MetroPCS’s records comports with applicable Fourth Amendment principles and is not constitutionally unreasonable.

There were other opinions.

Concurring in full, Judge William Pryor wrote “to explain that a court order compelling a telephone company to disclose cell tower location information would not violate a cell phone user’s rights under the Fourth Amendment even in the absence of the protections afforded by the Stored Communications Act.”

Concurring in the judgment, Judge Jordan, joined by Judge Wilson, expressed “concerns about the government being able to conduct 24/7 electronic tracking (live or historical) in the years to come without an appropriate judicial order.” Judge Jordan would’ve ruled on narrower grounds—assuming that Mr. Davis had a reasonable expectation of privacy but holding “that the government satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement by using the procedures set forth in 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) to obtain a court order for Mr. Davis’ cell site records.”

Judge Rosenbaum, concurring in the majority opinion, wrote separately because she thought “that the third-party doctrine, as it relates to modern technology, warrants additional consideration and discussion.”

And Judge Martin, joined by Judge Jill Pryor—the newest member of the Court—dissented:

In this case, the government got 67 days of cell site location data disclosing

Quartavious Davis’s location every time he made or received a call on his cell

phone. It got all this without obtaining a warrant. During that time, Mr. Davis

made or received 5,803 phone calls, so the prosecution had 11,606 data points

about Mr. Davis’s location. We are asked to decide whether the government’s

actions violated Mr. Davis’s Fourth Amendment rights. The majority says our

analysis is dictated by the third-party doctrine, a rule the Supreme Court developed almost forty years ago in the context of bank records and telephone numbers. But such an expansive application of the third-party doctrine would allow the government warrantless access not only to where we are at any given time, but also to whom we send e-mails, our search-engine histories, our online dating and shopping records, and by logical extension, our entire online personas.

Decades ago, the Supreme Court observed that “[i]f times have changed, reducing everyman’s scope to do as he pleases in an urban and industrial world, . . . the values served by the Fourth Amendment [are] more, not less, important.” Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 455, 91 S. Ct. 2022, 2032 (1971). This is even truer today. The judiciary must not allow the ubiquity of technology—which threatens to cause greater and greater intrusions into our private lives—to erode our constitutional protections. With that in mind, and given the striking scope of the search in this case, I would hold that the Fourth Amendment requires the government to get a warrant before accessing 67 days of the near-constant cell site location data transmitted from Mr. Davis’s phone. I respectfully dissent.

All told, the five opinions making up this decision span 102 pages. Fortunately, footnote 21 of the majority opinion summarizes the result.

 

May the 4th be with you

Nerd out!

Okay, now that that's out of the way, check out this front page article from the Washington Post about the aging prison population:

Harsh sentencing policies, including mandatory minimums, continue to have lasting consequences for inmates and the nation’s prison system. Today, prisoners 50 and older represent the fastest-growing population in crowded federal correctional facilities, their ranks having swelled by 25 percent to nearly 31,000 from 2009 to 2013.

Some prisons have needed to set up geriatric wards, while others have effectively been turned into convalescent homes.

The aging of the prison population is driving health-care costs being borne by American taxpayers. The Bureau of Prisons saw health-care expenses for inmates increase 55 percent from 2006 to 2013, when it spent more than $1 billion. That figure is nearly equal to the entire budget of the U.S. Marshals Service or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general, who is conducting a review of the impact of the aging inmate population on prison activities, housing and costs.

“Our federal prisons are starting to resemble nursing homes surrounded with razor wire,” said Julie Stewart, president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “It makes no sense fiscally, or from the perspective of human compassion, to incarcerate men and women who pose no threat to public safety and have long since paid for their crime. We need to repeal the absurd mandatory minimum sentences that keep them there.”

The Obama administration is trying to overhaul the criminal justice system by allowing prisoners who meet certain criteria to be released early through clemency and urging prosecutors to reserve the most severe drug charges for serious, high-level offenders.

At the same time, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency, has made tens of thousands of incarcerated drug offenders eligible for reduced sentences.

But until more elderly prisoners are discharged — either through compassionate release programs or the clemency initiative started by then-attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. last year — the government will be forced to spend more to serve the population. Among other expenditures, that means hiring additional nurses and redesigning prisons — installing showers that can be used by the elderly, for instance, or ensuring that entryways are wheelchair-accessible.

 I'm hopeful that judges will take note and start ordering alternative sentences -- especially for first-time non-violent offenders -- that will help society instead of just warehousing people.  May the force be with you!

Law Day is May 1

Together with the Federal Bar Association, the Southern District of Florida is hosting Law Day Programs in U.S. Courthouses to educate area high school students. Law Day is an annual celebration of our liberties, a reaffirmation of our loyalty to our country and a rededication to the ideals of equality and justice. The designation of May 1st as “Law Day” is codified in 36 U.S.C. § 113. Click here for more information about the national program.

