Hoops Holiday

The best two sports days of the year are today and tomorrow with the first round of the tournament. Unless something big happens in the SDFLA, there won't be much blogging. Enjoy the tourney.

U.S. News Rankings out today

The Florida schools:


UF                  48
FSU                51
UM                 69
FIU                113
Stetson           119

Ave Maria     not ranked
Barry             not ranked
FAMU          not ranked
Fl. Coastal     not ranked
Nova             not ranked
St. Thomas    not ranked
Cooley          not ranked

Watch Roy Black live in trial

Here.

It's fantastic to watch and a good example of why trials should be televised.  The public can see what's going on and lawyers can learn from the proceedings. 

It's a DUI Manslaughter case.  Here are the details from the Palm Beach Post:

There were shots dropped into pints of Guinness and drinks with names like "Mind Eraser."
Traffic homicide prosecutor Ellen Roberts described each one in detail this morning, letting jurors that by the time International Polo Club founder John Goodman caused the crash that killed Scott Wilson, he'd had the equivalent of 16 to 18 drinks at a charity event and an impromptu after-party.
When Goodman's Bentley hit Wilson's car, Roberts said "it literally pushed the little Hyundai into the canal," and Wilson eventually drowned.
These were the first statements jurors heard today in the DUI manslaughter trial of Goodman, heir to a Texas heat and air conditioning fortune.
And as expected, Goodman's defense attorney Roy Black told jurors that Goodman's Bentley malfunctioned shortly before the crash, surging forward while Goodman frantically tried to stop it.
Black promised engineers would testify to prove this occurred, and Black said jurors will also hear evidence that Goodman left the crash scene to get help but was hampered because he had suffered some painful injuries – including a broken wrist, fractured sternum and an aggravation of a previous back injury.
That pained, confused journey took him to a sophisticated barn belonging to an acquaintance, Kris Kampsen, where he found what has been described as a "man cave."
"He sits down on the couch, he's hurting. This man is in pain and he sits down and right in front of him, there is this bar," Black told jurors. "He takes out one of the bottles and he swigs it down."
That's why, Black said, Goodman's blood alcohol content was at more than twice the level at which drivers are presumed impaired when his blood was drawn some three hours after the accident.
Black said that though Goodman had three drinks over the course of the night, witnesses will testify that he was lucid as he was leaving the Players Club Bar and restaurant, his last stop before the crash.

Robin Rosenbaum scheduled for vote...

...by the Judiciary Committee for this Thursday.

Spring Break!

What's going on in the District?  Any trials?  Or is most of Miami is in Aspen this week for spring break?

The NY Times has an op-ed saying that everyone should push for trial and that would crash the system.  

But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.

“The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. In other words: the system is rigged.

In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for nearly all crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws; the result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to prosecutors.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. 

***

On the phone, Susan said she knew exactly what was involved in asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial. “Believe me, I know. I’m asking what we can do. Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?”

The answer is yes. The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.”

Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency” fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass protest would force a public conversation that, to date, we have been content to avoid. 

This has been talked about for quite some time, but no one ever has the guts to do it....  It would be interesting...