It's Friday!

Long weekend ahead! Woohoooo! But the weather......

Looks like downtown is abandoned today, doesn't it?

Just be careful driving this weekend, especially because Florida drivers rank 43rd out of the 50 states on driving knowledge. (New York is the worst.) I may be checking out early today, so go check out SFL pacer surfing or Rumpole bashing the PD's office.

Bonanno crew busted

Curt Anderson covers the infiltration of the South Florida crew here. The intro:

An FBI agent posing as a crooked businessman with ties to shady bankers was key to the indictment announced Thursday of 11 people on charges they ran a South Florida racket for New York's Bonanno organized crime family.
The unidentified agent was able to gain the trust of the crew and its leader, Thomas Fiore, by seeming to provide them with access to foreign bank accounts to launder criminal cash as well as help with drug trafficking and sale of stolen goods, according to the indictment.
All the while, the undercover agent wore a hidden recording device that captured their conversations. The FBI also recorded numerous telephone conversations between Fiore, other members of the crew and senior Bonanno bosses.

"I've sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn't want to do it. I felt I owed it to them."

I don't know who Magistrate Wallace Dixon is (apparently he's from the Middle District of North Carolina) but I he's jumped up my favorite judge list. Apparently Rudy Giuiani's son, Andrew Giuliana, got kicked off the Duke golf team and sued in federal court for breach of contract. The team countered that he got dropped because he assaulted a teammate, defied coaches, and violated "both the rules and the spirit of the game of golf." He lost, of course, but Judge Dixon had a lot of fun writing the R&R -- even citing Caddyshack*:

Plaintiff's promissory estoppel claim... brings to mind Carl Spackler's analysis from the movie Caddyshack (Orion Pictures 1980): "He's on his final hole. He's about 455 yards away, he's gonna hit about a 2 iron, I think."

*And for those non-Caddyshack people out there, the title is another great line from the movie.

The Sun-Sentinel *sucks*

I had a lot to post about tonight -- from Paris to dumb associates to heavy Cuban accents -- but instead I'm going to tell you how stupid the Sun-Sentinel is. That paper, which has always given the Herald a run for its money, had one of the young star reporters in South Florida: Vanessa Blum. And it fired her today.

Why?

Well, the Sun-Sentinel let Vanessa go today because it has partnered up with the Herald and decided that it could simply buy the Herald federal court coverage for its paper. The Herald will use some Sun-Sentinel coverage of local school board stuff for its paper. And on and on. Rumpole made the point about the dying newspaper business here when he was covering the Herald's firing of Susannah Nesmith:

Here's the point with the BBC stuff- if these trends keep up, local news will soon be gone. No one to report on County Commissioners doubling dipping into their expense accounts; no one to wander the hallways of the courthouse at 2PM and write about all the Judges missing; no one to write about the cops accused of misconduct and no one to write about the injustice of trying defendants over and over until the government gets a conviction.

We can function without Susannah Nesmith. We cannot function without the Susannah Nesmith's of the world. It's a scary thought that the free press is fading away not with an assault against the first amendment, but because the morons who made the business decisions for newspapers didn't see five years ago Craigslist was about to cripple their classified ad income.

President Obama recently referred to a quote from the nation's third president, Thomas Jefferson: "If he had the choice between government with newspapers or newspapers without government, he'd choose the latter." (Rumpole, I just cited to you, Obama, and Jefferson to make a point. What's wrong with that picture?)

Now, this is no knock on Jay Weaver and Curt Anderson, who are also friends of the blog, but they can't cover the entire District by themselves. And of course we have the DBR, which is committed to covering the federal courts. But while they are covering a big case in Miami, who will be tending the store in Lauderdale? What about Palm Beach and Ft. Pierce? And Vanessa broke her share of Miami stories as well -- the latest being the sealing issues in the Mutual Benefits case, which everyone is now looking in to.

I understand budgets and the crisis facing the newspaper industry. But what's the point of having a paper if you are giving up your local coverage? The whole reason people buy the Sun-Sentinel is because of reporters like Vanessa. Without that local coverage, why do we need a Ft. Lauderdale paper?

