What's the appropriate sentence for a 22-year old austic man who stalked and taunted the families of the Parkland victims?

This is a tough one.

The sentencing guidelines were 57-71 months.  The statutory maximum for each of the 4 counts of conviction was 5 years (60 months).  The defense asked for a downward variance and a residential program to address his mental issues.  The prosecutor asked for an upward variance to 20 years! (The stat max for each count stacked on top of each other). Of course we all feel for the victims, but 20 years is more than many rapists, murderers, and terrorists get.

After a lengthy sentencing, Judge Ruiz issued a guideline sentence of 66 months.

A summary from the New York Times:

A 22-year-old California man was sentenced to 66 months in federal prison on Monday after cyberstalking and threatening to kidnap relatives of those killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., federal prosecutors said.

The man, Brandon Michael Fleury, impersonated the confessed gunman on social media for three weeks to threaten and taunt survivors of the shooting and victims’ loved ones. He was found guilty in October of three counts of cyberstalking and one count of transmitting a kidnapping threat.

Sabrina Puglisi, Mr. Fleury’s lawyer, said she was disappointed that the judge did not place Mr. Fleury in a residential treatment program, given that he has autism spectrum disorder. However, she said, she was pleased the judge’s sentence was much lower than the maximum 20 years that Mr. Fleury had faced.

“The judge made a strong argument that this type of trolling behavior on the internet is not OK, not acceptable and it won’t stand,” Ms. Puglisi said in an interview on Monday. “He wanted to send a message to deter people from doing the same.”

What will happen when FDC or other federal prisons get coronavirus?

Will the corrections officers (who are already short staffed) show up to work?
Will prisoners be locked in their rooms 24-7?
Are the feds ready?

The virus is already in Chinese prisons.  From the LA Times:

Prisons are an ideal environment for viral transmission, according to medical experts. Doctors recommend keeping a distance of at least 6 feet from any sick person to avoid contagion from respiratory droplets when they cough or sneeze. Confirmed cases should remain in complete isolation, with the door closed.
“You aren’t going to see bottles of Purell. You’re going to see people existing very close together, which aids transmission,” said Brandon Brown, an epidemiologist at UC Riverside.
Perhaps the closest comparison to the prison scenario would be cruise ships, he said, where large populations living in close quarters have illustrated the virus’ explosive spread. Scientists have another concern: feces. In addition to the virus surviving for hours on surfaces — handrails, elevator buttons and even exchanged business cards — researchers suspect major contagion occurs in shared bathroom settings.

"They want me to lie. They’re yelling at me.”

That was Rick Singer, the ringleader and main snitch in the Varsity Blues case describing what the case agents wanted him to do.  That should make your blood boil of course.  But the cover-up by prosecutors is just as bad, not disclosing this obvious Brady material until after twenty of the defendants have already pleaded guilty and served their time. It's just outrageous.

From the NY Times:

Since the mastermind of the college admissions scandal, William Singer, pleaded guilty last March to racketeering and other charges, he has been mostly offstage, paddleboarding and enjoying the California sun while many of his former clients head off to prison.

But this week, Mr. Singer, who admitted to organizing a scheme to cheat on tests and bribe college coaches to get students into elite schools, was again the center of attention. Lawyers for the actress Lori Loughlin and other parents said that notes Mr. Singer had taken while cooperating with federal investigators showed that they pushed him to lie to incriminate his clients.

They said that Mr. Singer’s own words suggested that parents did not knowingly engage in a conspiracy to bribe coaches, as prosecutors have argued, and they accused prosecutors of sitting on the evidence for months in violation of their legal obligations.

“Loud and abrasive call with agents,” Mr. Singer wrote on Oct. 2, 2018, in a note with several typos and misspellings. “They continue to ask me to tell a fib and not restate what I told my clients as to where there money was going - to the program not the coach and that it was a donation and they want it to be a payment.”

He added that the agents were essentially “asking me to bend the truth.”

In a hearing on Thursday, a federal judge called the allegations of prosecutorial misconduct “very serious” but did not rule on the issue, directing the parties to submit further motions.

Ms. Loughlin’s lawyers had written in a court filing on Wednesday that the evidence in Mr. Singer’s notes was “devastating to the Government’s case and demonstrates that the Government has been improperly withholding core exculpatory information, employing a ‘win at all costs’ effort rather than following their obligation to do justice.”

I previously wrote about how prosecutors were trying to bully Aunt Becky into pleading guilty.  Turns out they were doing much worse!

So what will happen now? The judge took various motions under advisement.  But the sad truth is that the likelihood that anything will happen to the prosecutors or agents who engaged in this misconduct -- or to the case itself -- is very low.  The right result would be to issue severe sanctions, including dismissal.  That's the only way that we are going to stop prosecutorial misconduct, which is a real problem for the criminal justice system.

The judiciary exists to act as a check on the executive branch.  But unfortunately we don't see much of that at all when it comes to misconduct. Instead, we hear: don't do that again; it wasn't intentional; there was no prejudice; it was harmless; and so on. So prosecutors and agents keep doing it.

At sentencings every day in every courtroom around the country, we hear about deterrence and why severe sentences are needed.  Let's be consistent with prosecutorial wrongdoing.

