News & Notes

Why appointments are better than elections. (via Sun-Sentinel)

Joe Cool case continues; apparently "four days before Guillermo Zarabozo and his accomplice chartered the Joe Cool fishing vessel for a trip that led to his arrest for murder, he received a letter from Miami-Dade police accepting him as an applicant." (via Miami Herald).

Anyone want to guest blog for a couple weeks?

Openings in the Joe Cool case

The jury was picked in a morning and both sides already have given opening statements. If this was state court, it may have taken a week to pick a jury in a murder case. Not in federal court....

Here's Vanessa Blum and Curt Anderson on openings and Luisa Yanez on jury selection.

Jeffrey Tsai opened for the government.
Tony Natale for defendant Guillermo Zarabozo.

Co-defendant Kirby Archer, who pleaded guilty to life in prison, is not expected to testify for the government. The defense has painted Archer as the criminal and stated in openings that Zarabozo was also a victim.

Slow blogging....

Week two of trial begins tomorrow.

Some coverage here and here.

You know it's going to be a long trial...

.. when the government is still doing direct of its first witness at the end of the first week.

--David Oscar Markus
www.markuslaw.com
305-379-6667

Jack Abramoff's sentence reduced by Judge Huck

Here's the AP's Curt Anderson:

A federal judge agreed Wednesday to shave two years from former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff's prison sentence for a fraudulent Florida casino boat deal because of his extensive cooperation in that case and a wide-ranging political corruption probe that upended Washington politics.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Paul Huck guarantees that Abramoff, 49, will serve no more than an additional four years in prison — the sentence imposed by a Washington, D.C., judge last week in the separate corruption case.
Abramoff's attorneys had sought to have the Florida sentence reduced from nearly six years to about two. Huck called that request "greedy" and said it would not reflect the gravity of the fraud involved in the 2000 purchase of SunCruz Casinos by Abramoff and a partner.
"We've got two distinct sets of crimes. They are very serious," Huck said. "It could be that he would walk out of jail very soon. I'm not going to do that."
Huck accepted a Justice Department recommendation to reduce Abramoff's 70-month prison term to 45 months. He has already served nearly two years, leaving him with nearly two more to serve.

Any thoughts on whether the reduction was appropriate? Were defense lawyers being "greedy"? Did the prosecution ask for enough time off or too much time off?

Hung

Bill Barzee just hung his second jury in a row, this time in the Iranian Night Vision Goggle case. Here's Vanessa Blum's Sun-Sentinel article.

Major Eleventh Circuit ruling on reach of crack retroactivity

I am in a meeting right now, but I thought I would pass along the 11th circuit's big decision on the crack guidelines. Below is the link to Doug Berman's blog on the subject. More to come later.

http://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2008/09/major-eleventh.html

--David Oscar Markus
www.markuslaw.com
305-379-6667

Trials

I was supposed to start a month-long trial this week in West Palm Beach, but it got postponed till next Monday. Here are some stories about other trials that started this week:

1. Participant or just translator? Shahrazad Gholikhan started trial in front of Judge Cohn. She is charged with attempting to export night vision goggles to Iran. This was the case that originally pled out to credit time served, but the government moved to vacate the sentence saying it had made a mistake in the guidelines. Judge Cohn then resentenced her to 29 months. Then the defense moved to vacate the plea, saying that everyone had thought it was a CTS case. Judge Cohn agreed and here we are in trial. Vanessa Blum covers it here:

The strange legal odyssey that led an Iranian woman to surrender last year to face charges she tried to supply Iran with U.S.-made night vision goggles took another turn Tuesday with opening statements to jurors in Fort Lauderdale federal court.A prosecutor told jurors that Shahrazad Mir Gholikhan, 30, conspired with her former husband to illegally purchase thousands of military-grade night vision goggles and traveled to Vienna in 2004 to obtain a sample pair.Gholikhan's attorney countered that she went to Vienna without knowing her ex-husband's plan and served only as his translator.

2. The Venezuelan cash smuggling case started up before Judge Lenard. Here's Curt Anderson's take:

A wealthy Venezuelan businessman went on trial Tuesday on U.S. charges that he illegally acted as his government's agent in an elaborate scheme to conceal the source of $800,000 in political cash carried in a suitcase into Argentina.
Prosecutors say Franklin Duran, 40, was doing the bidding of Venezuela's intelligence service when he and others used promises of $2 million in cash and veiled threats of violence to make the cover-up work. The FBI taped dozens of conversations between Duran and his alleged cohorts on the telephone and in South Florida restaurants and coffee shops.
Jury selection began Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard, with the trial expected to take up to six weeks. Duran, who has pleaded not guilty, faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of conspiracy and failing to register with the U.S. as a Venezuelan agent.
The purported cover-up involved a cash-stuffed suitcase brought into Argentina aboard a Venezuelan aircraft in August 2007 that prosecutors say was intended as a contribution for new Argentine President Cristina Fernandez. Both she and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have denounced the trial as politically motivated, but U.S. officials deny that.
Still, the case has further strained the already sour relationship between the U.S. and Venezuela. Duran's lawyer, Ed Shohat, has repeatedly insisted the trial is intended mainly to embarrass Chavez and his allies in Latin America and that Duran wasn't even aware of the registration law he is accused of violating.
"Our view is that this case is a political attack," Shohat said.