Summary of Trump's SCOTUS picks

There's a nice website summarizing all 21 potential nominees here.  It's got lots of interesting tidbits, including significant rulings and writings.

In other news, big ups to Ashley Litwin, Lisa Lauck, and Marc Seitles for their appellate win in Uri Ammar's case.  It was a speedy trial violation.  The awesome Paula McMahon covers it here:

"To this day, Uri absolutely maintains that he is innocent," Ammar's appellate lawyers, Marc Seitles and Ashley Litwin, said Wednesday.
They said they have not yet spoken to Ammar, who is in Coleman federal prison in Central Florida, but Ammar's family was very excited when they heard he had won his appeal.
"They were in tears, they were screaming with joy. We are all very happy with the court's decision," Seitles said.
Seitles said he hopes Senior U.S. District Judge Lawrence King will agree to release Ammar, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who was a security worker at the casino. The lawyer said he also hopes the judge will not allow prosecutors to seek a new indictment and trial against Ammar.

Judge Ungaro sentences Matt Greer to 3 years

The other defendants received 18 months to probation. A fair and thoughtful sentencing determination with excellent lawyers all around. Here's the Miami Herald article.

In other news, you gotta check out this disaster from the FBI and GSA.  From Politico:

The hulking wooden sculpture titled “Cedrus” weighed more than 15,000 pounds and stood 17 feet tall, stretching from the lobby to the second floor of the FBI’s field office in Miami.
Made of Western red cedar imported from Vancouver, the massive artwork was actually 30 individual wooden pieces built to resemble a tornado. It was designed by Ursula von Rydingsvard, an artist known for making sculptures from wood beams.
The General Services Administration, an independent agency of the U.S. government that, among other things, leases office space to federal agencies, contracted with von Rydingsvard to create the site-specific sculpture for the Miami office, which the FBI leases.
The sculpture, installed early last year, didn’t last long.
Shortly after "Cedrus" arrived, FBI workers began getting sick, including at least a dozen who were hospitalized, according to hundreds of documents reviewed by POLITICO Florida. Most suffered allergic reactions to cedar dust coming off the sculpture. Among those who became sick was the office’s only nurse, who had to be relocated to another office.
“The health and safety issues surrounding the sculpture were real,” read a January letter written by Richard Haley, the FBI’s assistant director of finance overseeing department property. “One employee required an 11-day hospital stay and none have been able to return to work at the new field office.”
After months of navigating bureaucratic hurdles, as well as interagency fighting, the sculpture was removed in October 2015. The whole ordeal cost taxpayers nearly $1.2 million, including $750,000 paid to von Rydingsvard to design the statute. In documents reviewed by POLITICO Florida, GSA officials said they believed the sculpture was a good deal because it was “likely worth more than the $750,000 the government paid.”

 Really?  A good deal?  Sheesh. 

Judge Ungaro hears sentencing arguments in Matthew Greer's case

It's Michael Sherwin and Michael Berger for the government.  And for Greer, it's Roy Black, Hy Shapiro, and Jackie Perczek.  Really great lawyering all around.  Jay Weaver from the Herald is covering the sentencing:

The 38-year-old former CEO of Carlisle Development Group apologized on Wednesday to a federal judge for his wrongdoing and for “casting a cloud” over an affordable-housing industry whose mission is to build homes for society’s most needy.

“It pains me very deeply,” Greer, 38, said, choking up during his statement to the judge.

Yet his high-profile defense attorney, Roy Black, argued that Greer deserved no prison time because he pleaded guilty, cooperated with authorities, paid back the stolen money and has devoted his life to charity — including his latest effort to help a nonprofit group develop an Overtown housing complex for homeless mothers and their children.

Black touted the South Florida housing projects built by Carlisle with tax credits issued by the U.S. government, while downplaying that Greer and others involved in his partnerships inflated the constructions costs so they could split millions in illegal profits.

“I think the public got what they paid for,” Black told U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro. “They were not cheated.”

***

Prosecutor Michael Sherwin hammered that point, saying Greer was driven by “greed,” not charity, and that he “lost his way.”

“This was a lie for money,” Sherwin said.

The federal sentencing guidelines for Greer’s offense range from eight to ten years in the $34 million housing fraud probe that disgraced the one-time CEO and his Miami-based company, Carlisle, which was started by his father, lawyer Bruce Greer, two decades ago. Bruce Greer and his wife, Evelyn, a lawyer who once served as mayor of Pinecrest and on the Miami-Dade school board, attended the hearing.

On Wednesday, the prosecutor recommended that the judge start at eight years and then reduce it by 40 percent for Greer’s assistance in the long-running FBI and IRS investigation — for a total sentence of about five years.