Vanessa will land on her feet -- she's smart, personable and a great reporter. I wonder where the Sun-Sentinel will land if it keeps this up.

UPDATE -- Bob Norman has a list of the others who have been laid off.

“While some of the tales of woe emanating from the court are enough to bring tears to the eyes...

...it is true that only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off.”

That was John Roberts' response in 1983 to White House counsel Fred Fielding, who asked Roberts to evaluate a proposal then in circulation to create a kind of super appeals court to assist the Supreme Court with its ostensibly pressing workload. The New Yorker has a lenghty and compelling article about Roberts here, called "No More Mr. Nice Guy." It's certainly worth a read and has lots of inside stories about Roberts.

Speaking of the Supreme Court, it just granted cert in Conrad Black's case to decide the reach of the "honest services fraud" component of the mail fraud statute.

Or, if it's really a slow day, you can check out how much the airport can see when it does "whole body imaging."

Jay Weaver covers Liberty City verdict

Check out the interesting piece in the Herald today.

Here's the intro:

Did booting a holdout juror off the panel seal the fate of the Liberty City Six?

That is a central issue in the courtroom documents released last week after the five guilty verdicts that attracted national attention.

Known only as Juror No. 4, the woman was accused by 11 fellow jurors, prosecutors and the judge of refusing to deliberate in the federal terrorism-conspiracy case. However, in jury notes the woman said she wanted to ''see this trial to the end'' but could not withstand the pressure she was facing to change her stance -- presumably ``not guilty.''
Had she held out, prompting a third mistrial in the controversial case, the five men now facing lengthy prison sentences could have walked out of the courtroom free, because the U.S. attorney's office in Miami had already said it wouldn't try them a fourth time.

U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard's removal of the juror will be the centerpiece of defense appeals, based on claims that their clients didn't receive a fair trial. After Juror No. 4, a black woman, was replaced by a black male alternate, the 12-member panel convicted five of the six defendants Tuesday on charges of conspiring with the notorious global terrorist organization al Qaeda.

''Her note clearly shows that the other jurors tried to convince her to change her beliefs about the case,'' said attorney Richard Houlihan, who represented the sole acquitted defendant, Naudimar Herrera.

''They didn't agree with her, but that doesn't mean she wasn't deliberating with them,'' Houlihan said. 'Her factual beliefs were at odds with the other jurors'. Absolutely it was going to be a hung jury if she had been allowed to stay on.

The article even has a Moran/Abbell reference, citing back to when Judge Hoeveler dismissed a juror:

To follow up, Judge Lenard reviewed a precedent-setting appeals court decision from a 1998 trial in which a Miami juror was removed from a 12-member panel because she refused to deliberate. U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler removed the woman because she spent the time working on her nails.

Lenard heeded Hoeveler's example, first by questioning the 11 other panelists about Juror No. 4. They all said she was turning her back on them when they sought her opinion, and most quoted her as saying that she doesn't believe in or trust the law.

Appellate lawyer extraordinaire Richard Klugh got all Survivor on us and had this to say about the law:

An appeals expert in South Florida said the ultimate question is whether a juror is doing his or her job.

''It seems that the jurors in this case tried to make that decision themselves, as they appeared deadlocked,'' said attorney Richard C. Klugh Jr., who reviewed the notes. ``What you don't want is a situation like [the TV show] Survivor, where the majority of the jurors vote to kick a juror off the island just because of preference.''

Klugh said the removal of the juror will be a ''substantial issue'' in the defense team's motion for a new trial and eventual appeals.

"43 stun-gunned at prisons' Take Your Kids to Work Day"

For real!

Justice Moreno??

Obama's short list for filling Justice Souter's seat on the Supreme Court has been leaked. And there's a Moreno on the list. Unfortunately, it's not our Moreno -- it's California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno (that's him on the left). Here's the rest of list:

Solicitor General Elena Kagan
Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
U.S. Appeals Court judges Sonia Sotomayor and Diane Pamela Wood