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
A shutdown of numerous federal court websites on Friday, initially attributed to a cyberattack, was actually the result of technical problems, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said.
The service disruption prevented some attorneys from filing documents electronically and others from reading court records.
At first, a spokeswoman for the federal court system said the shutdowns were the result of a denial of service attack—a kind of blunt force assault that overwhelms a website's ability to handle regular users by inundating the site with meaningless traffic. She said the incident "affected an unknown number of courts around the country," as well as the systems for reading and filing court documents.
Later Friday night, however, an FBI spokeswoman said the service interruption was because of technical problems in the federal court computer system and not a cyber attack.
Jurors may have to see some stuff they might never be able to unsee if a defendant who's acting as his own attorney gets his way.
The South Florida man wants to introduce sex tapes and intimate photographs of himself and his wife as evidence in his criminal trial to try to prove that his marriage was real and not just undertaken for immigration purposes.
The trial of Rogerio Scotton — which starts Thursday in federal court in Fort Lauderdale — has nothing to do with sex.
The Brazilian-born former professional racecar driver, who lived in Boca Raton and Margate before his arrest in March 2012, is charged with 27 counts of mail fraud and two counts of lying to immigration authorities.
The 43-year-old businessman is accused of operating a multimillion dollar mail fraud involving shipping companies FedEx, UPS and DHL. Prosecutors say he stole millions of dollars from the shippers by creating phony accounts that fraudulently billed major companies like Target, WalMart and Apple between 2007 and 2012.
He wants U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenbaum to let him show what she called videos and photographs of "you and your wife engaged, I guess, in some very intimate acts" to the jurors who will decide his innocence or guilt.
Scotton hopes to undermine the prosecution's allegation that he lied about details of his marriage to a Cuban woman to get permanent resident status here. The 25-year U.S. resident said he has visible proof that the couple had a genuine marriage.
Scotton's desire to show jurors visual depictions of the more intimate side of the couple's relationship caused the judge to schedule a court hearing Wednesday to view the footage and photos and decide if it would be legally appropriate.
The judge told Scotton she wasn't going to just "play that stuff in front of the jury and see what's on there" without vetting it.
"I don't think that it would be fair to your wife," Rosenbaum told Scotton, explaining she needs to ensure that he gets a fair trial without unnecessarily violating his wife's privacy or introducing irrelevant matters.
"Why is the privacy of my wife important at this point?" Scotton asked the judge. "I'm facing jail time."
"[Let's] see if we can figure out a less intrusive way to prove the same thing," Rosenbaum told him.
There were no sound effects and certainly no cameras on hand when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia turned an already entertaining argument over a traffic stop on a two-lane road in northern California into drama worthy of Hollywood.Meanwhile, the New York Times had a good read about kosher meals in prisons:
Not even information that a carload of terrorists heading to Los Angeles with an atomic bomb would be enough to justify police stopping the car, if the tip came from an anonymous source, Scalia suggested Tuesday, using an extreme example to urge a lawyer for two suspects appealing their conviction to stand firm.
"I want you to say, 'Let the car go. Bye-bye, LA,'" Scalia said, drawing laughter from the audience as well as some colleagues.
While the rest of Washington stayed home in the snow, the Supreme Court was in session Tuesday and the justices had what, for them, seemed a rollicking good time.
The legal issue before the court is whether an anonymous tip about reckless driving is enough under the Fourth Amendment for police to pull over a car, without an officer's corroboration of dangerous driving.
Two brothers pleaded guilty to transporting marijuana after California Highway Patrol officers pulled over their silver Ford 150 pickup based on a report of reckless driving.
The officers did not observe erratic driving, but acted after dispatchers received a 911 call saying the vehicle had run the caller off the road and identifying it by its model, color and license plate. A subsequent search revealed four large bags of marijuana. The brothers argue in their appeal that the traffic stop violated their constitutional rights, based on an earlier high court ruling that anonymous tips by themselves ordinarily are not sufficient for police to detain or search someone.
The justices often try to test the arguments of the lawyers before them by hypothesizing about extreme positions. In this debate, Chief Justice John Roberts came up with a tip about a girl being tossed in the trunk of a car and kidnapped. Not enough, lawyer Paul Kleven said on behalf of the brothers.
"You get an A for consistency. I'm not sure about common sense," Justice Anthony Kennedy said.
But Scalia proved a stricter grader, after Kleven hesitated to agree that the car with the nuclear weapon couldn't be stopped. "That may be a situation, again, where the court decides that he risk is so great," Kleven began before Scalia cut in.
"So you see, he's not consistent," the justice said.
Lawyers for California and the Obama administration, defending the traffic stop based on the anonymous tip, said keeping the public safe from drunken drivers outweighs the intrusion of a traffic stop. They said a tip about someone driving recklessly would be enough because reckless driving often follows having had too much to drink.
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor said people use the term "reckless" differently, suggesting she might not accept the governments' argument.
