A few news and notes

1.  The Justices seemed annoyed that the U.S. would deport someone over a sock.  From USA Today:

The Supreme Court had a suggestion Wednesday for one of the more extreme reasons used by the Obama administration to deport documented immigrants on drug charges: Stick a sock in it.
The justices appeared fed up by the latest in a series of cases they have reversed over the past decade — cases in which immigrants have been deported or threatened with deportation because of minor drug offenses.
This time, the offender was convicted of possessing "drug paraphernalia" — a sock used to conceal four tablets of Adderall, a stimulant used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
"If he had cocaine in his sock, he would probably be convicted of possession of cocaine," a clearly miffed Justice Elena Kagan said.
"He was convicted of paraphernalia here because he had four pills of Adderall, which if you go to half the colleges in America ... and just randomly pick somebody, there would be a decent chance..." the former Harvard Law School dean said, her voice trailing off.
Nearly all the justices appeared convinced that the government had gone too far in deporting Moones Mellouli, a Tunisian who came to the USA on a student visa in 2004 and went on to earn two master's degrees, work as an actuary and teach mathematics at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Mellouli was deported under a federal law that permits the government to remove non-citizens "convicted of a violation of ... any law or regulation of a state, the United States or a foreign country relating to a controlled substance." First offenses for minor amounts of marijuana are exempt.
Much of the hour-long argument dealt with the literal and practical interpretations of those words. Does the drug have to be on the federal list, or is the Kansas list enough? Is it the violation that matters or only the conviction? What does "relating to" refer to — the violation or the law?
It wasn't long before the justices socked it to the government, and the case began to unravel.
"Is a sock considered drug paraphernalia under federal law?" Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked Mellouli's lawyer, Jon Laramore.
"Do you think a sock is more than tenuously related to these federal drugs?" Justice Antonin Scalia asked the government's lawyer, Assistant Solicitor General Rachel Kovner.

2.  Feds grab man selling black rhino horn.  From the Sun-Sentinel:

The president of a luxury Boynton Beach auction house pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiring to smuggle rhinoceros horns, coral and elephant ivory to China.

...
Christopher Hayes, president of Elite Estate Buyers, admitted to participating in a complex conspiracy to falsify shipping documents and use third-party shippers to help slip the illegal items out of the country to foreign buyers. In one case, federal prosecutors say, he sold two horns of the endangered black rhinoceros to a Texas resident and who was smuggling them to China....
Hayes' lawyer, Benedict Kuehne, said his client was "deeply apologetic" about violating the law protecting endangered species.
"He is distraught that he even in a slight way may have contributed to the harm of the environment and endangered species," he said. "Through his established business, he hopes to become an educator and leader in informing the profession about the concerns with endangered species items."
Hayes, 55, of Wellington, faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. A sentencing date has not been set. The company, which does business under the name Elite Decorative Arts, will pay a fine of $1.5 million. The company deals in high-end goods such as Chinese jade jewelry, oil paintings and antique porcelain.
The horns of the black rhinoceros, a critically endangered African species, command high prices in Asia for their use in traditional medicine. The investigation involved undercover officers of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who posed as buyers.

3.   Dersh's op-ed about the false accusations against him is pretty powerful:

I now stand accused of crimes I did not commit, by an unnamed woman who I don’t know and never met. I am also being sued for defaming my accusers. I still have no opportunity to respond in court to the false charges, though I am now seeking to intervene in the lawsuit in which the accusation was filed. I have submitted a sworn statement denying the accusations with great specificity. The court has not yet decided whether to accept my motion.

I feel like a victim of a drive-by shooting or the object of scribbled graffiti on the wall of a bathroom stall. I may never have the opportunity to prove my innocence, or to have my accusers prove the false charges, in any court of law. But because I am relatively well known—a double-edge sword in these situations—I can at least fight back in the court of public opinion, though at the very high cost—in legal fees, loss of insurance coverage and the possibility of a large monetary judgment against me.

Imagine the same thing happening to a person who did not have the resources to fight back.

There is a gaping hole in our legal system that allows lawyers to bring irrelevant accusations against innocent nonparties in court papers that insulate them from any consequences, and to deny the falsely accused any opportunity to respond.

The law must be changed to shatter this hall of mirrors I face and others might. There must be consequences for those who file accusations with no offer to prove them and no legal responsibility if they are categorically—and disprovably—false.

I will not rest until this gaping hole is filled with reasonable safeguards, so that what is happening to me can never happen to another innocent person.

"If the well-known, vinyl-era rock bands Bad Company and Blind Faith had merged to form a super group, then the hypothetical new band might have been called Bad Faith."

That was Judge Goodman in an order dealing with a bad faith claim in a civil lawsuit. The DBR covers the case here, http://m.dailybusinessreview.com/module/alm/app/dbr.do#!/article/1731936770

He also notes that the alternative Blind Company, "could be a colorful, hyperbolic yet somewhat accurate description" of the plaintiff's claims.  

He's having too much fun!

Fugitive caught after 37 years.

