Former weatherman victimized again? Federal prosecution imminent?

The New York Daily News covers B-Girl "victim" John Bolaris' latest issue (the blog's past coverage of his testimony is here).  Here are some of the tweets:

And from the article:

A former weatherman couldn’t have forecast his latest scandal, in which his fiancé took over his Twitter account while he was sleeping and unleashed a barrage of racy messages for his fans. John Bolaris, who was suspended from his job as a weather anchor for Fox affiliate WTXF in Philadelphia last year amid the bombshell story that he’d been drugged and robbed by beautiful women in Miami in 2010, was back in the headlines on Tuesday after fiancé Erica Smitheman drunkenly took over his Twitter account and repeatedly promised to post nude pictures of herself. The former Playboy model started her Twitter binge on Sunday night, writing, “Hello this is Erica…love John, he loves you all, I guess it’s ok if I send you all a naked photo or two…don’t tell my love.” She continued to write suggestive tweets referring to her modeling past and hinting that she’d taken over Bolaris’s account behind his back. “This is Erica, I did pose in Playboy…so what,” she wrote. “I will post my naked pictures…John Has no clue.” She also shared sexy pictures of herself and took aim at naysayers, as well as bragging that “sex is great” with her fiancé. “I am tweeting, he is sleeping,” she confirmed in a text to Philly.com, which reached out wondering if the reporter’s account had been hacked. “I am drinkinging and can’t take the haters! Lol,” she wrote, telling the paper she’d been ingesting liquid courage in the form of pinot grigio to write the tweets.

Should you be able to record the police?

In Illinois, the legislature wanted the answer to be no, but the 7th Circuit said the law violated the First Amendment.  The Supreme Court just denied cert, so the injunction is still on the books.  From the Chicago Tribune:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal of a controversial Illinois law prohibiting people from recording police officers on the job.
By passing on the issue, the justices left in place a federal appeals court ruling that found that the state's anti-eavesdropping law violates free-speech rights when used against people who audiotape police officers.
A temporary injunction issued after that June ruling effectively bars Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez from prosecuting anyone under the current statute. On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit against Alvarez, asked a federal judge hearing the case to make the injunction permanent, said Harvey Grossman, legal director of the ACLU of Illinois.
Grossman said he expected that a permanent injunction would set a precedent across Illinois that effectively cripples enforcement of the law.

It reminds me of this YouTube video:

This Good Wife episode was based on that video. It's a fun watch:

WARNING -- do not forward this blog post!

The police my be reading your email.  According to the NY Times:

Judges and lawmakers across the country are wrangling over whether and when law enforcement authorities can peer into suspects’ cellphones, and the cornucopia of evidence they provide.

 A Rhode Island judge threw out cellphone evidence that led to a man being charged with the murder of a 6-year-old boy, saying the police needed a search warrant. A court in Washington compared text messages to voice mail messages that can be overheard by anyone in a room and are therefore not protected by state privacy laws.

In Louisiana, a federal appeals court is weighing whether location records stored in smartphones deserve privacy protection, or whether they are “business records” that belong to the phone companies.

“The courts are all over the place,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a criminal lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group. “They can’t even agree if there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages that would trigger Fourth Amendment protection.”

The issue will attract attention on Thursday when a Senate committee considers limited changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that regulates how the government can monitor digital communications. Courts have used it to permit warrantless surveillance of certain kinds of cellphone data.

A proposed amendment would require the police to obtain a warrant to search e-mail, no matter how old it was, updating a provision that currently allows warrantless searches of e-mails more than 180 days old. 

When the legislature does act, we get strange decisions from the executive:

 Nearly three years later, in a 190-page ruling, Judge Savage sharply criticized the police.

The first police officer had no right to look at the phone without a search warrant, Judge Savage ruled. It was not in “plain view,” she wrote, nor did Ms. Oliver give her consent to search it. The court said Mr. Patino could reasonably have expected the text messages he exchanged with Ms. Oliver to be free from police scrutiny.