Sotomayor gave as an example her mother, who doesn't like it when the justice tops 50 miles per hour behind the wheel. "She thinks that when I'm going 51, I'm speeding and reckless," Sotomayor said.
Captive diners know that a good meal is hard to find.Scalia's joke was much better than Evers'.....
Airplane passengers, for instance, have been known to order kosher meals, even if they are not Jewish, in the hope of getting a fresher, tastier, more tolerable tray of food. It turns out that prison inmates are no different.Florida is now under a court order to begin serving kosher food to eligible inmates, a routine and court-tested practice in most states. But state prison officials expressed alarm recently over the surge in prisoners, many of them gentiles, who have stated an interest in going kosher.Their concern: The cost of religious meals is four times as much as the standard fare, said Michael D. Crews, who is expected to be confirmed as secretary of the Department of Corrections in March.“The last number I saw Monday was 4,417,” Mr. Crews said of inmate requests at his recent confirmation hearing before a State Senate committee. “Once they start having the meals, we could see the number balloon.”To which, Senator Greg Evers, the Republican chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee remarked: “Is bread and water considered kosher? Just a thought. Just a thought.”
The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a pair of cases about whether the police need a warrant to search the cellphones of people they arrest, presenting a major test of the meaning of the Fourth Amendment in the digital age.In other news, two judges got in trouble last week, and it took quite a bit for it to become public. Here's the story about Boyce F. Martin Jr. and Richard Cebull:
The court has long allowed warrantless searches in connection with arrests, saying they are justified by the need to find weapons and to prevent the destruction of evidence. The question for the justices in the new cases is whether the potentially vast amounts of data held on smartphones warrant a different approach under the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches.The lower courts are divided. In one of the cases the court agreed to hear, the federal appeals court in Boston in May threw out evidence gathered after the police there inspected the call log of a drug dealer’s rudimentary flip phone. “Today, many Americans store their most personal ‘papers’ and ‘effects’ in electronic format, on a cellphone, carried on the person,” Judge Norman H. Stahl wrote for a divided three-judge panel of the court.“That information is, by and large, of a highly personal nature: photographs, videos, written and audio messages (text, email, and voice mail), contacts, calendar appointments, web search and browsing history, purchases, and financial and medical records,” he added.When the full appeals court declined to rehear the case, Chief Judge Sandra L. Lynch said she hoped the justices would soon address the “very important and very complex” questions presented by it. “Only the Supreme Court can finally resolve these issues, and I hope it will,” she wrote.In urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, United States v. Wurie, No. 13-212, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. said courts have long endorsed inspection of anything carried by the people they arrest, including wallets, calendars, pocket diaries, address books and pagers.In February, a state appeals court in California applied the principles established in those cases to allow a search of a smartphone containing much more information than the one seized in Boston. That case arose from the arrest of David L. Riley, who was pulled over for having an expired auto registration. The police found loaded guns in the car and, on inspecting Mr. Riley’s smartphone, entries they associated with a street gang.A more comprehensive search of the phone led to information that linked Mr. Riley to a shooting. He was later convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 15 years to life.His lawyers asked the Supreme Court to hear the case, Riley v. California, No. 13-132, to determine how the Fourth Amendment applies to a device “that happens to include a phone” but is in essence a computer “capable of storing a virtually limitless amount of information.” They argued that a warrant should be required “before allowing the police to rummage through the digital contents of such a device.”In agreeing Friday to hear that case, the justices said they would decide a narrower question than the one proposed by Mr. Riley’s lawyers, that of whether evidence admitted at Mr. Riley’s trial was obtained by a search that violated his Fourth Amendment rights.
Lifetime appointments to the bench, the legitimate need to keep judges apart from the political hurly burly, and their own institutional insularity combine to make the conduct of the federal judiciary extremely opaque and difficult to hold to account. So it's worth noting that on Friday, the Judicial Conference's Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability, which reviews cases of misconduct by federal judges, published two different decisions involving judicial misconduct where the essential issue before the panel was whether to make public the alleged misconduct or keep it cloaked behind the judicial trappings of secrecy and confidentiality.
In both cases, the committee opted in favor of openness. How it got there -- and the backstory on both cases -- is fascinating.
Alex Acosta, law dean of the Florida International, has applied to become dean of the University of Florida Levin College of Law.
Acosta, who has led FIU's law school for four years, is one of 24 semifinalists to head the Gainesville school. The list will be narrowed down to finalists today for future interviews.
Other semifinalists include Ileana Porras, associate law dean of academic affairs at the University of Miami, and Martha Barnett, a partner and lobbyist at Holland & Knight's Tallahassee office.
UF law dean Robert Jerry announced in August that he would step down after completing his 11th year in June.
Acosta, a former U.S. attorney in Miami, was recently appointed to another five-year term. Founded in 2000, the FIU law school is South Florida's newest and its only public one.
Acosta, 45, is credited with its rapid rise in the U.S. News & World Report's ranking from unranked—below 160 out of 184 schools—to 105 and increasing median LSAT scores, grade point averages and Florida Bar passage rates.
