Mayor Michael Pizzi acquitted of all counts!

Congrats to Ed Shohat and Ben Keuhne on this big win.

Pizzi jury asking weird questions... (UPDATED -- Pizzi acquitted)

...and Judge Cooke is responding in print.  According to Dave Ovalle who is tweeting about the deliberations, Judge Cooke commented that "a whole generation can't read cursive" so she had to respond in print. She also said that she was "educated by nuns" in regards to her cursive.


On to the actual notes:



1)  The jury wanted "more understanding" about whether count 1 (the conspiracy charge) had to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.  The answer was obviously yes.



2)  The jury also wanted to know whether the entrapment instruction applied to all of the counts.  Again, the answer was yes.



Ovalle says that this leads him to believe that we are in for a split verdict.  I wonder.  This leads me to think that someone is fighting for the defense, but who really knows. 


UPDATE -- Ovalle was wrong -- NOT GUILTY across the board for Pizzi.

Pizzi jury deliberating

Dave Ovalle covers the closings here:

As depicted by the government, Miami Lakes Mayor Michael Pizzi was a greedy politician who “sold his office” for money from undercover FBI agents posing as crooked businessmen needing his influence in government.
“Mr. Pizzi knew this was a corrupt scheme,” federal prosecutor Bob Senior told jurors Tuesday during closing arguments in Pizzi’s corruption trial. “He participated in a corrupt scheme.”
But as told by Pizzi’s defense team, he was nothing more than a honest politician looking to help his community. He supported the bogus businessmen’s plan while being pushed, prodded and ultimately entrapped into accepting only part of the money — though for legitimate reasons.
“It is impossible that Mike Pizzi could have corrupt intent,” defense attorney Ed Shohat said.
***
“What kind of politician demands more money for simply sponsoring a free program that’s ‘good for the city,’ ” Senior told jurors.
But Shohat insisted that the agents, Kesti and lobbyist Richard Candia — Pizzi’s pal who was arrested and convicted as part of the scheme — consistently reinforced the notion that the program was legitimate. Pizzi supported the supposed grant but consistently shrugged off efforts to implicitly ask for money.
“Any good honest politician, trying to get hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not in the seven figures [for his community], would have done the exact same thing,” Shohat said.

Be nice to Dave Ovalle...

...if you are in federal court this morning.  He will be covering the closing arguments in the Pizzi trial for the Herald.  He's used to non-working escalators and bad coffee, so if you run into him, show him the good spots in and around the federal courthouse. Here's his lead-up story:

Lawyers are scheduled to deliver closing arguments Tuesday morning in a Miami federal court, with deliberations to follow.Pizzi’s defense rested Monday after several days of presenting witnesses aimed at explaining away allegations that the politician accepted money four separate times between 2011 and 2013.A guilty verdict could spell the end of a career for the fast-talking, populist-style politician first elected to the Miami Lakes City Council in 2000, then to the mayor’s seat eight years later. An acquittal would be a resounding triumph for Pizzi, who had long insisted he is innocent, set up by questionable FBI tactics and unscrupulous informants.Federal prosecutors say Pizzi took the money in exchange for supporting a phony federal grant application sought by two crooked Chicago businessmen — actually undercover FBI agents working with a lobbyist-turned-informant Michael Kesti.

***
Pizzi’s defense lawyers have painted Candia as a liar looking to lessen his prison sentence.To shoot down the claim, defense lawyers last week called to the stand Jorge Concepcion, a businessman who told jurors he was actually meeting with Pizzi at a house nearby at the time of the alleged Starbucks encounter.On Monday, for their final rebuttal witness, prosecutors put on a phone company engineer who testified that Pizzi’s phone call likely came south of a cellphone tower — near the Starbucks, in the opposite direction of the home where Pizzi purportedly met with Concepcion.

You be the judge.

1.  How much time should a mailman get for throwing away 700 letters because he couldn't get them all delivered?  Paula McMahon of the Sun-Sentinel covers the story of  South Florida mailman Jimmy Lee Peters Jr.  Judge Cohn rightfully sentenced him to probation:

At his sentencing Friday in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Peters' lawyer said his client stole nothing and simply became "overwhelmed" by the volume of mail that he was expected to deliver during his seven months as a mail carrier."He basically says that it was a very large district that he had to serve and he was just overwhelmed," defense attorney Ruben Garcia told U.S. District Judge James Cohn. "Instead of just taking it back and admitting that he just wasn't up to it, he took it home."Peters didn't open even one envelope and none of the intended recipients reported any losses, officials said.U.S. Postal Service employees reported that they found "several garbage bags full of U.S. mail" at Peters' Miami residence. Other workers later delivered the delayed mail, which was addressed to ZIP codes 33060, 33064, 33013 and 33014, court records show.Garcia told the judge that Peters – whose prior criminal record consisted of two misdemeanor convictions for possession of marijuana and two arrests for driving with a suspended license – had already been punished significantly by being fired from a good job."I've realized how wrong I was for delaying the mail," Peters told the judge. "I am extremely ashamed and remorseful." 

