News & Notes -- Rosh Hashanah edition

The Eleventh Circuit just decided Temple B'Nai Zion vs. City of Sunny Isles Beach.  It's quite a read.  The issue presented is one of ripeness: "This appeal presents the question whether an Orthodox Jewish synagogue’s statutory and constitutional challenges to its designation as a historic landmark by a municipality are ripe for adjudication."  But check out some of these facts:

The City was not supportive of the Temple’s expansion plans, and in the period that followed Rabbi Lankry met with Mayor Edelcup on several occasions to work out the differences. The meetings went badly. At one point, Mayor Edelcup allegedly referred to the Sephardic Jewish community as a “bunch of pigs.” When Rabbi Lankry inquired as to whether he could quote the mayor as to his pejorative comment, Mayor Edelcup responded, “I don’t care what the [expletive] you do.” The animosity between the parties now proceeded at full bore: when the Temple rebuffed the City’s attempt to purchase the property on which the Temple was situated (the Temple is apparently located adjacent to city hall), Mayor Edelcup directed the City’s code enforcement officers to inspect the Temple, and between September 2007 and February 2009, the Temple received 12 separate code violation notices from City officials.
***
At a public hearing held before the full City Commission on September 2, 2010, the same witnesses who had appeared before the Preservation Board appeared again and provided essentially the same testimony. Because the hearing was public, citizens were permitted to take the lectern and offer comments during the proceeding; many took the opportunity to complain about the operation of the Temple, accusing Rabbi Lankry and the Temple of removing memorial plaques from the walls, failing to light candles for deceased congregants, denying access to former congregants, and absconding with the Temple’s Torahs. The City Commissioners—three out of five of whom were members of the Temple congregation before it became Orthodox—also offered public comments before voting on the designation. Commissioner Gerry Goodman, who had previously sat on the Temple’s board of directors, for example, questioned Rabbi Lankry at length about why the Temple seemed to be closed to the public on certain days. Commissioner Goodman had purchased a memorial plaque for a loved one at the Temple some years earlier but had been unable to view the plaque when he attempted to do so. Goodman then began to ask Rabbi Lankry whether the Temple was being leased out, but Mayor Edelcup interjected, admonishing Goodman to “[f]ocus on the issues.” Before closing his remarks, Goodman asked Rabbi Lankry whether Lankry had called him an anti-Semite in the local newspaper.

Yikes.  At the end of the day, the Court engages in some technical ripeness analysis but asks the parties for some reflection (which is appropriate at this time of year!):

We do not know who will ultimately prevail between the Temple and the City in this ongoing feud. That question—a merits one—is not ours to answer. We merely decide today that the claims enumerated in the Temple’s complaint are ripe for judicial adjudication. And while we embrace some hope that the parties might bury their strife before the next stage of federal litigation comes to pass, again on that score, only time will tell. At this juncture, it is enough to say that the order of the district court is vacated, and that the Temple’s challenges to the enactment of the historic designation are ripe for review.

Dan Wallach of Becker & Poliakoff represented the Synagogue. Coffey Burlington represented the City.

Sorry kids, summer's over

That means it's time for football, traffic, and... some changes at the U.S. Attorney's office.  Here's your new lineup:

Marcus Christian is leaving the local office and heading to DOJ -- UPDATE: Actually he is headed to a law firm in DC, and not DOJ.  Thanks to the commenters and tipsters.
George Karavestos takes over as Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney
Lynn Kirkpatrick takes over for George as the Chief of Narcotics
and Norman Hemming is now Special Counsel

Meantime, the government has charged two lawyers in the Rothstein saga.  From the Sun-Sentinel:

Nearly four years after Scott Rothstein's massive Ponzi scheme spectacularly imploded, the long-simmering criminal investigation entered a new phase Friday with the arrests of two Broward County attorneys accused of assisting the fraudster.
Douglas L. Bates, a Plantation attorney, was picked up at his Parkland home early Friday by IRS agents. Christina Kitterman, who had worked at Rothstein's law firm, surrendered at the West Palm Beach federal courthouse. Both are accused of lying to some of Rothstein's investors as he kept his $1.4 billion fraud alive.
"The success of such a large-scale scheme depended on the complicity of Rothstein's colleagues and associates, like Douglas Bates and Christina Kitterman," said U.S. Attorney Wifredo A. Ferrer.
The two attorneys became the first defendants to be indicted for their roles in the alleged criminal activities the now-disbarred attorney ran out of the Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm. The now-imprisoned Rothstein and eight other defendants all cut deals with the federal government in advance of being criminally charged.

What is Marco Rubio's reason for blocking Will Thomas?

The DBR (John Pacenti) has a lengthy article about Marco Rubio's decision to block two African American nominees -- William Thomas and Brian Davis -- to the district court.  But he refuses to explain his reason for the decision. 

Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a tea party darling, is blocking confirmation hearings for two black judicial nominees by withholding the formality of submitting what is known as a "blue slip." Miami-Dade Circuit Judge William Thomas was nominated 552 days ago for a Miami opening in the Southern District of Florida. Nassau Circuit Judge Brian Davis has been waiting even longer — 612 days — for action to fill a Middle District of Florida vacancy in Tampa. The blue slip is a required by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont. Waiting for blue slips is a longstanding procedure that the chairman does not plan to break, his spokeswoman Jessica Brady said Thursday. Florida's other senator, Democrat Bill Nelson, has submitted blue slips for both candidates. Rubio's and Nelson's offices did not respond to telephone calls or emails seeking comment by deadline. The failure to submit blue slips marks a ratcheting up of Republican efforts to block President Barack Obama's judicial nominees, even if means alienating minorities, critics say. Thomas and Davis fulfill Obama's goal of bringing greater diversity to the federal bench. Both are black, and Thomas is openly gay. Obama has been more dedicated to diversity than any of his predecessors, with 43 percent of women nominees compared with 22 percent under George W. Bush and 29 percent by Bill Clinton. Obama also surpassed his predecessors on nominating blacks and Hispanics. By delaying the nominations of minorities, Republicans hope to hinder a lasting legacy on the lifetime appointment of jurists, said Andrew Blotky, director of Legal Progress, part of the Center for American Progress in Washington. "If you look at how long these vacancies have been open, it's ridiculous and unconscionable," he said.

Meantime, the district continues to try interesting cases.  The psychic trial is going on in Ft. Lauderdale.  Via Paula McMahon:

When Sylvia Roma visited a psychic in late 1997, she was a successful executive who figured her life was happy and the tarot card reading was "just for entertainment."
But Roma was quickly convinced that her family was cursed, she said, and over the next 14 years she sent close to $800,000 worth of cash and gold coins to the woman she knew as Joyce Michaels, but who was really Rose Marks.
Marks summoned her to Fort Lauderdale in July 2002 and told her that nearly $500,000 in cash and gold coins Roma had already given to Marks had burned in the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center — yet Roma continued to send money and jewelry to Marks, she testified.
"I was in so far, I had nothing to do but believe her. I didn't see any way out," Roma testified Thursday in federal court in West Palm Beach, where Marks is on trial.
Prosecutors say Marks, 62, of Fort Lauderdale, and her family defrauded about $25 million from victims they met in Manhattan and South Florida.
It's rare for so-called Gypsy fortune-telling frauds cases such as this one to go to trial, law enforcement experts say, and one of the reasons is that alleged victims are embarrassed and ashamed to admit they've been tricked.
Roma, who will be back on the witness stand Friday to be cross-examined by the defense, told jurors that she became depressed and isolated as Marks urged her to send more and more money.
Marks told Roma she couldn't discuss "the work" with anyone because it would let "negative energy" affect Marks' efforts to lift the curse and help Roma to have a happier life, she said. Marks told her she was meditating and building an altar and a protective shield with the hundreds of gold coins that Roma provided to her.

Any predictions on how this one will turn out?

JNC decides to interview these 17 applicants

Two new federal district judges will come from this list:

Beatrice Butchko
Jack Tuter, Jr.
John Thornton, Jr.
David Haimes
Thomas Rebull
Mary Barzee Flores
Martin Bidwill
Daryl Trawick
Jeffrey Colbath
Darrin Gayles
Robin Rosenberg
Migna Sanchez-Llorens
Meenu Sasser
Veronica Harrell-James
Beth Bloom
Barry Seltzer
Peter Lopez

I've listed the applicants in interview order.  The interviews are on September 17, and this list will be narrowed to 4 people.

Fat Joe to the Big House

For 4 months on a tax evasion case.  He's at FDC.  From TMZ:

Fat Joe has just turned himself in to prison to serve his 4 month sentence for tax evasion.

The rapper -- real name Joseph Cartagena -- is officially in custody at the Federal Detention Center in Miami.

As TMZ previously reported, Joe pled guilty back in December to stiffing Uncle Sam on a boatload of taxes for the years 2007 and 2008 ... more than $1 million total.

He originally faced up to two years in the slammer for the crime -- but was ultimately sentenced to just 4 months and a $15,000 fine, plus one-year supervised release.

Justice Ginsburg not going anywhere

She's been giving a bunch of interviews lately, the most recent one on the front page of yesterday's NY Times. Lots of really interesting stuff, including that she's not leaving the Court any time soon:

On Friday, she said repeatedly that the identity of the president who would appoint her replacement did not figure in her retirement planning.

“There will be a president after this one, and I’m hopeful that that president will be a fine president,” she said.