The American Bar Association’s Law Day theme this year is “Magna Carta: Symbol of Freedom Under Law,” celebrating the 800th anniversary of a document that is an international symbol of the rule of law and an inspiration for many basic rights, including due process, habeas corpus, trial by jury, and the right to travel. The Law Day programs include: a mock trial exploring fourth amendment issues, an animated discussion of the Magna Carta, a dialogue on the tensions between our security and our freedom, and observation of court in session. As part of the local theme of “Diversity and Inclusion in the Law”, a panel of members of the judiciary and the legal community will share personal experiences and obstacles each faced and overcame in order to achieve success in the legal field.

The events will take place on Friday, May 1, 2015 from 8:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. at the King building and the Broward courthouse.

For more information or to R.S.V.P. to attend the event, please contact
Jarred Reiling at Jarred_Reiling@flsd.uscourts.gov or
Clay Roberts at Clay_Roberts@flsb.uscourts.gov.

"In the early 1970s, four Florida Supreme Court justices resigned from office following corruption scandals."

That was the U.S. Supreme Court today in decising Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar.  From the intro:

Our Founders vested authority to appoint federal judges in the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, and entrusted those judges to hold their offices during good behavior. The Constitution permits States to make a different choice, and most of them have done so. In 39 States, voters elect trial or appellate judges at the polls. In an effort to preserve public confidence in the integrity of their judiciaries, many of those States prohibit judges and judicial candidates from personally soliciting funds for their campaigns. We must decide whether the First Amendment permits such restrictions on speech.
We hold that it does. Judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot. And a State’s decision to elect its judiciary does not compel it to treat judicial candidates like campaigners for political office. A State may assure its people that judges will apply the law without fear or favor—and without having personally asked anyone for money. We affirm the judgment of the Florida Supreme Court.

 I'm against judicial elections, but if you are gonna have em, then I think you gotta back the First Amendment and a person's right to ask for campaign contributions even if they are running for judge.  I find myself agreeing with Scalia again:

An ethics canon adopted by the Florida Supreme Court bans a candidate in a judicial election from asking anyone, under any circumstances, for a contribution to his campaign. Faithful application of our precedents would have made short work of this wildly disproportionate restriction upon speech. Intent upon upholding the Canon, however,the Court flattens one settled First Amendment principle after another.
The first axiom of the First Amendment is this: As a general rule, the state has no power to ban speech on the basis of its content. One need not equate judges with politicians to see that this principle does not grow weaker merely because the censored speech is a judicial candidate’s request for a campaign contribution. Our cases hold that speech enjoys the full protection of the First Amendment unless a widespread and longstanding tradition ratifies its regulation.

The big argument today

The Washington Post has interesting clips on the gay marriage argument to listen to here, including the protestor:

Protester briefly disrupts court 
10:29 a.m.:  Before U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. could speak to the justices, a protester inside the chamber stood up and began shouting.
“Homosexuality is an abomination!” the man shouted from the center of the chamber.
He continued yelling about an “abomination to God” as he was quickly taken outside by security, but his shouting could be heard echoing through the building for several minutes.
The interlude was “kind of refreshing,” Scalia remarked. The room chuckled as Verrilli began to make his remarks.
As Verrilli began to discuss Lawrence v. Kansas, giving way to a discussion about the fundamental nature of marriage, the muffled cries of “abomination” could still be heard in the courtroom.

"This embarrassment is something I'll take to my grave."

That was 57-year old Dr. Krishna Tripuraneni before being sentenced by Judge Gayles to 2 years for tax evasion of about $18 million. The government had asked for 3 years and the defense asked for non-incarceration. From the Sun-Sentinel:

The doctor, who built a flourishing medical practice in Wellington, had asked the judge to consider his long history of donating his medical services to needy people and giving generously to deserving causes.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles said he balanced the doctor's significant illegal conduct and his long history of charitable work in deciding the appropriate punishment.

"The thing that stood out to me ... there was this duality — this very serious crime and there are also good works," the judge said.

The judge said he had difficulty discerning the doctor's motive, noting that unlike many defendants, he had no great financial need or a drug problem.

"Perhaps it was the need for more homes, or bigger homes, or more cars ... I don't understand it," Gayles said.

Tripuraneni admitted that he lied about his business expenses and used money from his medical businesses to build an oceanfront mansion in Manalapan. He also used the money to pay for interior design work at other homes he owned, to make pay payments for condos he purchased, and to pay tuition for his son and daughter. Prosecutors said he illegally classified his personal expenses as building repairs and other business-related expenses.

The mansion, which the family named Nirvana, was put on the market earlier this year with an asking price of $25 million. Forbes magazine reported the luxurious 12,244-square-foot home sits on an acre-and-a-half of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Worth Inlet. The agent handling the listing told the magazine the property features a Zen garden and said the family flew in Buddhist monks to bless the home.

Tripuraneni, in a dark grey suit, told the judge he was sincerely sorry for what he did and took full responsibility for his offenses, which spanned five years.

"This embarrassment is something I'll take to my grave," he said.

He said he was too ashamed to face his parents, who are in their 80s and live in India. And he said he dreaded the thought of his future grandchildren learning what he did.

"There will be an asterisk next to my name and it's hard to live with that shame," he said.

Time for a new A.G.

