Get out your red pens

So, there are press reports that a bunch of neo-red-scare-artist-types have signed a letter to President Obama asking for the release of the five Cuban spies convicted here in the SDFla a while back. The problem is I can’t find a report about this that doesn’t ultimately trace back to Granma, the official news organ of the Cuban government. So, I don’t know whether to believe that these people are comunistas or victims of a comunista smear campaign. Either way, here are their names: Miguel Bosé, Juanes, Olga Tañón, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Ry Cooder, Pete Seeger, Bonnie Raitt, Oliver Stone, Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover, and Ed Asner (“Oh, Mr. Grant, how could you?”). There’s a bunch more, but I got tired.

Trials in the news

D.O.M. and Michael Pasano are in separate trials, and both are in the news. (D.O.M.’s trial violates topicality for this blog because it is not in the SDFla, but, given that D.O.M. doesn’t really take topicality seriously at all, I figure I can get away with a link.)

Pasano’s tax fraud trial is in this district, before Judge Zloch, and since I can’t readily link to the DBR, I’ll again follow D.O.M.’s lead and liberally quote from it:

Michael Pasano, a partner at Carlton Fields in Miami, on cross-examination accused [government witness] Habib Levy of trying to hide assets from the government of Venezuela. He also brought up an affair the married Levy had with a woman who worked for Cohen Assor at a perfume business in Paris.

The exchange was clearly the most colorful in a trial full of technical documentation and signature comparisons.

Okay, one more thing: a look at the docket shows that the government and Pasano had a little pre-trial skirmish in their supplemental trial briefs about the latitude the Sixth Amendment affords a criminal defendant in demonstrating bias on the part of a witness. I will leave the government’s position to your imagination. Suffice it to say that, if I had 20 students in my evidence class rather than 140, I could use trial briefs like these to have way more interesting class discussions than the textbook affords.

A sign of the times

Missouri is attaching little price tags to its pre-sentence reports so that judges realize that executing sentences is not free. Defense attorneys applaud this, and prosecutors decry it. Money quote: “‘No one can put a price tag on being a victim,’ said Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association.”

Oh, Scott, did they not teach torts at your law school? It turns out that one of the main reasons we have law, Scott, is to put a dollar value on the harm visited upon victims of intentional and accidental wrongs. True, money is never going to bring back the dead, but it’s what we do so that civilization doesn’t crumble in a chaotic cycle of retribution and vigilanteism. It’s been going on for hundreds of years, and it works pretty well.

There’s also a lot of good reasons why we have judges—and not victims—craft sentences. One of those is that judges are supposed to act dispassionately and create a sentence that will maximize the public good—not only vindicate the victim. Judges can do that better if they are aware of the impact their choices have on the public fisc. Plus, if this were implemented at the federal level, it would give probation officers something to put into a pre-sentence investigation report that doesn’t entail having them make legal arguments.

I hope this goes to trial

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the cops from the robbers. That’s more or less what defense attorney Robert Pelier told the press about his client, Hialeah Gardens Police Detective Lawrence Perez. The federal government, for its part, alleges that Detective Perez conspired with one “Negro” and one “Chuchi” to rob a marijuana stash house. The news accounts don’t mention the aliases of Detective Perez’s alleged co-conspirators, but I thought you should know. Negro is supposedly a drug dealer and wanted Detective Perez’s help to rob a competitor. You would never know all this from the indictment, which sticks to the tried-and-true charges of attempting to possess with intent to distribute and conspiring to do so. Thankfully, the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s press releases fill the lacuna of narrative detail. The government and Detective Perez stipulated to a $50,000 corporate surety bond before Magistrate Judge McAliley. Federal Public Defender Kathleen Williams’ office was appointed to represent Negro. There is no record of Chuchi having had his initial appearance. Judge Jordan has the case.

How is this not a bigger deal?

So, I started doing some reading to figure out what’s going on in the SDFla so that I can guest-host while D.O.M. rededicates himself to the practice of law. The news is good and bad. The good news is that the feds caught two people who really needed to be caught and who are guilty of the sort of crime that cries out for federal retribution. The bad news is that the factual proffer from Friday’s plea colloquy before Judge Marra makes me think that there may well be a deep circle in hell set aside for these defendants. Alfonso Baldonado, Jr., and Sophia Manuel admitted to extorting money from Filipino workers and luring them to Boca with false promises of lucrative employment at places like the Ritz. These victims went into substantial debt to travel here only to become an exploited cheap labor pool for the defendants’ staffing company. The two convicts confiscated the workers’ passports and terrorized them with threats of jail and deportation. Thirty workers slept side-by-side “on the kitchen, garage, and dining room floors.” They were fed “chicken feet, necks, innards, and rotten vegetables.” The litany of horribles goes on and on. Sentencing is set for December 10.