From the Government's press release:

Robert Anton Woodring, formerly of Fort Lauderdale, Boyton Beach, and Pompano Beach, Florida, was arrested on charges of failing to surrender for service of sentence.  In 1984, Woodring was indicted for failing to surrender in September 1977, to commence a 10-month sentence imposed in October 1975, for removing a yacht in order to prevent seizure by authorized persons. Woodring had also been sentenced in a related case to seven year imprisonment after a jury found him guilty of mail fraud and conspiracy to conspiracy to commit mail fraud.  Woodring is set to be arraigned on January 14, 2015, at 10:00 a.m. 

U.S. Marshals, with the assistance of the FBI and Mexican authorities, apprehended Woodring in Guadalajara, Mexico, in December 2014.  On December 22, 2014, Woodring appeared in federal court in Los Angeles, California, where a U.S. Magistrate Judge ordered him detained pending trial as a risk of flight. Woodring waived his right to an identity hearing and removal hearing and agreed to be transported to Miami for further proceedings.

Mr. Ferrer commended the efforts of the U.S. Marshals Service and FBI in apprehending the defendant. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert T. Watson.

How much time should Anthony Bosch get?

Apparently MLB thinks he should get a big reduction even though he damaged the sport.  From the Miami Herald:

As Bosch awaits sentencing in February, lawyers for Major League Baseball — whose operation he corrupted from his anti-aging clinic in Coral Gables — are pointedly telling prosecutors what a great help he has been in cleaning up the sport. In a letter, they likened Bosch to a onetime New York Mets batboy who got caught up in an earlier steroid scandal and received lenient treatment after cooperating with authorities. ...
A short sentence of one year — as opposed to three times that long — is possible for Bosch, 51, who pleaded guilty in October and is free on bail despite testing positive for cocaine use during court-ordered monitoring that began after he surrendered in August. Prosecutors have already agreed to recommend a sentence reduction in his plea deal, as long as Bosch, who is in a substance-abuse program, tells the truth.
Despite his tarnished reputation, Bosch began attracting support from MLB officials soon after the steroid scandal broke and the league sued him in 2013 — especially when the onetime anti-aging guru agreed that June to turn on his customers, including New York Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez.
Soon after, high-powered MLB lawyers, including former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, sought a meeting with the U.S. attorney in Miami to promote Bosch’s role as the league’s star witness against Rodriguez and the other ballplayers, according to newly disclosed court records. They were hoping to gain assurances from the U.S. attorney’s office that it would consider Bosch’s assistance to Major League Baseball.
The meeting was held in U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer’s office in September 2013. Mitchell, the former Democratic Senate majority leader, and two other league lawyers pitched him on Bosch’s contribution to MLB’s investigation of banned substance use. Members of Ferrer’s senior staff were also present.
In a follow-up letter, baseball’s lawyers thanked Ferrer for hosting the meeting, while stressing that Bosch’s assistance “was critical to MLB’s efforts to successfully sanction” the 14 players with lengthy suspensions, including Rodriguez.
MLB’s lead attorney, Charles Scheeler, with the Washington law firm, DLA Piper, highlighted Bosch’s “full cooperation” — including testifying against Rodriguez at an arbitration hearing in New York. He explained that, in exchange, the league agreed to inform authorities of his assistance.

Nice memorial for Judge and Mrs. Davis

There was a beautiful memorial for Judge Edward B. Davis and his wife Pat Davis at their old house in Miami over the weekend.  Lots of old law clerks, family, and friends attended.  Here's some pictures of the good judge and his lovely wife.  The second one is of Ron Rosengarten, Gary Dumas, Miriam Palahach, and Kevin Murray, his first law clerks and judicial assistant.  The judge kept pictures of his law clerks, which they are holding.

The pendulum is swinging

The Koch brothers are now fighting the prison problem in America.  Here's Charles Koch's piece in Politico: 

As Americans, we like to believe the rule of law in our country is respected and fairly applied, and that only those who commit crimes of fraud or violence are punished and imprisoned. But the reality is often different. It is surprisingly easy for otherwise law-abiding citizens to run afoul of the overwhelming number of federal and state criminal laws. This proliferation is sometimes referred to as “overcriminalization,” which affects us all but most profoundly harms our disadvantaged citizens. 
Overcriminalization has led to the mass incarceration of those ensnared by our criminal justice system, even though such imprisonment does not always enhance public safety. Indeed, more than half of federal inmates are nonviolent drug offenders. Enforcing so many victimless crimes inevitably leads to conflict between our citizens and law enforcement. As we have seen all too often, it can place our police officers in harm’s way, leading to tragic consequences for all involved.
How did we get in this situation? It began with well-intentioned lawmakers who went overboard trying to solve perceived or actual problems. Congress creates, on average, more than 50 new criminal laws each year. Over  time, this has translated into more than 4,500 federal criminal laws spread across 27,000 pages of the United States federal code. (This number does not include the thousands of criminal penalties in federal regulations.) As a result, the United States is the world’s largest jailer—first in the world for total number imprisoned and first among industrialized nations in the rate of incarceration. The United States represents about 5 percent of the world’s population but houses about 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

...Reversing overcriminalization and mass incarceration will improve societal well-being in many respects, most notably by decreasing poverty. Today, approximately 50 million people (about 14 percent of the population) are at or below the U.S. poverty rate. Fixing our criminal system could reduce the overall poverty rate as much as 30 percent, dramatically improving the quality of life throughout society—especially for the disadvantaged.