In his letter to the UF search committee, Acosta noted he has helped boost female enrollment from 46.2 percent to 51.6 percent and minority enrollment from 53.2 percent to 59.6 percent. He also boasts of raising $1.55 million, saying, "My fundraising has been outstanding."
"I previously served in three presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed positions in federal government," Acosta said of his time with the Justice Department and the National Labor Relations Board. "I offer an unusual combination of experience in the academy, government and law practice."
When he applied to be the FIU dean, Acosta acknowledged his one failing was his lack of teaching experience.
Leonard Strickman, FIU's first law dean, said he thinks Acosta would do a good job at UF and does not begrudge his applying.
What an awkward exchange in the opening of Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States, between Justice Scalia and Steven Lechner, who was making his first appearance before the Nine.
Lechner began with the customary, “Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court,” and continued on for about a page in the transcript, when he was interrupted by Justice Scalia.
MR. LECHNER: It is axiomatic that the highest evidence of title in this country is a patent from the government. When the government issues a patent, it divests itself of title except for those interests expressly reserved. Here, the patent did not reserve any interest in the 1875 Act -Oh isn’t that uncomfortable.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Counsel, you are not reading this, are you?
A moment later, Justice Breyer kindly intervened:
What do you all think -- jerk move by Scalia or not?JUSTICE BREYER: It’s all right.
Florida has the nation’s highest rate of identity theft, led by the fraud-wracked Miami area, and thieves are increasingly using the ill-gotten personal information to rip off the government through fraudulent tax refunds, a top federal prosecutor said Wednesday.
The identity theft rate in Florida in 2012 was more than 361 complaints for every 100,000 residents, according to the most recent Federal Trade Commission data. Georgia was next at 194 complaints per 100,000 residents, followed by California and Michigan at about 122 complaints each and New York at 110. The 2012 figures are the most recent.Among metropolitan areas, the Miami region topped the identity theft charts — just as it has previously for Medicare fraud and mortgage fraud — at more than 645 complaints for every 100,000 residents, according to the FTC. Florida has all five top identity theft regions: Naples, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fort Myers-Cape Coral and Tallahassee round out the national top five.
The Southern District of Illinois (East St. Louis) led the nation with 10.1
prosecutions of this statute per one million people, over eight times the
national average of 1.2 prosecutions per million. In second place was the
Southern District of Florida (Miami) with 8.8 prosecutions per million,
followed by South Carolina with 7.2 prosecutions per million.
Lawyers appearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit may soon see more unfamiliar faces when they look up at the bench.The court's chief judge has declared an emergency, such that cases may be decided by three-judge panels composed of only one of the court's judges, plus two visiting judges."We've got eight judges on a 12-judge court," said Chief Judge Edward Carnes, explaining the order he issued on Dec. 30.The four vacancies on the court occurred when judges decided to leave the court or take senior status. President Barack Obama has made nominations for three of the four openings, but there is no guarantee if or when they'll be confirmed by the Senate. Two Georgia-based vacancies date to 2010 and 2012, while openings arose in Florida and Alabama last fall.Federal law says that when federal appeals courts decide cases by three-judge panels, at least two of the judges must be members of that particular appeals court. Although the Eleventh Circuit generally does not use judges from outside of its membership to decide the cases it decides without oral argument—about 80 percent of the court's decisions, Carnes said—it liberally uses visiting judges for its oral argument calendar. Sometimes an oral argument panel might even comprise a fully active member of the Eleventh Circuit, one of the court's senior judges on a reduced caseload and a visiting judge from outside the court. Usually, visiting judges are district court judges from within the Eleventh Circuit's territory or senior federal judges from outside the circuit.But the federal rule requiring a majority of a three-judge panel to come from the circuit's membership has exceptions, including that the chief judge can certify that there is an "emergency." The statute, 28 U.S.C. § 46(b), says such emergencies include, but are not limited to, the unavailability of a judge of the court because of illness.
When Carlos Gomez's identity was stolen, his bank account wasn't drained. But the Miami man went to jail and nearly ended up in prison for a crime organized by an employee at his former bank.Finally, Chewbacca has posted some behind the scenes pictures from back in the day. I liked this one:
An employee at Wachovia Bank, which was bought by Wells Fargo, admitted stealing Gomez's personal information from an account he closed in 2002 and using it to open up another account in a $1.1 million embezzlement.
Wells Fargo & Co. discovered the fraud and implicated Gomez, among other suspects. Gomez was arrested at gunpoint in his home in front of his three young daughters, jailed without bond for two weeks and spent another seven months on house arrest.
Now that charges have been dropped, the UPS driver wants the bank to pay for destroying his life. His federal lawsuit recently withstood a motion to dismiss by the bank.
"I want to let the world know my story, to see how these banks can be," Gomez said. "At the end of the day, they don't care about you. You are just a number. They didn't care if I rotted in jail for 20 years."