What I don’t understand is how this slavery case gets all of four short paragraphs in the newspapers. Maybe part of the reason is that Willy Ferrer put out a very professional and measured quote—“They came here seeking a better life, but found their dream of freedom transformed into a real-life nightmare of servitude and fear.” If I were U.S. Attorney, I would have said something like, “These defendants deserve to be tortured gruesomely and slowly, and I am frustrated that all we can do is put them in the same prisons where we put drug dealers.” Which alone is enough to explain why I’m not U.S. Attorney.

“At this age, I’m not even buying green bananas.”

Gotta love that quote from 103-year old district judge Wesley E. Brown, the oldest federal judge in the country (from the NYT):

Judge Wesley E. Brown’s mere presence in his courtroom is seen as something of a daily miracle. His diminished frame is nearly lost behind the bench. A tube under his nose feeds him oxygen during hearings. And he warns lawyers preparing for lengthy court battles that he may not live to see the cases to completion, adding the old saying, “At this age, I’m not even buying green bananas.”
At 103, Judge Brown, of the United States District Court here, is old enough to have been unusually old when he enlisted during World War II. He is old enough to have witnessed a former law clerk’s appointment to serve beside him as a district judge — and, almost two decades later, the former clerk’s move to senior status. Judge Brown is so old, in fact, that in less than a year, should he survive, he will become the oldest practicing federal judge in the history of the United States.
Upon learning of the remarkable longevity of the man who was likely to sentence him to prison, Randy Hicks, like many defendants, became nervous. He worried whether Judge Brown was of sound enough mind to understand the legal issues of a complex wire fraud case and healthy enough to make it through what turned out to be two years of hearings. “And then,” he said, “I realized that people were probably thinking the same thing 20 years ago.”
“He might be up there another 20 years,” added Mr. Hicks, 40, who recently completed a 30-month sentence and calls himself an admirer of Judge Brown. “And I hope he is.”
The Constitution grants federal judges an almost-unparalleled option to keep working “during good behavior,” which, in practice, has meant as long as they want. But since that language was written, average life expectancy has more than doubled, to almost 80, and the number of people who live beyond 100 is rapidly growing. (Of the 10 oldest practicing federal judges on record, all but one served in the last 15 years.)

Whacked

Judge Zloch sentenced a former Guatemalan soldier, Gilberto Jordan, to the maximum 10 years today lying on citizenship forms about his military service and role in the killings. It was a hefty upward variance. From Curt Anderson's report:

Jordan could have received just six months behind bars under sentencing guidelines. But prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge William Zloch to impose the maximum possible, a 10-year sentence.

They said Jordan admitted to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that he participated in the December 1982 massacre in the Guatemalan village of Dos Erres, including personally throwing an infant down a well.

Investigators say at least 162 people died, many hit with sledgehammers or shot.

"Mr. Jordan admitted to killing a baby. He then participated in the killings of countless other men, women and children," said Hillary Davidson, a U.S. Justice Department senior trial attorney. "He never should have been allowed to live here peacefully for many years."

Zloch was just as harsh, saying Jordan tried to hide "his background as a mass murderer." Referring to the 10-year sentence, the judge said: "Anything less would be totally inadequate as just punishment for this crime and its accompanying heinous acts."

Quick hits

1. I love this story from BLT -- senators are conducting the impeachment trial of U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. and the schedule they are trying to keep to is about 8am to 7:30 pm. They need at least 7 senators to hear evidence. Problem is that they are having a tough time keeping 7 senators around for such a long day:

But senators, who aren’t used to staying in one place during the day, have had trouble keeping to the plan.

Today, for example, the 12-member committee that’s conducting the trial recessed at 11 a.m., so that its members could cast votes on the Senate floor. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), the committee’s chairwoman, asked her colleagues to return at 11:40 a.m. to hear more testimony before lunch. But only a few of them did, and seven members must be present before the committee can hear testimony.

“It doesn’t appear we’re going to get seven,” McCaskill said shortly after noon. “We have to have seven members before we can proceed.”

2. Also gotta love the 9th -- they don't put up with the Miranda two-step. Or illegally seizing ballplayers' drug-test records.

3. You all know that I really think that we should have cameras in federal court. But who is going to watch civil trials? Zzzzzzzzzzz.

4. Justices Ginsburg and Kagan know how to parttyyyyyyyyyyyyy.