Monday, August 19, 2024

Chris Morvillo feared dead

I am devastated about today's news that superstar lawyer Chris Morvillo, who was set to celebrate the high profile acquittal of Mike Lynch on Lynch's yacht, is feared dead after a tornado hit the anchored ship.  Morvillo's wife and Lynch also are presumed dead. Adding to the tragedy, Lynch's co-defendant, who also was acquitted, died this weekend in an unrelated accident.

I am having a tough time processing what happened.  I had Chris on my podcast just last week.  We had never met before being introduced for the episode, but we became fast friends, emailing about the case and his upcoming adventure. We shared so many good stories about trial work.  We honestly could have made a 3 hour episode and we were both surprised that the hour flew by so quickly. I could tell right away what an amazing guy Chris was. Smart. A fighter. Passionate.  A family guy who spoke glowingly about his children.  

The story of this representation, which lasted over 10+ years, is amazing.  Chris dedicated over a decade of his career to obtaining justice for Mike Lynch.  He got it and then for this to happen.... it's tough to find the right words.

In the last few days, we emailed about the episode and the positive feedback we had been receiving.  He was so excited about the trip. He couldn't wait for his daughters to meet up with him and his wife.  I am so thankful the girls had not yet arrived when this tragedy struck.   

For a guy coming off the win of his career and about to celebrate with his client and family, I cannot imagine a worse tragedy.  I am sick about it.  I am thinking about his two daughters and the rest of his family, his colleagues, and everyone else who knew Chris -- a shining light in our white collar criminal defense world. He will be greatly missed. 

Update -- here's the raw video of the interview with Chris.  I thought it would help show what an incredible guy he was.

Sunday, August 18, 2024

Chicken Wings

 Rumpole covers the case of the stolen chicken wings here.  But that wasn't the only chicken wing case in the news.  Apparently the Ohio Supreme Court said boneless wings can have bones.  Stephen Colbert wasn't having it at the 4:21 mark:


Thursday, August 15, 2024

Chat with the Chair

By John R. Byrne

Judge Karen K. Caldwell, a district judge from Kentucky, is the Chair of the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. That's the panel that decides whether to consolidate civil cases from different districts and, if they are consolidated, to which judge to ship those cases. Our district judges are currently presiding over some large MDLs. But, for many, the JPML's decision making process is mysterious. In the current issue of The Federal Lawyer, our own Judge Ruiz interviewed Caldwell about it. Worth a read, especially if you practice in the MDL space.

The JPML has been around since 1968. Seven district judges currently sit on the panel. Interestingly enough, we've never had a judge from the SDFLA serve as a panel judge and only one Florida district judge, Judge Hodges from the Middle District, has ever served. We need to get to work on that!

Summer2024 Caldwell by John Byrne on Scribd

Wednesday, August 14, 2024

What's the possessive of Harris?

Harris' or Harris's?

Walz' or Walz's?

Markus' or Markus's?


In other news, the 11th Circuit issued this opinion yesterday, with each judge also writing a concurring opinion.  Three concurring opinions... by Rosenbaum, Newsom, and Luck.  Happy reading.

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Chris Morvillo for Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch


FOR THE DEFENSE, SEASON 6, EPISODE 6:
Chris Morvillo for Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch

You're gonna enjoy this one. Chris Morvillo tried a 3 month case across the country for a client he represented for 10+ years after a co-defendant had already lost and after the judge said that the client had to remain on house arrest with armed guards.  And this was not for any ordinary client -- the press dubbed Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch as the British Bill Gates.  Lynch turned to Chris Morvillo of Clifford Chance and Brian Heberlig & Reid Weingarten of Steptoe & Johnson.  Chris joins the podcast this week to discuss the amazing and against-all-odds across the board acquittal. 

There are lots of podcast connections to this episode -- Brian was previously on the show as was the presiding judge, Charles Breyer.  And a few weeks ago we had Sean Hecker on to discuss a related case.  One of the things we discuss with Chris on this episode is an incredible jury instruction the defense got from Judge Breyer after the prosecution engaged in some shenanigans with the defense's summary witness.  You can read the instruction here.


As always, you can catch this and other episodes on the web or on every podcast platform, including Apple and Spotify

If you have a friend that would like to receive these updates, please have them sign up here.

Thank you! --David

 

Hosted by David Oscar Markus and produced by rakontur

Friday, August 09, 2024

A Good Day for a Pro Se Litigant

By John R. Byrne

There's an old saying that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. Though pro se defendant Frederick Bush wasn't a lawyer when he represented himself at his federal trial, he also wasn't a fool. In fact, he acquitted himself quite nicely, preserving a mens rea argument that the Eleventh Circuit just relied on to vacate his conviction.

To recap, Bush was confined at a residential re-entry center in Tallahassee. One day, he decided to leave, later claiming that an employee there had threatened him. In a single count (importantly), the government charged him with two separate statutes that criminalize escaping or leaving custody, one of which (critically) required proof that the defendant acted "willfully" (i.e., with knowledge that his conduct was unlawful). 

At trial, Bush had several back-and-forths with the Court about the need for the government to prove willfulness, even reading from an old Fifth Circuit case. Still, the Court specifically instructed the jury that it needn't find that Bush knew that his actions were unlawful. This was plain error, the Court said. 

