Dramatic guilty verdict in psychic trial

Paula McMahon has covered this trial wall to wall.  It's never easy after a guilty verdict:

Though Marks' relatives were initially calm and cried softly as the verdict was read, several of them became very upset after jurors left the courtroom and the family realized their matriarch was not going to be allowed to remain free on bond.
"Please let me hug my mom," Marks' eldest son, Ricky Marks, asked U.S. Marshals and courthouse security officers.
Other family members begged to be allowed to give their phone numbers to "Pinky" — Marks' family nickname — so she could call them from jail.
One grandson jeered at the lead investigator on the case, retired Fort Lauderdale Detective Charlie Stack, asking him, "How are you feeling now, Charlie? You did a good job?"
But Marks' two sons Ricky and Michael Marks tried to calm their family and apologized to Stack.
Daughter Rosie Marks began hyperventilating and collapsed to the floor in the hallway outside the courtroom. She and her two brothers, their spouses, one of Marks' granddaughters and Marks' sister have all pleaded guilty to related charges and are free while awaiting sentencing later this year.
Other members of the extended family shouted and one threw a Bible in the courtroom, yelling "I hate this Bible … I don't want this Bible anymore."
There was more security than usual in the courtroom but the agents and officers handled the disruption diplomatically, urging everyone to remain calm and trying to alleviate the family's concerns.

Psychic's trial now in jury's hands

Paula McMahon has been covering this fun (it's all relative) trial.  Here's the latest article with excerpts from the closing arguments:

Jurors heard from both the prosecution and defense that, in the Romani or Gypsy culture, mothers have a long tradition of teaching their daughters to develop psychic and other skills to help them become fortune tellers.
And while the prosecution said the mixing of family money in Marks' bank account and checks from one family member's client being sent to Marks were evidence of money-laundering to conceal the source of "dirty" money, the defense quoted an expert who said Gypsy families share money among the extended family more commonly than other cultures in the U.S.

More from the prosecution:

Prosecutors urged jurors on Wednesday to find "psychic" Rose Marks guilty of orchestrating a massive con — regardless of how outlandish the allegations sound and whether jurors think the victims were gullible.
"Don't blame the victims, and don't let them blame the victims," Assistant U.S. Attorney Larry Bardfeld said of Marks' defense in closing arguments in the month-long trial.
The victims were "not stupid," but were preyed upon by uncaring scammers who exploited vulnerable people in times of crisis — when they were bereaved and grieving, ill or looking for true love, he said.

And more from the defense:

While prosecutors cast everything in a negative light, Schwartz suggested they could not prove that Marks took money from clients under false pretenses, never intending to return it. He pointed out that she paid back large sums of money to several clients, but said she was unable to make payments after she was arrested and barred from working as a psychic at least until the criminal case is over.
"She doesn't have to prove she intended to pay it back, they [prosecutors] have to prove she didn't intend to pay it back," Schwartz said.

I thought this jury instruction looked interesting:

Jurors were also told that courts have ruled that fortune telling is free speech that is constitutionally protected by the First Amendment.

"Link Rot" at the Supreme Court, and a Will Thomas update

Adam Liptak has this great piece about links in Supreme Court cases not working anymore:

Supreme Court opinions have come down with a bad case of link rot. According to a new study, 49 percent of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions no longer work.

This can sometimes be amusing. A link in a 2011 Supreme Court opinion about violent video games by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. now leads to a mischievous error message.

“Aren’t you glad you didn’t cite to this Web page?” it asks. “If you had, like Justice Alito did, the original content would have long since disappeared and someone else might have come along and purchased the domain in order to make a comment about the transience of linked information in the Internet age.” 

It gets worse:

Even links to the Supreme Court’s own Web site have stopped working. One is to a video of what Justice Antonin Scalia called “the scariest chase I ever saw since ‘The French Connection.'”

The chase ended when a police car rammed the vehicle of a fleeing suspect, leaving him paralyzed. The driver sued, saying the police had used excessive force, and in 2007 the Supreme Court ruled against him.

The court posted the video. “I suggest that the interested reader take advantage of the link in the court’s opinion, and watch it,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in a concurrence.

Good luck: the link does not work. “The fact that the Supreme Court itself has links to its own Web site that no longer function shows the depth of the link rot problem,” Ms. Liebler and Ms. Liebert wrote, noting that the video could still be found with a little hunting around.

There were scores of links in the term that ended in June. For proof that many dog owners use six-foot leashes, for instance, Justice Alito included a link to About.com.

(Should justices conduct independent Internet research of the sort that might appear in a high school research paper? In an article last year in The Virginia Law Review, Allison Orr Larsen, a professor at William & Mary Law School, called the trend worrisome. Judge Richard A. Posner of the federal appeals court in Chicago defended the practice in a new book, “Reflections on Judging,” saying that “the Web is an incredible compendium of data and a potentially invaluable resource for lawyers and judges.”)