Eric Holder has stepped down and now we have Loretta Lynch. Part of his speech from CNN:

As in his speech when he took office six years ago, Holder laid claim to helping restore the Justice Department's reputation, a tacit shot at the Bush administration and the political scandal that hung over former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales after the firings of U.S. attorneys.

Holder said he was proud of the department's work, which he said was done "free of politicization." He told the Justice staffers they were responsible for a new "golden age" at the Justice Department.

He cited the department's role in the Obama administration's decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, which has quickened the acceptance of same-sex marriage. He called same-sex marriage the "civil rights issue of our time." He also lauded the department's active role in civil rights enforcement, which has become a major focus in light of a national spate of police shootings and excessive use-of-force incidents.

While Holder listed his accomplishments, much of the ceremony also served as a reminder of the rocky relationship he has had with Republicans, who made him the first sitting cabinet member to be held in contempt of Congress and who regularly used him as the stand-in to take shots at President Obama in political fights.

In other news, gay marriage is before the High Court and Justices Scalia and Kennedy are gonna be fighting on this one. From the Washington Post:

Kennedy is often the deciding vote when the ideologically divided court splits 5 to 4, but in two-thirds of those cases he sides with the conservatives.

But if they often arrive at the same conclusion — one obstacle for same-sex marriage proponents in the current case is Kennedy’s allegiance to states’ rights — Kennedy and Scalia could not be more different in how they view a judge’s role.

Their different approach to gay rights reflects their more fundamental disagreement about how to think about the liberties protected by the Constitution,” said Paul M. Smith, a Washington lawyer who was on the winning side in the Lawrence case.

Scalia believes the only freedoms that should be viewed as protected by the Constitution “are those that have been protected under American law throughout our history, defined at the most specific level,” Smith said. Otherwise, the people decide.

Kennedy, Smith said, “believes that each generation has the right to conceive of newer and broader forms of liberty that merit constitutional protection. He sees history as a guide but not a straitjacket.”

Their battle is compelling, said Allison Orr Larsen, a William and Mary law professor, because it “brings to the forefront the theoretical question in constitutional law: How should courts respond to change when interpreting the Constitution?”

Michael Dorf, a professor at Cornell Law School and a former Kennedy clerk, said his former boss’s decisions on gay rights were not constructed to lead ultimately to a decision on same-sex marriage. But they provided a foundation for how to view new constitutional rights “if that’s where the country moves.”

Scalia, on the other hand, champions the cause of originalism, and Edward Whelan, a former Scalia clerk and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said his former boss learned quickly that “Kennedy’s judicial approach was not anything close to what Scalia’s is.”

“A basic tenet of originalism is that it’s not the role of judges to impose their own moral philosophies,” Whelan said. “Scalia understands the Constitution to leave the vast bulk of policy issues to the democratic processes and rejects the notion that it’s his role to read his own views into the Constitution.”

And here's your Monday moment of zen:

It's been a bad week for law enforcement and dogs

First was the well-covered story of the Supreme Court ruling that traffic stops couldn't be extended, even briefly, to allow for drug-sniffing dogs to take a whiff around the car (yes, Rumpole, that was Scalia in the majority).

And next is this awful story about the FBI lying in courtrooms around the country about hair samples. In this particular case, the FBI convicted a man using hair analysis when the hair at issue was a dog's hair!

In one particularly shocking case from 1978, two FBI-trained hair analysts who helped in the prosecution of a murder case couldn’t even tell the difference between human hair and dog hair.

The case involved a murder in Washington D.C. that year. The victim, a cab driver, was robbed and killed in front of his home. Before long, police centered upon Santae Tribble, then a 17-year-old local from the neighborhood, as a suspect.

Tribble maintained his innocence. But no matter what he said and how much his friends vouched, two FBI forensics experts claimed that a single strand of hair recovered near the scene of the crime matched Tribble’s DNA. Thanks to that evidence, which was groundbreaking at the time, Tribble was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison after 40 minutes of jury deliberation, reported the Washington Post.

He would go on to serve 28 years until the truth came out: an independent analysis found that the FBI testimony was flawed. Not a single hair that was found on the scene matched his DNA. After attorneys brought the evidence to the courts, Tribble was exonerated of the crime, though he’d already been released from prison. “The Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that he did not commit the crimes he was convicted of at trial,” a judge wrote in the certificate of innocence released at the time, in 2012.

It gets worse. Not only did none of the hairs presented as evidence in trial belonged to Tribble, the private lab found that one of the hairs actually came from a dog.

“Such is the true state of hair microscopy,” Sandra K. Levick, Tribble’s lawyer, wrote at the time, in 2012. “Two FBI-trained analysts… could not even distinguish human hairs from canine hairs.”

Tribble’s case in not unique. In a Washington Post story released over the weekend, officials from the FBI and the Justice Department acknowledged the extent of their flawed use of hair forensics prosecutions prior to 2000.

The numbers are staggering. Over 95 percent of the cases involving hair evidence that the FBI has reviewed so far contained flawed testimony—257 out of 268 cases.

Ho hum. No one seems to care.