A short opinion. Also notable that Judge Newsom used the word "stretch" to describe Bush's time in custody. A word right out of a Dashiell Hammett novel.

Bush Decision by John Byrne on Scribd

Tuesday, August 06, 2024

Snitchin' ain't easy

 Jennis Ellis has turned State against the former president and her former client.  According to the AP:

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign attorney Jenna Ellis, who worked closely with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, will cooperate with Arizona prosecutors in exchange for charges being dropped against her in a fake electors case, the state attorney general’s office announced Monday.

Ellis has previously pleaded not guilty to fraud, forgery and conspiracy charges in the Arizona case. Seventeen other people charged in the case have pleaded not guilty to the felony charges — including Giuliani, Trump presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows and 11 Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring Trump had won Arizona.

“Her insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the State in proving its case in court,” Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement. “As I stated when the initial charges were announced, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined — it is far too important. Today’s announcement is a win for the rule of law.”

In other news, Rumpole posted the NYT interview with Justice Gorsuch.

Some interesting stuff re criminal justice:

French: Well, one way I’ve heard that described is that complexity is a subsidy for the wealthy. That complexity is a subsidy for the powerful. In other words, large corporations, well-connected individuals, wealthy individuals can navigate all of the red tape. But the ordinary American really struggles, and sometimes the ordinary American can even struggle to interpret criminal law.

This was an interesting element of the book to me and something that people who are not familiar with your jurisprudence might not know — it’s that you’ve long been a champion of the rights of criminal defendants. It struck me that some of the stories here in the book, of the way in which the complexity of criminal law has impacted people, are among the most potent in making the point. Is there a particular story about the abuse of criminal law that stands out to you as you’re reflecting back on the work?

Gorsuch: I would say Aaron Swartz’s story in the book might be one example. Here’s a young man, a young internet entrepreneur, who has a passion for public access to materials that he thinks should be in the public domain. And he downloads a bunch of old articles from JSTOR.

His lawyer says it included articles from the 1942 edition of The Journal of Botany. Now, he probably shouldn’t have done that, OK?

But JSTOR and he negotiated a solution, and they were happy. And state officials first brought criminal charges but then dropped them. Federal prosecutors nonetheless charged him with several felonies. And when he refused to plea bargain — they offered him four to six months in prison, and he didn’t think that was right — he wanted to go to trial.

What did they do?

They added a whole bunch of additional charges, which exposed him to decades in federal prison. And faced with that, he lost his money, all of his money, paying for lawyers’ fees, as everybody does when they encounter our legal system. And ultimately, he killed himself shortly before trial. And that’s part of what our system has become, that when we now have, I believe, if I remember correctly from the book, more people now serving life sentences in our prison system than we had serving any prison sentence in 1970. And today — one more little item I point out — one out of 47 Americans is subject to some form of correctional supervision (as of 2020).

French: You speak in the book about coercive plea bargaining, this process where a prosecutor will charge somebody and then agree to a much reduced sentence on the condition that they don’t take it to trial, that they go ahead and plead guilty, or sometimes when they refuse to plead guilty, they’ll add additional charges. This is something that a lot of critics of the criminal justice system have highlighted for some time. Do you see a remedy?

Gorsuch: Well, I’m a judge, and I’m going to apply the laws we the people pass. That’s my job. In the book, I just wanted to highlight to “we the people” some of the changes that I’ve seen in our law during my lifetime, and plea bargaining during my lifetime has skyrocketed. It basically didn’t exist 50 or 100 years ago, and now 97 percent or so of federal criminal charges are resolved through plea bargaining.

And I just have some questions. What do we lose in that process? We lose juries. Juries are wise, right? And they’re a check both on the executive branch and prosecutors and they’re a check on judges, too, right? And the framers really believed in juries. I mean, there it is in Article III. There it is in the Sixth Amendment. There it is in the Seventh Amendment. They really believed in juries, and we’ve lost that.

And another thing about juries, when you lose juries: Studies show that people who sit on juries — nobody likes being called for jury service. But studies show that after jury service, people have a greater respect for the legal system, for the government, and they participate more in their local governments.

 

Sunday, August 04, 2024

Plea offers

When negotiating a plea agreement with the government, how often do you hear -- this isn't an actual offer... I need to get approval from my supervisor.  

I wonder if that happened in the 9/11 cases where the three defendants were offered life only to find out later that the Defense Secretary decided to withdraw the offers.  Via the NY Times:

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Friday overruled the overseer of the war court at Guantánamo Bay and revoked a plea agreement reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two alleged accomplices.

The Pentagon announced the decision with a memorandum relieving the senior Defense Department official responsible for military commissions of her oversight of the capital case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his alleged accomplices for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field.

The overseer, retired Brig. Gen. Susan K. Escallier, signed a pretrial agreement on Wednesday with Mr. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi that exchanged guilty pleas for sentences of at most life in prison.

In taking away the authority, Mr. Austin assumed direct oversight of the case and canceled the agreement, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case. He left Ms. Escallier in the role of oversight of Guantánamo’s other cases.

Because of the stakes involved, the “responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Mr. Austin said in an order released Friday night by the Pentagon.

“Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024.”

 I also wonder whether the defendants had told the government that it accepted.  If so, I'm sure you'll see a motion to enforce the deal.