Peters was sentenced to two years of probation and ordered to undergo substance abuse treatment. The judge said he felt that, considering everything, it was a reasonable punishment.

2.   Next up is a wine counterfeiter.  How much time should Rudy Kurniawan receive for selling *a lot* of counterfeit wine to rich wine collectors?  According to Judge Richard Berman in the SDNY, TEN YEARS! Here's the CBS NY story about the (way too long?) sentence:

He said Kurniawan’s victims were wealthy and aware that counterfeit wines were a frequent occurrence in the marketplace.“Nobody died. Nobody lost their savings. Nobody lost their job,” he said. The lawyer said the 2 1/2 years Kurniawan has served in prison was enough penalty, since he had lost everything and been branded a cheat.Okula called the defense lawyer’s comments “quite shocking,” especially when he suggested that Kurniawan should get lenient treatment because he ripped off rich people rather than the poor.“Fraud is fraud,” he said.Kurniawan was a connoisseur of counterfeiting who mastered label making, cork stamping, bottle waxing and recorking to create fake bottles of wine. Federal prosecutors said Kurniawan turned his California home into a wine factory. Restaurants sent him empty wine bottles, then he mixed together cheap wine and rebottled it as vintage wine.He also borrowed money against his collection of fake wines and owes a New York bank several million dollars.Wine consultant Maureen Downey spent hours documenting the deception to help her sniff out future fakes, CBS 2’s Tony Aiello reported in December 2013.“Some of the stuff up there, even the producers say they would not be able to spot it,” Downey said.For example, Kurniawan phonied up two bottles of 1934 Romanee-Conti and sold them for $24,000. A fake double-magnum of 1947 Chateau Petrus was auctioned for $30,000. “He made blends,” Downey said. “He was like a mad scientist.”

I'm not sure the jury who asked for a "big bottle of wine" discussed in the post below would have cared.

3.  How much should a federal judge get if he is convicted of battery on his wife?  According to the AP, federal judge Mark Fuller from the Middle District of Alabama was arrested Saturday night in Atlanta at the Ritz-Carlton:

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Fuller was charged with misdemeanor battery and taken to the Fulton County jail around 2:30 Sunday morning.Fuller, 55, is a judge in the Middle District of Alabama and presided over the 2006 bribery trial of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy. According to a jail official, the judge has a 9 a.m. Monday court appearance and was expected to remain in jail overnight.Police responded to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at 181 Peachtree Street at 10:47 p.m. According to Atlanta police spokeswoman Kim Jones, officers spoke to Fuller’s wife, “who stated she was assaulted by her husband.” Fuller’s wife, who was not named by police, was treated by paramedics but refused treatment at a hospital.Fuller was nominated to the bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush and has been a controversial figure in Alabama politics, largely for his role in the Siegelman trial. Siegelman’s family members and supporters claim the former governor’s prosecution was politically motivated and that Fuller should have recused himself for conflicts of interest.

Jury in West Palm Beach asks for "big bottle of wine"

And they also include the LOL and :) on their note....

Gotta love South Florida! 

Are lawyers only happy when they're miserable?

That's the discussion over at Above the Law.  From the intro to Bruce Stachenfeld's post:

What I mean is this: You are working round-the-clock so much you haven’t even been home for a full day and hardly at all for a month on a doozie of a deal. You are completely sick of it. All you can think of is when the deal will be “over.” You are clearly “miserable.” If only you could have your personal life back! Then, finally, the deal closes — at last. Your client is wiring out the funds. As the transfer of funds is happening, a (terrible) thought races through your mind. You hate yourself for the thought — you try not to have the thought — but you simply can’t help it… and the thought is that you are kind of worried because you have nothing to do now and that is disquieting… gee, what if work has really slowed… at some point this will be a real problem. You’ve had your personal life back for maybe a second — you haven’t even taken a shower — and you are worrying where your next deal will come from.
Or the other way around. Work has been slow — very slow — for a couple of months. You have enjoyed some rounds of golf and gone out to a bunch of dinners and lunches, but you really would like a nice tricky and challenging deal to sink your teeth into. And of course you are mindful of the fact that like it or not lawyers just have to bill hours. That is how we make a living, and you just aren’t billing hours. Not a good thing. You are edgy — if only you could have a big deal to work on….

