How are federal judges and U.S. Attorney going to be selected?

 

No one knows. Jay Weaver covers a lot of the competing interests in this piece. The article starts this way:

When Joe Biden won the presidency, Florida’s congressional Democrats thought they might finally get a chance to serve up his picks for federal judges.

But they had a significant hurdle: Florida’s two Republican senators still dominated the commission that scrutinizes judicial candidates to be nominated by the Democratic president.

So, in an unprecedented move, longtime Democratic Reps. Alcee Hastings and Debbie Wasserman Schultz created their own Florida judicial nominating commission earlier this year to compete with the GOP-controlled Senate panel — even though the House of Representatives has no authority to confirm federal judges for lifetime appointments. The Senate has that power.

The shifting political landscape has caused confusion for judicial candidates seeking to fill two openings for federal judges in the Southern District of Florida and a new vacancy for the U.S. attorney’s job in the same region. Some said it is not clear who will have the last word in recommending finalists for each of the coveted positions.

The judicial openings in South Florida have been created by two U.S. District Court judges assuming “senior status,” Federico Moreno and Ursula Ungaro. The U.S. attorney’s post became vacant with the recent resignation of Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Ariana Fajardo Orshan.


Among the several candidates who have expressed interest in applying for the judges’ two seats: U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Becerra, Federal Public Defender Michael Caruso, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Lisa S. Walsh, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Tanya Brinkley and Miami-Dade County Judge Ayana Harris.

The U.S. attorney’s post has drawn the interest of former South Florida federal prosecutors Jacqueline Arango, Andres Rivero, David Buckner and Markenzy Lapointe, along with Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg.

In the end, President Biden has the sole authority to nominate whomever he wants to be a federal judge or U.S. attorney. But as senators, Florida’s two Republicans, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, have the unique power to block anyone from being confirmed by the Senate. During the Obama administration, Rubio refused to issue a “blue slip” for two of the Democratic president’s nominees for federal judges in South Florida, Miami-Dade Circuit Judges William Thomas and Mary Barzee, preventing them from going through Senate confirmation hearings. As a result, their nominations stalled.

Breaking -- Court to interview 5 applicants for Magistrate Judge

 Well, the pool of 49 applicants has been narrowed to 5:

Melissa Visconti

Randy Katz

Lornette Reynolds

Erica Zaron

Reginald Corlew

The district court judges will be conducting interviews on May 13.  Good luck to all.

Third Circuit raises interesting issue on loss in fraud case

 Defense attorneys make the argument all of the time -- hold the client responsible for the actual loss in the case, not the "intended" loss.  The Third Circuit raised this interesting point about the issue in a case where a defendant made about $30,000 but the "intended" loss, according to the district court, was $36 million:

Under a Guidelines comment, a court must ... identify the greater figure, the actual or intended loss, and enhance the defendant’s offense level accordingly.  Only this comment, not the Guidelines’ text, says that defendants can be sentenced based on the losses they intended.  By interpreting “loss” to mean intended loss, it is possible that the commentary “sweeps more broadly than the plain text of the Guideline.”  United States v. Nasir, 982 F.3d 144, 177 (3d Cir. 2020) (en banc) (Bibas, J., concurring).  But Kirschner assumes the comment is correct, and so we will too.

I haven't seen this argument before, which I'm sure will be making its way into all sentencing briefs and appeals going forward.  Let's hope some more sensibility comes around for these crazy loss calculations. By the way, the 3rd Circuit reversed the loss finding on other grounds and remanded to the district court for a fuller hearing and analysis.

Weekend news and notes

 1.  Amy Comey Barrett finally got to meet her colleagues in person.  From CNN:

2.  Can Chauvin win on appeal?  From the AP:

The defense has said it was impossible for Chauvin to get a fair trial in Minneapolis because of pretrial publicity and community pressure on jurors to convict. That claim is sure to underpin any appeal.