Were Mr. Obama to name Justice Ginsburg’s successor, it would presumably be a one-for-one liberal swap that would not alter the court’s ideological balance. But if a Republican president is elected in 2016 and gets to name her successor, the court would be fundamentally reshaped.

Justice Ginsburg has survived two bouts with cancer, but her health is now good, she said, and her work ethic exceptional. There is no question, on the bench or in chambers, that she has full command of the complex legal issues that reach the court.

Her age has required only minor adjustments.

“I don’t water-ski anymore,” Justice Ginsburg said. “I haven’t gone horseback riding in four years. I haven’t ruled that out entirely. But water-skiing, those days are over.”

Justice Ginsburg, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, said she intended to stay on the court “as long as I can do the job full steam, and that, at my age, is not predictable.”

“I love my job,” she added. “I thought last year I did as well as in past terms.”

In other news, Eric Holder is speaking out for PD funding. Here's his op-ed:

Fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that everyone who is charged with a serious crime has the right to an attorney. In Gideon v. Wainwright, Justice Hugo Black observed for the court that “in our adversary system, any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured of a fair trial unless counsel is provided to him.” As a prosecutor, as a judge and as our nation’s attorney general, I have seen this reality firsthand.

Despite the promise of the court’s ruling in Gideon, however, the U.S. indigent defense systems — which provide representation to those who cannot afford it — are in financial crisis, plagued by crushing caseloads and insufficient resources. And this year’s forced budget reductions, due largely to sequestration, are further undermining this critical work.

In stark contrast to many state defender programs, the federal public defender system has consistently served as a model for efficiency and success. According to court statistics, as many as 90 percent of federal defendants qualify for court-appointed counsel, and the majority of criminal cases prosecuted by the Justice Department involve defendants represented by well-qualified, hardworking attorneys from federal defender offices. Yet draconian cuts have forced layoffs, furloughs (averaging 15 days per staff member) and personnel reductions through attrition. Across the country, these cuts threaten the integrity of our criminal justice system and impede the ability of our dedicated professionals to ensure due process, provide fair outcomes and guarantee the constitutionally protected rights of every criminal defendant.

I join with those judges, public defenders, legal scholars and countless other criminal-justice professionals who have urged Congress to restore these resources, to provide needed funding for the federal public defender program and to fulfill the fundamental promise of our criminal justice system.

The Justice Department is strongly committed to supporting indigent defense efforts through an office known as the Access to Justice Initiative, which I launched in 2010, and a range of grant programs. The department took this commitment to a new level on Aug. 14 by filing a statement of interest in the case of Wilbur v. City of Mt. Vernon — asserting that the federal government has a strong interest in ensuring that all jurisdictions are fulfilling their obligations under Gideon and endorsing limits on the caseloads of public defenders so they can provide quality representation to each client.

Unfortunately the federal public defender program is in dire straits. As I write, federal defenders representing the Boston Marathon bombing suspect are facingabout three weeks of unpaid leave. In Ohio, the director of one federal defender office who had served there for nearly two decades has laid himself off rather than terminate several more junior attorneys.

This shameful state of affairs is unworthy of our great nation, its proud history and our finest legal traditions. In purely fiscal terms, the cuts imposed by sequestration defy common sense because they will end up costing taxpayers much more than they save. The right to counsel is guaranteed under the Constitution. On the federal level, this means that every defendant who is unable to afford a lawyer must be represented by either a federal public defender or an appointed attorney from a panel of private lawyers. While federal defender offices are staffed by experienced, dedicated professionals operating in a framework that has proved both effective and efficient, panel attorneys often possess less experience and incur significantly higher fees. An increased reliance on panel attorneys may result in less desirable outcomes as well as significantly higher costs.

Five decades after the Supreme Court affirmed that adequate legal representation is a basic right, sequestration is undermining our ability to realize this fundamental promise. The moral and societal costs of inadequate representation are too great to measure. Only Congress has the ability to restore the funding that federal defenders need to ensure that justice can be done. It is past time for our elected representatives to act.

Judge Scola sentences Khan to 25 years...

...10 more than the prosecution was asking for. The AP's Curt Anderson has this:

Hafiz Khan, 78, had faced up to 60 years behind bars on four terrorism support-related charges. But U.S. District Judge Robert Scola opted for less than the maximum term, although it is 10 years more than the sentence recommended by federal prosecutors.

The case against Khan, who was imam at a Miami mosque prior to his 2011 arrest, was built on hundreds of FBI recordings of both telephone calls and Khan's face-to-face conversations with an undercover informant. In the calls, Khan discusses details of numerous wire transfers to Pakistan over a three-year period that totaled about $50,000.

Khan also was overheard praising deadly attacks by the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, including a 2009 bombing at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. In another call, Khan was heard wishing for the deaths of 50,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

"May Allah utterly destroy them. The destruction . if they do not repent and do not revert to the right path," Khan said on the FBI recording.