The judge then suppressed the bounty of evidence that the prosecution had secured through warrants, including the text message that had initially drawn the police officer’s attention.

“Given the amount of private information that can be readily gleaned from the contents of a person’s cellphone and text messages — and the heightened concerns for privacy as a result — this court will not expand the warrantless search exceptions to include the search of a cellphone and the viewing of text messages,” she wrote.

Mr. Patino remains in jail while the case is on appeal in the state’s Supreme Court. A lawyer for Mr. Patino did not respond to a request for comment.

Just months before Judge Savage’s ruling, the Rhode Island legislature passed a law compelling the police to obtain a warrant to search a cellphone, even if they find it during an arrest. Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee, an independent, vetoed the bill, saying, “The courts, and not the legislature, are better suited to resolve these complex and case-specific issues.”

 Do we have any privacy any more?

Happy Thanksgiving! (UPDATED)

UPDATE -- Judges Carnes and Hill won't be sharing a turkey this holiday.  Check out Judge Hill's dissenting opinion in Rozier v. United States.  A snippet:

I reluctantly conclude that our court is determined to deny relief to every confined habeas petitioner whose sentence has been unlawfully enhanced under either the career offender guideline or the armed career criminal statute.

***

I must confess I am bewildered that both the United States, through its Department of Justice, and this court appear to rejoice when access to constitutional protection for the correction of admitted and highly prejudicial error is found to be blocked by unmet procedural “safeguards.” On the contrary, I should have thought that the correction of such error would be celebrated by all sworn to uphold the Constitution. As is inscribed in the office rotunda of the Attorney General of the United States, “The United States wins its point whenever justice is done its citizens in the courts.” Some in the Department of Justice seem to believe that the inscription reads, “Justice is done when the United States wins.”

  Clearly justice is not the intended beneficiary of these procedural safeguards. On the contrary, the safeguards are designed to protect finality. If these new rules require that finality trump justice, then perhaps, as one member of this panel has opined elsewhere, they are unconstitutional. In any event, I cannot join in this elevation of form over substance; of finality over fairness. Due process is the defining virtue of our system of criminal justice. But we should ask ourselves why. Is it because it achieves finality? Or is it because we believe that, more often than not, we will reach a correct result where certain process is due the criminal defendant. The goal is a correct result – not simply the provision of process. To be sure, we do not guarantee a correct result. But where all know the result is error, to adhere to the process as though it were the end goal is unfair in the purest sense of the word.
This is especially true where the petitioner is in federal custody, not state custody. We safeguard finality for state court convictions out of respect for the dual principles of comity and federalism. Neither of these considerations is due the erroneously sentenced federal prisoner. It seems to me that the majority has striven mightily to avoid granting the writ to someone currently deprived of liberty in violation of law. I am weary of our court’s relentless effort to put more and more procedural angels on the head of the habeas pin. At some point, we must concede, as the Seventh Circuit did recently, that common sense and basic fairness require that we correct these unlawfully enhanced sentences. See Narvaez v. United States, 674 F.3d 621 (7th Cir. 2011).

Tuesday News & Notes

1.  The Court's Holiday Schedule is here.

2.  Former NFL player Louis Gachelin sentenced to two plus years.  (Via Sun-Sentinel).

3.  Lewis/Tein has some good news covered by the DBR and SFL.  UPDATED -- And Rumpole!

4. Alan Dershowitz interviews Jeffrey Toobin.  Really interesting.

5.  Former state prosecutor in Maine cuts his electronic monitor.  Apparently, that's very rare.

6.  The Washington Times updates the judicial nominees and the waiting time.

Judge Seitz taking Senior Status

Rumors have been swirling that Judge Seitz would be taking senior status this month, and it appears that she did so as of November 16, 2012, which is 14 years to the day she was appointed by President Clinton).  So another opening for President Obama, who is quickly reshaping our District Court. 