As they arrived at and left the courthouse each day for testimony, jurors passed clear signs that the city was preparing for renewed protests. The courthouse downtown was encircled by razor wire and guarded by armed troops. Most storefront windows were boarded up.

A prime target of an appeal would be key rulings by trial Judge Peter Cahill, including that the trial should remain in Minneapolis rather than be moved and that jurors should be sequestered only for deliberations.

Cahill also refused to delay the trial after Minneapolis announced a $27 million settlement with Floyd’s family during jury selection. The defense says that suggested guilt before jurors even heard evidence.

The defense has decried as prosecutorial misconduct remarks by the state during closings, including that aspects of the defense case were “nonsense.” That claim could make its way into an appeal.

3.  Is it a federal crime to inflate your law schools U.S. News rankings?  Orin Kerr has this thread looking at this interesting question.  The 11th Circuit's Takhalov opinion will be a hurdle...

4.  Yours truly was in SDNY this week.  Here's some coverage from Ghislaine Maxwell's arraignment.

"Chauvin verdict: Don't hate his lawyer"

 That's the title of my latest article in The Hill.  Below is the introduction.  Let me know your thoughts.

Hate mail. Distancing from friends and family. Criticized and second-guessed by the media. All criminal defense lawyers can feel for attorney Eric Nelson and what he has gone through during his high-profile representation of a deeply unpopular client, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted on all charges Tuesday in the killing of George Floyd.

It’s hard to fight any case at trial. Defense lawyers often face hostile prosecutors, judges, prison guards, and probation officers every day — but in a high-profile case, add to that a hostile media, public, and even popular movements.

CNN’s Jake Tapper said Nelson was gaslighting the jury during the closing. While the jury was deliberating, the President of the United States said he was praying for the victim and that the evidence was overwhelming. A congresswoman said that if the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, protestors should become more confrontational. And I’m sure closer to home, Nelson’s friends and family asked him “How can you represent that person?”

There’s no other profession in America where everyone is rooting against you.

If Chauvin had been shot on his way to the courthouse, it’s hard to imagine anyone sending hate mail to or criticizing the surgeon who operated in an attempt to save his life. No one would protest outside of the surgeon’s office or home. That’s not the same for the criminal defense lawyer.

Sen. Rubio announces competing JNC

 There's the Congressional JNC.  And now there's the Rubio JNC.  Scott is not participating.  So it's unclear how Biden will go about selecting judges and U.S. Attorneys.  Here is the list from Rubio, which includes some prominent Democrats (like Dan Gelber and Seth Miles):

Southern District JAC:
Carlos Lopez-Cantera – Statewide Chair
Manny Kadre – District Chair
Georgina A. Angones
Nelson Diaz 
Renier Diaz de la Portilla 
Albert E. Dotson, Jr. 
Robert H. Fernandez 
Dan Gelber 
Jillian Hasner
Jorge Hernandez-Toraño
Yolanda Cash Jackson 
Seth Miles
Bernie Navarro 
Ed Pozzuoli 
Steve L. Waserstein

News & Notes

1. Any thoughts on the closing arguments yesterday? It looked to me that the prosecution's rebuttal was the best of the three. Lots of good rhetoric. For example: "You were told, for example, that Mr. Floyd died because his heart was too big... the truth of the matter is that the reason George Floyd is dead is because Mr. Chauvin's heart was too small."

2. Joe DeMaria is rightfully fighting the mask protocols in Miami for trials. It's impossible to cross examine a witness wearing a mask. Here's his petition in the 3rd DCA (Law360 subscription necessary) and the article in the DBR (subscription necessary). The argument section starts out like this:

The constitutional right to due process in judicial proceedings requires that a party be allowed to examine a witness in a form that allows the factfinder to fully assess the witness’s credibility. Under the circumstances of this case, the process due to Dresser includes the right both to testify unmasked, and to require to her witnesses to testify without a mask.