Ungaro said she would issue her decision on Greer’s sentence along with punishment for five other co-defendants on Monday, after hearing arguments from defense attorneys and prosecutors.

Argument transcript in Beckles...

...is here.

And the Supreme Court decided a double jeopardy case this morning, Bravo-Fernandez:

The issue-preclusion component of the Double Jeopardy Clause does not bar the Government from retrying defendants, like petitioners, after a jury has returned irreconcilably inconsistent verdicts of conviction and acquittal and the convictions are later vacated for legal error unrelated to the inconsistency.

Welcome back

The Supreme Court is back in full swing, and AFPD Janice Bergman has a big argument this morning in Beckles v. United States.  From SCOTUSblog:

Issue: (1) Whether Johnson v. United States applies retroactively to collateral cases challenging federal sentences enhanced under the residual clause in United States Sentencing Guidelines (U.S.S.G.) § 4B1.2(a)(2) (defining “crime of violence”); (2) whether Johnson's constitutional holding applies to the residual clause in U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a)(2), thereby rendering challenges to sentences enhanced under it cognizable on collateral review; and (3) whether mere possession of a sawed-off shotgun, an offense listed as a “crime of violence” only in commentary to U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2, remains a “crime of violence” after Johnson.

Argument preview: Court to tackle constitutionality of residual clause in sentencing guidelines

This will be interesting for 11th Circuit watchers because this issue has deeply divided the court.  Good luck Janice!

Have a great Thanksgiving!

If felony-battery in Florida a crime of violence under 2L1.2 of the Sentencing Guidelines?

That's the question the en banc 11th Circuit will take up in U.S. v. Vail-Bailon.  Here's the panel decision by Judge Rosenbaum saying it is not a crime of violence:

When I was growing up, my parents told me not to judge a book by its
cover. The Supreme Court has expressed an analogous concern about concluding
that a crime qualifies as a violent crime under the Armed Career Criminal Act
(“ACCA”), based solely on the name of the crime. See Johnson v. United States,
___ U.S. ___, 135 S. Ct. 2551, 2560 (2015) (discussing whether Connecticut’s
offense of “rioting at a correctional institution,” a crime that the Supreme Court
characterized as “certainly sound[ing] like a violent felony,” qualifies as a violent
felony under the residual clause of the ACCA).1
This case raises the question of whether the Florida crime of felony
battery—a crime that, from its name, may sound like a crime of violence—actually
satisfies the definition of “crime of violence” under §2L1.2 of the Sentencing
Guidelines when it is committed by mere touching. Heeding the Supreme Court’s
warning, we have carefully compared the elements of felony battery under Florida
law to the “elements clause” of § 2L1.2’s definition of “crime of violence.” Based
on our review, we now hold that felony battery under Fla. Stat. § 784.041 does not
qualify as a “crime of violence” under § 2L1.2 when it is committed by mere
touching. For this reason, we vacate Vail-Bailon’s sentence and remand for resentencing.

Judge Jordan concurred, and visiting Judge Siler dissented.

The en banc order is here.

Will it be Justice Pryor?

It was the big Federalist Society meeting this weekend in which Justice Scalia was remembered and celebrated.  One of the takeaways is that 11th Circuit Judge William Pyror is quietly the favorite to get Scalia's seat. (Here's a short interview with him from the weekend.) He would be the first 11th Circuit judge to get the nod... 

It's hard to know exactly what PE Trump is thinking here though as he was busy this weekend tweeting about Hamilton.

In the meantime, I repost Judge Milton Hirsch's Constitutional Calendar today, which is really interesting:

On Nov. 21, 1864, in response to a request from Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew asking him to express his condolences, President Lincoln wrote to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, a widow who was believed to have lost five sons during the Civil War.  Lincoln's letter was later printed in the Boston Evening Transcript.  Later still, it was revealed that two, not all five, of Mrs. Bixby's sons died in battle; one deserted, one was honorably discharged, and another either deserted or died a prisoner of war.

 

The authorship of the letter has been debated by scholars, some of whom believe it was written by John Hay, one of Lincoln's secretaries.  The original of the letter was destroyed by Mrs. Bixby, who was a Confederate sympathizer and disliked Lincoln.  Copies of an early forgery circulated for years, causing many people to believe that they had the original letter.

 

None of which matters.  The letter is the finest piece of epistolary prose ever written on this continent, and if Lincoln didn't write it, he meant to.  It serves to remind us that the highest function of political leadership in America's democracy is to inspire us with a regard for those principles that set this country apart.

 

As I do every year on the anniversary of its writing, I take pleasure in sharing this remarkable letter with my friends:

 

"Dear Madam,

 

"I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.  I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming.  But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save.  I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

 

"Yours very sincerely and respectfully,

 

"A. Lincoln"