Ugly fight over federal judges

Robin McDonald covers the dispute here in which the two Georgia senators agree that Jill A. Pryor and Mark H. Cohen should be federal judges, but they want Cohen to go to the 11th and Pryor to the district court even though President Obama is vetting them for the opposite positions:

Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson on Tuesday sent a letter to the White House saying they would support Cohen, a partner at Troutman Sanders, for the 11th Circuit vacancy, and back Pryor, a Bondurant Mixson & Elmore partner, for a vacant post on the district court.
In an eight-line letter to the White House counsel, the senators also resurrected the name of a third candidate, U.S. Magistrate Judge Linda T. Walker, whose nomination for another district court vacancy was returned to the White House in December at the apparent request of the president's staff. The letter, on Isakson's stationery but signed by both senators, notified White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler that the senators would return "blue slips" to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Cohen for the 11th Circuit and Pryor and Walker for the district court. A blue slip is the Senate's traditional indication that a nominee has received the approval of his or her home state senator. But the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary has been vetting Pryor for the 11th Circuit post, according to Fulton County Superior Court Senior Judge Melvin K. Westmoreland. 

Meantime, Senators are threatening to stall all appellate appointments over the recess appointment dispute with the President.  Even though Judge Jordan has support from both sides of the aisle, such a move would hurt his chances.  Apparently, Senator Rubio has said that he is not going to support an across the board rejection of Obama's nominees.  For Judge Jordan's sake, I hope that politics don't jam him up.

FIU hosts Justice Alito at moot court finals

Dean Alex Acosta was rightfully beaming tonight, as his law school had its final round of moot court with a bench of Justice Alito, Judge Marcus, and Judge Barkett.  Here is Acosta introducing the final round with the judges in the background:

Lots of judges in town came to the festivities.  Here's a picture of Judges Huck and Altonaga with the panel:

The participants were Sherman Davis, Matthew Rogoff, Nicholas Greene, and Jeremy Chevres; and the issues hit close to home -- the GPS/4th Amendment issue (couldn't Justice Alito have convinced the Court to release Jones next week?!) and the Padilla retroactivity issue. Everyone did a nice job.

73-year old man pleads guilty in large fraud case

Via Curt Anderson:

A prominent businessman pleaded guilty Wednesday to fraud in a $135 million real estate scheme that fleeced hundreds of investors, including the Roman Catholic prep school he once attended.
Gaston Cantens, 73, faces up to five years behind bars after pleading guilty to a single count of wire and mail fraud conspiracy. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams set sentencing for April 4.
Cantens also lured investors from Miami's close-knit Cuban-American community, many of them elderly and some Roman Catholic priests.
One victim, 80-year-old Eduardo Arango, said he lost about $800,000 investing with Cantens. He called the plea agreement "a sweet deal" because Cantens could have faced more charges and a longer prison sentence.
"Most of the victims were people who are very aged. They lost whatever their resources were. They have suffered," Arango said.

Another GOP debate tonight.  Too bad Ali-G isn't the moderator:

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/01/25/2957872/religious-fla-prep-school-a-victim.html#storylink=cpy

Why blogs are awesome

Legal blogs are buzzing over yesterday's GPS ruling in Jones.  Before we had blogs, we would have to wait for law professors to write law review articles that no one would read.  But now, we have instant access to tons of great commentary about the decision. 

Orin Kerr over at Volokh has a number of really interesting posts on the opinion, including this one which discusses Scalia's trespass ruling in Jones and this one which raises three questions to think about after Jones.  I also found interesting Tom Goldstein's reaction about how the government didn't really lose as badly as everyone says it did. 

The beauty of all of this is that there is some really great, high powered opinions and commentary available to everyone right away.

And here is your moment of zen for the day:

SCOTUS decides GPS monitoring is a search

Per Justice Scalia: "The Government’s attachment of the GPS device to the vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment."

Here's the opinion. This is a biggie, and a huge loss for the feds who were fighting hard. Scalia backs away from the traditional Katz test:

This conclusion is consistent with this Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, which until the latter half of the 20th centurywas tied to common-law trespass. Later cases, which have deviated from that exclusively property-based approach, have applied the analysis of Justice Harlan’s concurrence in Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, which said that the Fourth Amendment protects a person’s “reasonable expectation of privacy,” id., at 360. Here, the Court need not address the Government’s contention that Jones had no “reasonable expectation of privacy,” because Jones’s Fourth Amendment rights do not rise or fall with the Katz formulation. At bottom, the Court must “assur[e] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.” Kyllo v. United States, 533 U. S. 27, 34. Katz did not repudiate the understanding that the Fourth Amendment embodies a particularconcern for government trespass upon the areas it enumerates. The Katz reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test has been added to, butnot substituted for, the common-law trespassory test. See Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 165, 176; Soldal v. Cook County, 506 U. S. 56, 64. United States v. Knotts, 460 U. S. 276, and United States v. Karo, 468 U. S. 705—post-Katz cases rejecting Fourth Amendment challenges to “beepers,” electronic tracking devices representing another form of electronic monitoring—do not foreclose the conclusion that a search occurred here. New York v. Class, 475 U. S. 106, and Oliver v. United States, 466 U. S. 170, also do not support the Government’s position. Pp. 4–12.