Links in Supreme Court opinions are less likely to work as they get older. But even some recent links are broken. A decision from February, for instance, included a citation to statistics from the Ohio court system; the link leads to a dead end.

Even working links may be problematic, as many Web sites are routinely altered. In April 2008, for instance, the court issued an important decision in a case concerning the lethal chemicals used to execute inmates, linking to a draft article. The link now delivers the reader to an article that indicates it was last revised in August 2008.

Meantime, Sen. Rubio is under more fire for his recent decision to block Judge Thomas. The NY Times is covering the story, and Fred Grimm has this excellent editorial in the Herald.  Here's the conclusion, which rebuts Rubio's argument about the sentence in the leaving the scene of the accident case:

But Assistant State Attorney Jane Anderson, who prosecuted the Traverso case in 2012, wrote Rubio that despite the widespread contention that this was a DUI case, the prosecution “had no proof that the defendant had driven under the influence or recklessly. Legally it was an accident.”
The judge, she noted, actually refused a defense motion for downward departure from the sentencing guidelines. He added a year’s sentence to the 11 months Traverso had already served in the county jail — a 23-month sentence, not, as Rubio’s office intimated, 364 days. Anderson wrote, “While the sentence was ultimately disappointing to the state and the victim’s family, Judge Thomas legally sentenced the defendant after hearing all parties and conducting the sentencing hearing with compassion and careful judgment.”
Rubio has a similar letter correcting popular misconceptions about the Traverso case from Nushin Sayfie, chief administrative judge for the criminal court.
Rubio received other letters praising Thomas from bleeding-heart organizations like the Miami-Dade and Broward Police Benevolent Associations, not to mention the League of Prosecutors. Ovalle, who knows everything about that courthouse, insisted that Thomas is regarded as one of the hardest-working, most competent judges in the Miami-Dade criminal court division.
But all this is to pretend that Rubio had some reason other than crass Tea Party politics for sabotaging Judge Thomas’ reputation and aborting the confirmation process.
So the Thomas nomination won’t get a hearing, much less a vote.
Because, you know, he just lacks the right “judicial temperament.”

There is now an online petition circulating for Judge Thomas that you can sign here.

UPDATE -- if you want to read any of the letters referenced in the Grimm article, you can access them at Glenn Sugameli's website.

Marco Rubio should give Will Thomas a "blue slip"

The DBR has the news on the refusal to issue a blue slip and SFL has a nice post explaining why that refusal is wrong.

The thing is -- we are just talking about allowing the process to go forward; to let the Senate vote on Thomas' nomination.  A nomination that Rubio initially recommended.  How can anyone be against allowing the process to proceed?

In other news, William Dimitrouleas sentenced Craig Toll to 2 years in prison, after having sentenced Osorio to 12.5 years.  Interestingly, Chris Korge testified in favor of Toll saying that he didn't know what was going on at the company.

Meantime, prosecutors in Kentucky are arguing that the 2255 waiver is not unethical.  The Kentucky Supreme Court doesn't understand their position:

The justices seemed puzzled by the stance of the federal prosecutors. Repeatedly, the jurists questioned the need for the waiver and whether an attorney can be aware of their mistakes at the time a plea agreement is reached.
Cushing told the justices that allowing later attacks on the performance of an attorney merely prolongs cases and hurts victims and their families.
“It’s about finality,” Cushing said. “Victims of crime have gone through tremendous trauma when these things go through the courts.”
Justice Daniel Venters said there is generally no way for a defendant to know if the attorney made an error until much later.
“It’s always hindsight in terms of defendants,” Venters said.
Justice Lisabeth Hughes Abramson said all justices want to see cases closed, but they must be closed properly.
“You’re asking us to accept the lawyer who is singularly unaware of his own lack of due diligence to be the guardian of the defendant’s rights,” Abramson said.
The case comes three years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Kentucky’s high court in a case that hinged on an attorney’s deficient advice. In that case, truck driver Jose Padilla wasn’t told he would face deportation if he pleaded guilty to hauling marijuana in the back of his truck. The U.S. Supreme Court concluded that the lack of due diligence by Padilla’s attorney affected the plea and Padilla’s claim of ineffective assistance of counsel was valid.
Justice Will T. Scott noted that if the waivers had been in place in Padilla’s case, he would have gone to prison and been deported based on bad advice.
“In cases where it matters, it really matters,” Abramson said.