3. Who is the greatest Supreme Court Justice of all time? SCOTUSblog ran a pool and your winner is... Earl Warren. Here's the intro to the post:

Forget Ali vs. Frazier, Celtics vs. Lakers, or Evert vs. Navratilova. It’s time for Marshall vs. Warren.
After three rounds of the first-ever SCOTUS bracketology tournament, only two justices remain. Both held the title of chief justice. Both reshaped American law and society. Both are legal titans who defeated a string of worthy contenders to reach the championship. But only one can be chosen by SCOTUSblog readers as the greatest justice in the court’s history.
To see how we got here, you can review the first-round results, the second-round results and the semifinals. We explained our original seeding and selection criteria here. Of course, no March Madness tournament is without controversy, and a few malcontents have sneered at ours. Too triumphalist? Lousy seeding? Skewed in a liberal direction? Skewed in a conservative direction? We heard those complaints and more. Our bracket even inspired a rival tournament with a slightly different agenda – an event premised on underachievement that no one should be proud of winning. Kind of like the NIT.
But enough with March Madness melodrama. This is the final round of the Big Dance, and it’s time to vote. Here’s the championship match-up.

Race and criminal justice

Closing arguments today in Chauvin. And you can feel the tension around the country as we head toward a verdict. Politico has this article saying that the Supreme Court is to blame for "driving while black."

The reason Brooklyn Center police pulled over Daunte Wright is unclear and largely irrelevant. The Department’s chief of police said the car he was driving had expired tags. His mother said he thought he was pulled over because he had air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. Regardless of the reason, 20-year old Wright was shot to death by a police officer minutes after the traffic stop began.
Traffic stops figure prominently in some of the most high-profile police killings of Black people. We remember many of their names—Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile —but they are just a few of the many people who have been killed or died as the result of law enforcement’s expansive authority to enforce traffic laws.
Traffic stops might seem like a local matter, or a subjective police decision, but actually the practice is built on five decades of Supreme Court precedent, a set of decisions that has successively opened the door to — and given police an incentive to — use traffic stops as an invasive tool of policing aimed mostly at people of color, primarily Black people.
As a result, reckoning with police violence must include a reckoning with how U.S. Supreme Court precedent has enabled it through its decades-long campaign to empower law enforcement in the so-called War on Drugs. Litigators must continue to push the Court to revisit these damaging decisions with the goal of overturning or weakening the precedents that have put too much power and discretion in the hands of police. Federal, state, and local policymakers, meanwhile, must recognize that these precedents provide a constitutional floor for police behavior; laws and policies can and should be adopted to hold police to a higher standard.
“Driving While Black” is a tongue-in-cheek expression that describes a frightening reality—police can, and often do, find any reason to pull over Black drivers. Given the glut of traffic rules, police rarely have to concoct a reason to pull over any driver they choose. Their job as traffic enforcers enables police officers to pull over Black drivers whenever their implicit or explicit biases tell them that a Black driver is “up to no good.” Harassment, intimidation, violence, and sometimes death, too often ensue.
The Supreme Court opened the door to legally permissible racialized policing with the 1967 case Terry v. Ohio, by allowing police to conduct certain cursory searches, now known as stop-and-frisks, based on the low legal standard of “reasonable suspicion.” As our country’s experience with stop-and-frisk vividly demonstrates, however, for police, reasonable suspicion is too often synonymous with being a Black or brown person in public.
The practice of racially profiling Black drivers was effectively endorsed by the Court in the 1996 ruling in Whren v. United States, which decided that police are allowed to use minor vehicle infractions as a pretext to initiate traffic stops with the goal of investigating other possible unrelated crimes.
According to an analysis of over 100 million traffic stops, Black drivers are about 40 percent more likely to be pulled over than their white counterparts. This analysis also reveals that Black and Hispanic drivers are twice as likely as white drivers to have their cars searched after being pulled over.