The SDFLA Blog is dedicated to providing news and notes regarding federal practice in the Southern District of Florida. The New Times calls the blog "the definitive source on South Florida's federal court system." All tips on court happenings are welcome and will remain anonymous. Please email David Markus at dmarkus@markuslaw.com
Now, the sequester's mandatory budget cuts are about to hit home, slowing many facets of the federal justice system in South Florida.
Criminal sentencing hearings in federal court will be suspended Fridays — a favorite day for many judges. This is a result of unpaid furloughs hitting prosecutors, public defenders and federal marshals over the next six months.
Each Federal Public Defender employee in the Southern District of Florida must take 22 unpaid days between April 1 and the end of the government's fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. It translates into almost one day each week.
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"The real cost is to the employees of the office," Caruso said. "We have single moms and we have parents who are saving for their kids' college, and we have people who need to pay their mortgage. Every employee is taking a 20 percent pay cut."
Sources told the Daily Business Review that each prosecutor in the Southern District will take 14 furlough days, but the office did not confirm that figure.
U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer's office referred all questions about budget cuts to the office of Attorney General Eric Holder in Washington.
The Justice Department released a letter from Holder to U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Maryland, chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, outlining sequester budget cuts for prosecutors, civil attorneys, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Marshals Service and the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
The Marshals Service is facing furloughs of up to 13 days; employees at the Bureau of Prisons will face on average 12 day.
The article is a fun read, but it leaves a lot of important details till the end. Meantime, this is the woman who Professor Frampton was trying to meet:Frampton didn’t plan on a long trip. He needed to be back to teach. So he left his car at the airport. Soon, he hoped, he’d be returning with Milani on his arm. The first thing that went wrong was that the e-ticket Milani sent Frampton for the Toronto-Santiago leg of his journey turned out to be invalid, leaving him stranded in the Toronto airport for a full day. Frampton finally arrived in La Paz four days after he set out. He hoped to meet Milani the next morning, but by then she had been called away to another photo shoot in Brussels. She promised to send him a ticket to join her there, so Frampton, who had checked into the Eva Palace Hotel, worked on a physics paper while he waited for it to arrive. He and Milani kept in regular contact. A ticket to Buenos Aires eventually came, with the promise that another ticket to Brussels was on the way. All Milani asked was that Frampton do her a favor: bring her a bag that she had left in La Paz.While in Bolivia, Frampton corresponded with an old friend, John Dixon, a physicist and lawyer who lives in Ontario. When Frampton explained what he was up to, Dixon became alarmed. His warnings to Frampton were unequivocal, Dixon told me not long ago, still clearly upset: “I said: ‘Well, inside that suitcase sewn into the lining will be cocaine. You’re in big trouble.’ Paul said, ‘I’ll be careful, I’ll make sure there isn’t cocaine in there and if there is, I’ll ask them to remove it.’ I thought they were probably going to kidnap him and torture him to get his money. I didn’t know he didn’t have money. I said, ‘Well, you’re going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?’ And he said, ‘You can contact my brother and my former wife.’ ” Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon’s warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.On the evening of Jan. 20, nine days after he arrived in Bolivia, a man Frampton describes as Hispanic but whom he didn’t get a good look at handed him a bag out on the dark street in front of his hotel. Frampton was expecting to be given an Hermès or a Louis Vuitton, but the bag was an utterly commonplace black cloth suitcase with wheels. Once he was back in his room, he opened it. It was empty. He wrote to Milani, asking why this particular suitcase was so important. She told him it had “sentimental value.” The next morning, he filled it with his dirty laundry and headed to the airport.Frampton flew from La Paz to Buenos Aires, crossing the border without incident. He says that he spent the next 40 hours in Ezeiza airport, without sleeping, mainly “doing physics” and checking his e-mail regularly in hopes that an e-ticket to Brussels would arrive. But by the time the ticket materialized, Frampton had gotten a friend to send him a ticket to Raleigh. He had been gone for 15 days and was ready to go home. Because there was always the chance that Milani would come to North Carolina and want her bag, he checked two bags, his and hers, and went to the gate. Soon he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He thought it must be for an upgrade to first class, but when he arrived at the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Asked to identify his luggage — “That’s my bag,” he said, “the other one’s not my bag, but I checked it in” — he waited while the police tested the contents of a package found in the “Milani” suitcase. Within hours, he was under arrest.
The Dyer building was left vacant due to health concerns after the Wilkie D. Ferguson Courthouse opened.
Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno welcomes the idea of the college acquisition.
"Miami Dade College could make repairs for a fraction of the cost of the GSA," Moreno said. "They've done a magnificent job with the Freedom Tower."
The slim tower is a Miami landmark that the college took over in 2005. It was the home of the defunct Miami News and was used by the federal government to process refugees fleeing Fidel Castro's communist Cuba.
Moreno said Padron intends to preserve the historic nature of the courthouse but noted some security changes would be needed. Tunnels link the Dyer courthouse to the Federal Detention Center across the street, and access would need to be sealed. The courthouse also connects to other buildings in the federal complex.
I think that's a good use of prosecutorial discretion to look at the conduct, regardless of what the statutory maximums were and to fashion a sentence that was consistent with what the nature of the conduct was," Holder testified, adding that Swartz and his attorneys had rejected the plea offers.
Holder was responding to questioning from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who suggested that the prosecutors handling the case were overzealous and guilty of misconduct.
In 2011, Swartz was charged with breaking into a computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloading 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, a subscription service for academic articles.
Swartz was an accomplished programmer and activist who argued that more online information should be free to the public.
Critics, including Swartz's family and members of Congress, have accused prosecutors of seeking excessive penalties in the case.
"Does it strike you as odd that the government would indict someone for crimes that would carry penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million fines, and then offer them a three month prison sentence?" Cornyn asked.
Holder insisted that the charges themselves are less important than the penalties sought by prosecutors and said several months in prison would have been appropriate based on the crime.
But Cornyn worried that such harsh potential penalties could empower prosecutors to "bully" defendants into pleading guilty.