In other news, the B-Girls trial is still being heard and the testimony of former weatherman John Bolaris was out of a bad movie.  From Jay Weaver:

More than two years after his “nightmare on South Beach,” former TV weatherman John Bolaris remains a little foggy about his close encounter with a couple of Latvian “Bar Girls” who swindled him for $43,000 in bogus booze charges billed to his AMEX card.
On Friday, Bolaris testified in Miami federal court that he didn’t have sex with them, though the thought crossed his mind after meeting the duo at the Delano Hotel in late March 2010. Bolaris, 55, was asked whether the B-girls suggested they go to his room at the Fontainebleau Hotel for a “threesome.”
“No, sir,” Bolaris told defense attorney Roderick Vereen. “In my right state of mind, I would not do that.” Vereen shot back: “What about in your intoxicated state of mind?” ***The following night, Bolaris said he went to dinner at the Delano Hotel, eating sushi and drinking a few glasses of his favorite wine, pinot grigio. He then sat down in the hotel’s Rose Bar for a few more glasses of wine. Nearby, a pair of B-girls were acting like tourists as they took pictures of each other. They struck up a conversation with him.
Bolaris described them as “very cutesy, like the girls next door ... the kind of girls you’d like to marry.” He paid for a round of wine, and later invited them to the Delano’s poolside bar, where he slipped a $50 bill to the bouncer to let them in. He bought another round of wine.
One of the B-girls started rubbing his shoulders from behind, while the other approached from the front to offer him a shot of liquor.
“Come on, do the shot,” she teased. Bolaris said, “No, no.”
But eventually he gave in and downed one.
During his testimony, federal prosecutor Richard Gregorie asked Bolaris if at that point he had the impression they were “hookers.” He emphatically said, “No.”
Gregorie further asked if he went to the Delano looking to have sex. He said he went there for sushi, “not for sex.”

Is this guy serious?  He believed that two girls just came up to him and started rubbing his shoulders at the Delano pool.  And remind me again why this is in federal court.   Lots of other details on the net from the 302 reports and other sources. 

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/16/3100889/ex-philadelphia-weatherman-testifies.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/16/3100889/ex-philadelphia-weatherman-testifies.html#storylink=cpy

Sorry for the slow blogging

I'll be back on Monday. Enjoy the weekend.

Judge William Thomas officially nominated to District Court

This is great news and fast. Let's hope that this is how it's going to be in the President's second term. Here is President Obama's press release:

President Obama Nominates Seven to the United States District Courts

WASHINGTON, DC - Today, President Obama nominated Valerie E. Caproni, Kenneth John Gonzales, Raymond P. Moore, Judge Beverly Reid O’Connell, Judge William L. Thomas, Judge Analisa Torres and Derrick Kahala Watson for District Court judgeships.

"These individuals have demonstrated the talent, expertise, and fair-mindedness Americans expect and deserve from their judicial system," said President Obama.  "They also represent my continued commitment to ensure that the judiciary resembles the nation it serves.  I am grateful for their willingness to serve and confident that they will apply the law with the utmost impartiality and integrity.  Too many of our courtrooms stand empty.  I hope the Senate will promptly consider all of my nominees and ensure justice for everyday Americans.”

 ***

Judge William L. Thomas:  Nominee for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida
Judge William L. Thomas has served as a Circuit Judge in Florida’s Eleventh Judicial Circuit since 2005, where he has presided over both civil and criminal matters.  For seven years, from 1997 to 2005, he served as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in the Southern District of Florida, where he represented indigent clients in federal criminal cases.  Judge Thomas began his legal career as an Assistant Public Defender at the Miami-Dade County Public Defender’s Office in 1994.  He received his J.D. in 1994 from the Temple University School of Law and his B.A. in 1991 from Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania.

***

HT: Glenn Sugameli