The final lament is that work is so damned inconsistent. One day you have nothing to do, and the next day you are swamped. There is no consistency, and therefore it is hard to make plans — it is hard to commit to pilates or pottery class or even going to the gym regularly or anything that requires regular attendance. If only you could have a regular life; however, you know full well that the cutting-edge stuff, the cool stuff, doesn’t fit into regular scheduling. We must always respond to someone’s emergency as that is what a service business is. How often has a client uttered the following three words: “take your time”?
So what should we do about this? Can anything be done about it, or are we lawyers going to have the ultimately pathetic lives, only “happy” when we are “miserably” overworked?
Dang it — I am not going through life that way — no way. And I urge the rest of the lawyers at my firm — and anyone else reading this — to avoid this terrible fate.
But avoiding this negative energy spiral is no easy feat. The fact remains that we are in a service business and we either do an awesome job for our clients — on their unpredictable time frames — or we lose our clients to other law firms that will make the necessary sacrifices. Just saying “no” to the clients or colleagues who make the time demands won’t work. And neither will being miserable and stressed out. Here is another plan.
Do you want a nine-to-five kind of boring job with unchallenging work? Most of us don’t want that. This is one of the reasons we became lawyers in the first place — because the work is incredibly interesting and challenging.
Conversely, do you want a life where you work round the clock, albeit on interesting and challenging matters, so hard that even your health starts to go? I would think you don’t want that either. At some point the work just isn’t fun any more and your job just stinks.
So how about you just flip your brain around. Instead of looking at the negatives, start looking at the positives of each work phase? This is the trick.

Major opinion from the 11th Circuit on structural error

Judge Wilson, joined by a visiting judge, issued this opinion in United States v. Roy, which starts:

This appeal involves a defense attorney’s temporary absence from the courtroom at his client’s trial when inculpatory testimony was admitted into evidence and contributed to his conviction. Appellant Alexander Michael Roy (Roy) alleges that his criminal conviction was obtained in violation of the Sixth Amendment and the Supreme Court’s holding in United States v. Cronic, 466 U.S. 648, 659, 104 S. Ct. 2039, 2047 (1984), which creates a presumption of prejudice and requires a new trial when counsel is absent during a “critical stage” of the trial. Because (1) Roy was a sole defendant during his criminal trial, (2) the afternoon session of Roy’s trial commenced while his counsel was actually and physically absent, and (3) during that absence, evidence directly inculpating Roy in a crime for which he was eventually convicted was presented to the jury, we conclude that Roy was denied counsel at a critical stage, and based on Cronic, we are required to reverse Roy’s conviction as to all counts of the indictment and remand the case to the district court for a new trial.

 And concludes:

 Where, as here, structural error has occurred, the entire trial is unfair and the convictions as to all counts are tainted. See Fulminante, 499 U.S. at 309–10, 111 S. Ct. at 1265. The Supreme Court has defined structural errors as those where the reviewing court “can only engage in pure speculation” about what the jury might have done; their consequences are “necessarily unquantifiable and indeterminate.” Sullivan v. Louisiana, 508 U.S. 275, 281–82, 113 S. Ct. 2078, 2082–83 (1993). Structural errors are “markedly different” from trial errors (which can be “quantitatively assessed”), and thus, structural errors “defy analysis by harmless-error standards.” Fulminante, 499 U.S. at 308, 309, 111 S. Ct. at 1264–65 (internal quotation marks omitted). There are some errors that courts can accurately measure and hold harmless. This is not one of them. Especially here, where the charges are interrelated and evidence relevant to one count may have influenced the jury as to others.

Chief Judge Carnes dissented, with this "forceful" introduction:

Returning late from a lunch break on the third day of a six-day trial, defense counsel missed a small part of the testimony of the twelfth of thirteen government witnesses. He was out of the courtroom for only seven of the 1,884 minutes, or 31.4 hours, of the trial (not counting recesses and jury deliberations), which amounts to less than one-half of one percent of the trial time. During his absence counsel missed only 18 answers out of a total of approximately 2,745 answers that were given by government witnesses during the trial, which means counsel missed less than one percent of the total number of answers given by witnesses for the prosecution. That’s it. And all of the testimony that he missed was repeated in even more detail by the same witness after counsel returned to the courtroom.
So far as it appears from the record, the judge and the prosecutor did not notice defense counsel’s brief absence. When he returned to the courtroom, counsel did not object to testimony having been taken in his absence. He did not ask the court to strike the questions and answers that he had missed and instruct the jury to disregard them. He apparently did not seek to have the questions and answers he missed read back to him outside the presence of the jury so that he could familiarize himself with them and object to any that were objectionable. For all that we can tell, counsel may have deliberately taken advantage of his own tardiness and carefully avoided any attempt to correct the problem, hoping that he could have a get-out-of-jail-free card in his pocket for his client. If so, it worked. The majority decides that the defendant’s convictions for attempted child enticement and for possession of child pornography, most of which the defendant produced himself, must be set aside because of his counsel’s brief absence, even though the record conclusively establishes that the absence could not possibly have prejudiced the defendant.
At oral argument, we could not ask the defendant’s trial counsel about the facts surrounding his absence from the courtroom, why he did not object, if he made any off-the-record effort to familiarize himself with the testimony taken in his absence, or anything else about the matter. The reason we could not ask what really happened, and why, is that trial counsel conveniently did not represent the defendant on appeal. Another attorney did. We could have remanded the case for an evidentiary hearing to find out all of the facts, but the majority refused my request to do that. The majority is content with only a swift sideways glance at the facts because it thinks the facts can be presumed away. But “[t]his is not a matter for polite [or impolite] presumptions; we must look the facts in the face.” Frank v. Mangum, 237 U.S. 309, 349 (1915) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
The majority’s view, now the law of this circuit, is that if a witness gives any testimony at all, even a single answer, supporting any count against the defendant while the defendant’s attorney is outside the courtroom, reversal of every count of conviction is automatic. No matter what. Reversal is automatic regardless of the reason for the absence. Regardless of whether the trial judge or prosecutor noticed the absence. Regardless of whether the answer given during the absence was objectionable. Regardless of whether the defendant suffered any actual prejudice from counsel’s absence. Regardless of whether counsel failed to object or seek any kind of corrective action. Regardless of whether counsel made a strategic decision not to seek to correct the problem. Regardless of whether the first mention of the matter was on appeal. And regardless of whether counsel deliberately engineered the whole thing. In other words, absence plus any inculpatory answer equals reversal regardless of any and all other facts and circumstances.
The majority holds that no matter how strong the evidence of the defendant’s guilt, all a defense attorney has to do to guarantee an automatic reversal of his client’s conviction on any and all counts is to be outside the courtroom while a witness gives a single inculpatory answer on any count against his client. The attorney can keep quiet about it until he sees what the verdict is and then claim his right to have any convictions set aside. And under today’s decision they must be set aside.
In fact, under the majority’s holding, it does not even matter if the attorney upon returning to the courtroom does object and does seek corrective actionbecause as soon as a single answer is given in his absence an absolute, conclusive, irrebutable presumption of prejudice arises. Nothing can be done. The law today’s decision puts in place is that absence during any inculpatory testimony at all is all that matters; no prejudice is required, no inquiry is allowed, no cure is permitted. Of course I dissent.

The majority has a lengthy response to the dissent, but I thought interesting the response to the argument that defense lawyers are unethically creating these errors on purpose:

We pause to address the concerns expressed by our dissenting colleague in his forceful dissent:

***

Our dissenting colleague next suggests that Roy’s counsel “may have deliberately taken advantage of his own tardiness and carefully avoided anyattempt to correct the problem, hoping that he could have a get-out-of-jail-free card in his pocket for his client. If so, it worked." Further, the dissent says that counsel may have “deliberately engineered the whole thing” and that our decision today could invite misconduct by opportunistic counsel, which, according to the dissent, is prevalent in the three states of the Eleventh Circuit as reflected by statistics evidencing rampant lawyer misconduct in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama by criminal lawyers.
Our confidence in the integrity of lawyers, who are admitted to practice in our courtrooms as officers of the Court bound by rules of professional responsibility, satisfies us that our decision today will not go so far as to motivate them to place their licenses to practice law in jeopardy by, as the dissent suggests, strategically slipping out of the courtroom when the judge is not looking and when they think inculpatory evidence is coming, to invite reversible error in the event of a conviction. Nor does the parade of horribles imagined by the dissent permit us to disregard Cronic.
The dissent also maintains that judges are not like, in its words, “kindergarten teachers, [who] will be forced to keep an eye on their lawyer-children.” Contrary to that view, we are unpersuaded that United States District Judges should be excused from the less than onerous burden of ensuring that the defendant’s lawyer is seated at counsel table, next to his client, or is somewhere in the courtroom when the government seeks the admission of incriminating evidence that will be used by the jury to convict his client of a felony, resulting in life imprisonment. Especially in a trial with a single defendant who has a single lawyer.
We conclude that when the accused is deprived of his lawyer at a critical stage of his trial, there has been a denial of Sixth Amendment rights that makes the adversary process itself unreliable. The Constitution gives the defendant the right to “the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him.” Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45, 69, 53 S. Ct. 55, 64 (1932). Accordingly, counsel’s absence during the admission of inculpatory evidence against Roy at his trial is “‘constitutional error of the first magnitude and no amount of showing of want of prejudice would cure it.’” Cronic, 466 U.S. at 659, 104 S. Ct. at 2047 (emphasis added) (quoting Alaska, 415 U.S. at 318, 94 S. Ct. at 1111).
Although we reverse and remand for a new trial, a reversal does not mean that the defendant goes free. Rather, Roy will be retried in accordance with the rules of evidence and procedure, and without constitutional error.