Roy Altman speaks for new judges at SCOTUS

Very cool honor for Judge Altman who spoke to and on behalf of the new judges (class of '19).  Justice Thomas spoke for the Court, and Justices Sotomayor, Alito, and Kavanaugh attended. Here are some pictures:

Elections matter...

...especially for the Supreme Court.

This week, in a 5-4 opinion, the Court found that a Border Patrol Agent cannot be sued for shooting a teenager from Mexico in the face.

Immune.

Insane.

Inhumane.

And of course it’s Alito writing the opinion. Totally on brand.

The opinion is Hernandez v. Mesa, available here.

The holding in Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents does not extend to claims based on a cross-border shooting.

Justices Thomas and Gorsuch say in a concurrence that they would do away with Bivens altogether!

Alito really is the most partisan Justice we have.

And it’s not even close.

Don’t @ me.

Thank goodness for Justice Ginsburg who writes the dissent and explains that allowing the suit to go forward would not impact national security or any other “concern” that the majority has.

It's Judge Newsom, not Newsome

Judge Newsom has quickly become known as one of the more entertaining writers on the 11th Circuit.  He even makes IP litigation fun.  From the intro:

Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club, a residential community in Boca Raton, Florida, is home to multimillion-dollar mansions, a championship golf course, and even a private marina. It’s also home, as it turns out, to the contentious real-estate rivalry that spawned this trademark litigation.
Royal Palm Properties, a real-estate broker whose specialty is buying and selling homes in Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club, sued its competitor, Pink Palm Properties, for infringing its registered service mark on the phrase “Royal Palm Properties.” Pink Palm Properties counterclaimed, challenging the mark’s validity. A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida upheld Royal Palm Properties’ mark but found that Pink Palm Properties hadn’t infringed it. The district court, though, overturned the verdict in part, granting Pink Palm Properties’ renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law and ordering the cancellation of Royal Palm Properties’ mark. The question before us is whether the district court correctly flipped the jury’s verdict and granted judgment as a matter of law on Pink Palm Properties’ trademark-invalidation counterclaim.

We hold that the district court erred. To be entitled to judgment as a matter of law, Pink Palm Properties would have had to make quite the showing at trial—such that no reasonable jury could have found that it failed to prove grounds for cancelling Royal Palm Properties’ mark. Based on our careful review of the record, we conclude that Pink Palm Properties didn’t meet this high bar. On neither of its two grounds for cancellation—that the “Royal Palm Properties” mark (1) is not “distinctive” and (2) is “confusingly similar” to previously registered marks—did Pink Palm Properties prove, decisively, that it had won the day. We therefore reverse the district court’s decision to overturn the jury’s verdict and invalidate Royal Palm Properties’ service mark.

I enjoyed this discussion and the footnote especially:*

Pink Palm Properties certainly satisfied the first two Coach House requirements. The “Royal Palm Properties” mark clearly “resembles” the “Royale Palms” marks—the spelling of the dominant words is nearly identical8—and the “Royale Palms” marks were registered several years before the “Royal Palm Properties” mark.

8.Welcome to the author’s life. Compare “Newsom” with “Newsome.”

* Welcome to this author's life as well.  Compare "Markus" with "Marcus."

Stone sentenced to 40 months

The criminal justice world, as well as the political world, are all talking about the Roger Stone sentence.  40 months...

Rumpole has a nice post about it here, calling the sentence too harsh.  He's right of course.  The problem is that so many people see it as lenient because the sentence was below the Sentencing Guidelines.  And that's the problem.  Over 3 years (YEARS!) in prison for a first-time non-violent and elderly offender is not lenient by any stretch.

We've become so accustomed to the Sentencing Guidelines that people -- including judges -- see downward variances as some sort of break.  But once we realize that the guidelines are just made up numbers, which are not based on anything, and that they have completely warped our system into jailing more people for longer amounts of time than any other country in the world, then we will see that downward variances are no break and 3+ years is lenient. 

Maybe we should not call them "downward variances."  That implies that the judge should start off with the guidelines.  Any ideas?

Trump commutes sentence of Judith Negron

In one of the worst examples of the trial tax in this District and around the country, Judith Negron -- a first-time non-violent offender -- was sentenced to 35 years (35 years!!!) in prison for Medicare fraud.  President Trump commuted her sentence yesterday to time served (8 years).  Most people are asking what her connection is to the President, and that's the problem with his commutations.  They are being viewed as individual driven instead of being driven by the unfairness of the system (which is the same criticism of his Stone tweets).  I just wish Trump would use this opportunity to grant more commutations and make some broader statements about the issues with our system.  Let's fix the trial tax and the Sentencing Guidelines.

Here's the WH press release on Negron:

Judith Negron is a 48-year-old wife and mother who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for her role as a minority-owner of a healthcare company engaged in a scheme to defraud the Federal Government.  Ms. Negron has served 8 years of her sentence and has spent this time working to improve her life and the lives of her fellow inmates.  Her prison warden and her counselor have written letters in support of clemency.  According to her warden, Ms. Negron “has always shown herself to be a model inmate who works extremely well with others and has established a good working relationship with staff and inmates.”  This grant of clemency is supported by the Clemency for All Non-Violent Drug Offenders Foundation, Dan Schneider, Matt Whitaker, Adam Brandon, Kevin Roberts, Brett Tolman, John Hostettler, and Alice Johnson, among others.