Scola said several times Friday that the evidence against Khan was strong.

"I can't think of a case where the evidence would be more overwhelmingly clear," the judge said.

During trial, Khan testified in his own defense that although he sometimes made strongly worded political statements, the money he sent to Pakistan was for family, friends and charity. In particular, Khan said he sent money to a religious school, or madrassa, that he'd founded in Pakistan's Swat Valley. That school was closed for a time by the Pakistani government, which claimed it was a Taliban hideout and training ground.

Khan also claimed in his testimony that he only pretended to support extremist Taliban views — including toppling Pakistan's government in favor of one that would impose strict Islamic law — in order to obtain $1 million promised him by the man who turned out to be the FBI informant. Prosecutors said that was a complete fabrication.

"Terrorists need money. What he did was put lives at risk," said Assistant U.S. Attorney John Shipley. "It put Pakistani lives at risk and it put American lives at risk."

In a lengthy statement to the judge in Pashto through an interpreter, Khan again insisted he was not a terrorism financier and that his sole intent was to help the poor in his native Swat Valley.

"I did not send one dollar to the terrorists or the fighting Taliban," Khan said. "I am absolutely against the terrorists and the violence."

Khan's wife, Fatima, appealed to Scola from her wheelchair, also in Pashto, to allow him to come home. She said his rants against Pakistan and the U.S. on the FBI tapes did not mean he was a proponent of violence.

"He gets angry a lot. He is not speaking from his heart," she said.

CJA rates being cut by $15/hour to $110/hour

That's the decision to save the Defenders from having to make massive layoffs around the country. From the USA Today article:

The federal judiciary for the first time is cutting the fees of court appointed defense lawyers, including those representing death penalty defendants, to deal with the "dire consequences'' of required government budget reductions known as sequestration.

The reductions, outlined in a notice to U.S. District Judge Catherine Blake, chairwoman of the Federal Judicial Conference Committee on Defender Services, are part of an unprecedented criminal justice cost-cutting effort that also will scale back operations of federal probation services at a time when authorities are planning to rely more heavily on programs like probation to help reduce the rising federal prison population.

The cuts in attorneys' fees will be implemented next month with payments dropping from $125 per hour to $110 in non-death penalty cases and from $179 per hour to $164 in cases where capital punishment is being sought.

The reductions are aimed at saving $50 million during the next 13 months to avoid further cuts into the full-time staff of the federal defenders service. The defender program consists of both full-time public defenders, who have been targeted for furloughs and layoffs, and private court-appointed lawyers who assist in the representation of the indigent.

In addition to the fee cuts, millions of dollars in fees to the outside court-appointed counsels, scheduled for payment in fiscal year 2014 (beginning in October), would be deferred into fiscal year 2015.

In the letter to Blake made public Monday, William Traxler Jr., chairman of the Judicial Conference's Executive Committee, warned that the fee cuts "may impact the delivery of justice, but are necessary to avoid permanent damage to the federal defender program.''

The sequester hasn't affected the U.S. Attorney's office in the same way as it has not had to fire employees or have furlough days.

It also hasn't impacted BOP. In fact, the government is asking for 15 years in prison (a life sentence) for 78-year old Hafiz Khan. Via Curt Anderson:

An elderly Muslim cleric convicted of sending tens of thousands of dollars to finance the Pakistani Taliban terror organization should spend at least 15 years in prison, federal prosecutors recommended Wednesday.

Hafiz Khan, 78, could get as much as 60 years behind bars when he is sentenced Friday because each of the four terrorism supported-related convictions carry maximum 15-year sentences. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Shipley said in court papers that combining all four potential sentences into one would be sufficient punishment.

Sentencing is scheduled before U.S. District Judge Robert Scola.

Shipley said hundreds of FBI recordings of Khan on the telephone and speaking in person with an informant show he supported the Taliban's attacks on Pakistani and U.S. targets and knew his money was going to promote violence. Some calls showed Khan praising attacks such as a deadly 2009 bombing at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, and the failed 2010 attempt to detonate a bomb in New York's Times Square.

"We are not contending that Khan's misconduct tops the scale of terrorism offenses," Shipley said. "But his sending money to militants in Pakistan helped the Taliban put Pakistani and American lives in jeopardy and fostered violence, not peace."

Khan's attorney, Khurrum Wahid, filed separate papers Wednesday asking for a more lenient but unspecified sentence, pointing to Khan's advanced age and medical problems. He also cited Khan's testimony in his own defense that he intended the roughly $50,000 he sent over a three-year period to be used for family, friends and charity in his Pakistan homeland. Before his 2011 arrest the imam at a Miami mosque, Khan also founded a religious school, or madrassa, in Pakistan's Swat Valley.