Meantime, in local news, Judge Darrin Gayles spoke to the Federal Bar Association today.  A nice turnout and a good talk about practice dos and don'ts in his courtroom.

Good luck to John Pacenti

John is leaving the Daily Business Review and headed back to the Palm Beach Post.  He's been a fantastic federal courts reporter and will be sorely missed. 

He is a graduate of the University of Arizona and has been a reporter since he was a sophomore in high school. He has worked as a sportswriter and a music critic but his forte has always been hard news. After working 10 years for the Associated Press in Phoenix and Miami as a newsman and a sportswriter, he went to work for the Palm Beach Post in 1999 covering civil and criminal justice, as well as sports news.

He started as the federal courts writer for the Daily Business Review in 2007 where he won awards for his coverage on crooked court-appointed trustees, pill mills, and police shootings. 

He should be particularly proud of his Justice Watch column, as well as coverage on prosecutorial misconduct and the Miccosukee litigation.

Same as it ever was?

Such a waste....

Let's see if 2015 is the year that judges really step up and start putting a check on the executive by making that chart curve back downwards.  Some are hoping that the 11th Circuit will start to change things with all of the new judges, but others are more realistic.  From the Daily Report:

... Obama's Eleventh Circuit nominees as a group do not appear to be particularly liberal—and, to the extent they lean left, they may be hamstrung by years of conservative precedent. Jill Pryor once sat on the ACLU of Georgia's legal committee, and Martin has spent considerable time penning dissents to conservative rulings since joining the court. But all of Obama's Eleventh Circuit nominees except Pryor have spent time as prosecutors, and she has spent the bulk of her career as a business litigator. Julie Carnes was appointed to the district court by George H. W. Bush and was selected for the Eleventh Circuit as part of a compromise package of federal court nominees agreed to by the White House and Georgia's senators.
Court watchers should learn more soon.
A group of doctors' request that the entire court examine a controversial, high-profile ruling on guns has been pending since August. A panel in that case rejected the doctors' First Amendment challenge to a Florida law that limits physicians' ability to talk to their patients about firearms.
The Eleventh Circuit is set to hear three cases en banc in February: two criminal cases and a civil case in which the court will revisit aspects of a panel decision that sided with plaintiffs who filed a Fourth Amendment lawsuit over a raid of a barber shop.
Also in February, a three-judge panel is scheduled to hear an Alabama-based, nonprofit Catholic television and radio network's challenge to the federal contraceptive mandate. Unlike the businesses that won their case before the Supreme Court in June, the religious nonprofit can opt out of providing contraceptive coverage, but it has argued that filling out the required form that would signal its third-party health insurance administrator to provide the coverage is itself a violation of the group's religious beliefs. The Eleventh Circuit recently granted oral argument in a similar case brought by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Savannah.
And, although the U.S. Supreme Court may get to the issue first, the Eleventh Circuit has in November and December received an avalanche of briefs from the parties and other interested groups in a case over Florida's ban on marriages by same-sex couples.

Or how about cleaning up the Department of Corrections?  Did you see the Herald article about the DOC forging a document regarding a criminal investigation?  This is scary:

The Florida Department of Corrections has opened a criminal investigation into whether a public record provided by the agency to the Miami Herald was forged.
The document was a form, purportedly filled out and signed by inmate Harold Hempstead, the whistle-blower who in March leaked details to the newspaper about a gruesome death at Dade Correctional Institution, where inmate Darren Rainey collapsed while locked in a brutally hot shower.
Hempstead’s information led the Herald to investigate the Rainey case as well as other suspicious deaths and possible corruption in the Florida Department of Corrections. By the end of 2014, DCI’s top administrators had been ousted, and the department’s secretary, Michael Crews, had retired.
Last year, in the course of the newspaper’s investigation, Hempstead signed a release giving the Herald blanket permission to obtain all his medical records, waiving the strict health information privacy law known as HIPPA.

The rule provides safeguards to protect the privacy of personal health information, and sets limits and conditions on what may be disclosed without patient authorization. Normally, the department heavily redacts its documents, citing the federal law, including details such as where a prisoner is found injured, beaten or dead, where they are transported after they are found and evidence discovered at the scene that the agency believes may reveal an inmate’s medical condition. Examples of redacted items might include descriptions of bloody clothing or, in the case of Rainey, the fact that pieces of skin had fallen off his body.
After Hempstead signed the waiver, a Department of Corrections spokesman informed the newspaper that he had withdrawn his permission to release his records uncensored. When the Herald questioned whether that was true, the spokesman supplied a document — seemingly not in Hempstead’s handwriting — that expressed his change of heart.
Since then, the inmate said, he has told two DOC investigators in two separate interviews that the second document is a fraud.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article5341200.html#storylink=cpy