Why you gotta love Judge Ungaro

You can almost hear her engaging the Governor's lawyers (via Curt Anderson):

 Gov. Rick Scott intends to take his fight for random drug tests of tens of thousands of state employees all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a lawyer for the Republican governor told a federal judge Thursday.
But Charles Trippe, who was previously Scott's general counsel and is now in private practice, could not persuade U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro to delay further proceedings in the case while the state appeals. Ungaro said she did not want to become "a political tool" in the controversial issue — and she also said Scott has "probably about zero" chance of winning a Supreme Court case.
"I just don't think it has likelihood of success," said Ungaro, who previously declared Scott's January 2011 drug-testing executive order an unconstitutional violation of the workers' privacy rights.
The case affecting some 85,000 state employees as well as many job applicants is back before Ungaro because the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded her April 2012 ruling in was too broad. The appeals court said in May of this year that some workers can legitimately be tested — such as those in law enforcement and sensitive safety jobs — and Ungaro planned to appoint a special master to come up with a proposed list of those positions.
Trippe wanted Ungaro to delay that exhaustive process so the governor can pursue the Supreme Court appeal, which would likely push the case well into election-year 2014. But Ungaro would not issue that order Thursday, even though an attorney for the American Federation of County, State and Municipal Employees did not object.
"How are you going to avoid it? Do we hope the governor will be voted out of office?" Ungaro said of the legal case. "Is this the idea, keep the ball up in the air, pray he is not re-elected?"
The judge said she would not delay the case unless Scott agreed to scrap the executive order should the Supreme Court decline to review it.
"I certainly can't say that," Trippe replied.
The executive order has been on hold pending the outcome of the lawsuit, filed by AFCSME and the American Civil Liberties Union. Also on hold is implementation of a similar state law that gives agency department heads authority to devise their own drug-testing programs, said union attorney Shalini Agarwal.
Ungaro set another hearing for Oct. 11 and urged the two sides to come up with a way forward. For example, the judge suggested the two sides work together on narrowing down which job categories might be exempt from drug testing and which could be covered by it.
"I have no desire to see the citizens of the state of Florida exposed to any more expense," she said.
Trippe, however, said the governor's office may return to the October hearing "with the same position we have today" seeking to delay the case.
"That's fine," the judge replied. "And, I may deny it."

Wednesday News & Notes

1.  The blog broke the news yesterday of the 4 nominees from the JNC for the federal bench.  Two of these nominees will be selected as our next federal judges:

Beth Bloom, Darrin Gayles, Peter Lopez, John Thornton

2.  Meantime, Judge Will Thomas' nomination is still being held up by Sen. Marco Rubio.  A rally on his behalf was held this morning at the federal courthouse.

3.  Claudio Osorio was sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison.

4.   "Grotesque prosecutorial misconduct" leads to a new trial.  This time it's from New Orleans.  Via CNN:

Jury selection was minutes away for five ex-New Orleans police officers accused of shooting unarmed civilians after Hurricane Katrina when a commenter ripped into the defendants on a newspaper website.

"NONE of these guys should had have [sic] ever been given a badge," the commenter, identified only as "legacyusa," wrote. "We should research how they got on the police department, who trained them, who supervised them and why were they ever been promoted. You put crap in -- you get crap out!!!"

"Legacyusa" turned out to be one of the top federal prosecutors in New Orleans. His post was just one of many anonymous barbs that led a federal judge Tuesday to throw out the convictions of those ex-cops in the Danziger Bridge shootings, which left two people dead and four seriously wounded.

In a 129-page ruling, District Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt cited long list of "egregious and inflammatory" comments by at least three Justice Department officials using a variety of online identities. Those comments fueled a "21st century carnival atmosphere" that tainted the 2011 trial and will require a new one, Engelhardt wrote.

"This case started as one featuring allegations of brazen abuse of authority, violation of the law and corruption of the criminal justice system; unfortunately, though the focus has switched from the accused to the accusers, it has continued to be about those very issues," the order states. "After much reflection, the court cannot journey as far as it has in this case only to ironically accept grotesque prosecutorial misconduct in the end."

In a statement issued Tuesday afternoon, the Justice Department said, "We are disappointed with the court's ruling. We are reviewing the decision and considering our options."

  
 Seems like a strange reaction from DOJ.  Why do they defense misconduct?

5.   Locally, bond was denied this morning in a case involving Iran, uranium, African mines, and ICE.  From Curt Anderson:

A West African man was ordered jailed Thursday until trial on U.S. charges that he attempted to broker an illegal deal to ship tons of uranium ore from Sierra Leone to Iran, including a trip to the U.S. with uranium ore samples concealed in shoes inside his luggage.
Patrick Campbell, 33, faces a maximum of 20 years behind bars and up to $1 million in fines if convicted of attempting to violate the U.S. embargo against Iran. A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement affidavit filed in federal court says Campbell claimed he could supply enough ore — commonly known as yellowcake — to yield 1,000 tons of purified uranium that could be used for nuclear fuel or weapons.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Seltzer agreed with prosecutors at a hearing that Campbell should not be released on bail, although a trial date has not been set. Campbell is scheduled to enter a plea next week.

Breaking -- JNC cuts list to 4

Your next two federal district judges will be from this list:

Beth Bloom, Darrin Gayles, Peter Lopez, John Thornton

Congrats!!

Interesting to note that all four are sitting state judges in Circuit Court.

JNC interviews today

Good luck to all of the applicants.

After the interviews, the JNC will cut the list to four (for two open seats).  I will post those four names as soon as I have them.