Justice Sotomayor doesn't like this analysis and concurs to explain that all this old stuff may need to be re-examined in light of evolving technology:

More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. E.g., Smith, 442 U. S., at 742; United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435, 443 (1976). This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a greatdeal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellu- lar providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medi- cations they purchase to online retailers. Perhaps, asJUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the “tradeoff” of privacy for convenience “worthwhile,” or come to acceptthis “diminution of privacy” as “inevitable,” post, at 10, and perhaps not. I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year. But whatever the societal expectations, they can attain constitutionally protectedstatus only if our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence ceases to treat secrecy as a prerequisite for privacy. I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection. See Smith, 442 U. S., at 749 (Marshall, J., dissenting) (“Privacy is not a discrete commodity, possessed absolutely or not at all. Those who disclose certain facts to a bank or phone company for a limited business purpose need not assume that this information will be released to other persons for other purposes”); see also Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352 (“[W]hat [a person] seeks to preserve as private,even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected”).

Justices Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan also concur, but disagree with Scalia's property analysis, and would stick to the Katz reasonable expectation of privacy test.

Now Justice Stevens engages Steven Colbert--hilarious

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Big win for Roy Black in the 11th Circuit

The case is USA v. Ignasiak, and the 11th Circuit per Judge Martin vacates the convictions of this doctor in a pill mill prosecution:

After carefully reviewing the record and having the benefit of oral argument, we reverse Ignasiak’s convictions because the admission of autopsy reports and testimony about those reports, without live in-court testimony from the medical examiners who actually performed the autopsies (and where no evidence was presented to show that the coroners who performed the autopsies were unavailable and the accused had a prior opportunity to cross examine that witness), violated the Confrontation Clause under the facts of this case. Because we conclude that the fourth issue is dispositive, we decline to address the other issues raised in Ignasiak’s merits appeal, except for the sufficiency 2 of the evidence claim.3 While we ultimately conclude that the evidence was sufficient, the degree to which we view the government’s case as less than overwhelming compels our conclusion that the Confrontation Clause violation was not harmless in this case. To give our harmful error determination sufficient context, it is necessary to describe the evidence in some detail.

The Court also has a very interesting discussion of the government's expert witness at pgs. 43-48 in which the government claims that it was not Brady material that its expert had previously committed federal crimes and that the information should remain under seal:

The Notice revealed for the first time that Dr. Jordan engaged in criminal conduct beginning at an unspecified time up to and continuing until 2006. Specifically, Dr. Jordan had, on nine separate occasions, used a counterfeit badge and his United States Marshal credentials to pose as an on-duty U.S. Marshal in order to carry firearms on commercial airplanes while on personal travel. On the ninth flight, a Transportation and Security Administration (“TSA”) agent discovered Dr. Jordan’s ploy, and seized the weapons, counterfeit badge, and Marshal Service credentials. The South Dakota U.S. Attorney’s Office opened an investigation of Dr. Jordan. Although Dr. Jordan had engaged in similar criminal conduct at least eight times before, thereby committing multiple violations of 18 U.S.C. §§ 912 and 1001 and 49 U.S.C. § 46505, the South Dakota U.S. Attorney allowed Dr. Jordan to enter into a “pre-trial diversion agreement” in which Dr. Jordan paid $2,000 and agreed not to carry any concealed weapons except while on official business. 

The government filed this information under seal and asked for it not to be made public because of the expert's right to privacy.  I kid you not:
 

Thus, while it is true that Dr. Jordan’s privacy interests sit on one side of the balance, it is “the interest of the public in accessing the information” that rests on the other. Id. And, in this case, the public has a great interest in learning the contents of the Notice—namely, learning the highly material fact that Dr. Jordan, a repeat government expert witness, abused his government authority and committed acts which could have been charged as felonies. To say that the defense would have preferred to use this information to discredit Dr. Jordan’s testimony is almost certainly an understatement. Perhaps ironically, by arguing that there was no Brady violation in this case because the AUSA prosecuting Ignasiak was unaware of Dr. Jordan’s history, it is actually the government that most persuasively highlights the value in unsealing the Notice. Indeed, should the Notice remain sealed, the significant likelihood is that in the next CSA prosecution in which Dr. Jordan testifies as an expert, both the prosecuting AUSA and the defense counsel will again be unaware of the highly relevant impeachment evidence contained in the Notice. And in that case, as in this one, should the truth ever come to light, the government could again point to its own ignorance and claim immunity from Brady error. Stated this way, we would have expected the government to condemn, rather than condone, such a problematic outcome. But instead the government asserts that Dr. Jordan’s privacy interest outweighs the public’s right to know the extent of Dr. Jordan’s involvement with the government. To be sure, in some cases a party may overcome the presumption of openness if it can show “an overriding interest based on findings that closure is essential to preserve higher values and is narrowly tailored to serve that interest.” Press-Enterprise Co. v. Superior Court of California, 464 U.S. 501, 510, 104 S. Ct. 819, 824 (1984). Indeed, the government correctly points to two categories of witnesses whose privacy interests are understandably paramount: victims in sex crime cases and criminal informants. Dr. Jordan is neither. Rather, he is an expert witness who, at a rate of $300/hour, voluntarily accepted employment which required him to testify against Ignasiak. Indeed, Dr. Jordan testified that he has been paid “around” $30,000 for his service as the government’s expert in this and other cases. While the fact of his paid status does not make him amenable to any sort of unfair or immaterial character attack, it does greatly reduce, if not altogether eviscerate, his expectation to keep impeachment evidence private. The government is thus right that courts should protect witnesses like Dr. Jordan from “unwarranted invasion” into their privacy. But we cannot agree that impeachment evidence concerning a highly compensated and voluntarily appearing expert witness is either “unwarranted” or an “invasion” into that witness’s privacy.

 Congrats to Roy Black, Richard Strafer, Jackie Perzcek and the whole team over there for this great win.

Colbert is awesome

This is too good to pass up: