"If the state court is not sensible enough to dismiss this piece of shit, it will end up in federal court."

That was Fred Haddad about the Florida Bar complaint against attorney Sean Conway for his comments on a blog about Judge Cheryl Aleman.

Liberty City 7 -- prosecution rests

That happened yesterday.

Why aren't there more self surrenders?

Brian Tannebaum has this interesting post on self surrendering defendants to face charges. He argues that defense lawyers should be able to voluntarily surrender a defendant when that person and the lawyer know about the charges in advance:

The purpose of an arrest is to take the defendant into custody and present them before a judge or have them bonded out immediately. It's not a damn prize or game.And I'm tired of prosecutors telling me "I'm not going to interfere with their desire to arrest your client." What are you all so afraid of? Tell the officers/agents, I know this defense attorney, he keeps his word, let his client surrender. If they say no, so be it.

This issue actually comes up quite frequently in this District. Wouldn't it save everyone a great deal of time and resources if there was more cooperation on self surrendering a defendant? What say you SDFLA readers?

Joel DeFabio -- back to back Not Guilty verdicts

Hot off his win in the Liberty City 7 case, Joel DeFabio won last night in the Haitian slave case. In both, his client was the only full acquittal.

Here's the Herald article and the Sun-Sentinel article.

ADDED: From the comments, Rumpole jokes:

One more NG within the calendar year and the DOJ will have no choice but to convene a grand jury on obstruction of justice charges. Plus there must be some guidelines enhancement for winning a case and pissing the US attorneys off.

Blog topics

I guess I should be blogging about the new crack guidelines become retroactive today, but instead I'll point you to this funny post at AboveTheLaw about our blackout last week.

Slowwwww blogging

I apologize for the slow blogging recently.

But what's going on in the District? Any news you want to share? Email it to me so I can post about it (anonymously if you'd like).

In any event, I hear that the "Haitian slave" case is coming to a close in the next day or two.

The Liberty City Seven/Six case is plugging along.

The new building is still closed.

And it's March already!

News and Notes

1. Sailfish sentences net jail (via AP).

2. Gov't appeal of Padilla sentence covered by Herald.

3. Haitian "slave" testifies (via Sun-Sentinel).

4. YouTube taunter pleads guilty (via Sun-Sentinel).

Let's get ready to rumble!

The government filed its notice of cross-appeal in the Jose Padilla case.