Nice memorial for Judge and Mrs. Davis

There was a beautiful memorial for Judge Edward B. Davis and his wife Pat Davis at their old house in Miami over the weekend.  Lots of old law clerks, family, and friends attended.  Here's some pictures of the good judge and his lovely wife.  The second one is of Ron Rosengarten, Gary Dumas, Miriam Palahach, and Kevin Murray, his first law clerks and judicial assistant.  The judge kept pictures of his law clerks, which they are holding.

The pendulum is swinging

The Koch brothers are now fighting the prison problem in America.  Here's Charles Koch's piece in Politico: 

As Americans, we like to believe the rule of law in our country is respected and fairly applied, and that only those who commit crimes of fraud or violence are punished and imprisoned. But the reality is often different. It is surprisingly easy for otherwise law-abiding citizens to run afoul of the overwhelming number of federal and state criminal laws. This proliferation is sometimes referred to as “overcriminalization,” which affects us all but most profoundly harms our disadvantaged citizens. 
Overcriminalization has led to the mass incarceration of those ensnared by our criminal justice system, even though such imprisonment does not always enhance public safety. Indeed, more than half of federal inmates are nonviolent drug offenders. Enforcing so many victimless crimes inevitably leads to conflict between our citizens and law enforcement. As we have seen all too often, it can place our police officers in harm’s way, leading to tragic consequences for all involved.
How did we get in this situation? It began with well-intentioned lawmakers who went overboard trying to solve perceived or actual problems. Congress creates, on average, more than 50 new criminal laws each year. Over  time, this has translated into more than 4,500 federal criminal laws spread across 27,000 pages of the United States federal code. (This number does not include the thousands of criminal penalties in federal regulations.) As a result, the United States is the world’s largest jailer—first in the world for total number imprisoned and first among industrialized nations in the rate of incarceration. The United States represents about 5 percent of the world’s population but houses about 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

...Reversing overcriminalization and mass incarceration will improve societal well-being in many respects, most notably by decreasing poverty. Today, approximately 50 million people (about 14 percent of the population) are at or below the U.S. poverty rate. Fixing our criminal system could reduce the overall poverty rate as much as 30 percent, dramatically improving the quality of life throughout society—especially for the disadvantaged.

Meantime, in local news, Judge Darrin Gayles spoke to the Federal Bar Association today.  A nice turnout and a good talk about practice dos and don'ts in his courtroom.

Good luck to John Pacenti

John is leaving the Daily Business Review and headed back to the Palm Beach Post.  He's been a fantastic federal courts reporter and will be sorely missed. 

He is a graduate of the University of Arizona and has been a reporter since he was a sophomore in high school. He has worked as a sportswriter and a music critic but his forte has always been hard news. After working 10 years for the Associated Press in Phoenix and Miami as a newsman and a sportswriter, he went to work for the Palm Beach Post in 1999 covering civil and criminal justice, as well as sports news.

He started as the federal courts writer for the Daily Business Review in 2007 where he won awards for his coverage on crooked court-appointed trustees, pill mills, and police shootings. 

He should be particularly proud of his Justice Watch column, as well as coverage on prosecutorial misconduct and the Miccosukee litigation.

Same as it ever was?

Such a waste....

Let's see if 2015 is the year that judges really step up and start putting a check on the executive by making that chart curve back downwards.  Some are hoping that the 11th Circuit will start to change things with all of the new judges, but others are more realistic.  From the Daily Report:

... Obama's Eleventh Circuit nominees as a group do not appear to be particularly liberal—and, to the extent they lean left, they may be hamstrung by years of conservative precedent. Jill Pryor once sat on the ACLU of Georgia's legal committee, and Martin has spent considerable time penning dissents to conservative rulings since joining the court. But all of Obama's Eleventh Circuit nominees except Pryor have spent time as prosecutors, and she has spent the bulk of her career as a business litigator. Julie Carnes was appointed to the district court by George H. W. Bush and was selected for the Eleventh Circuit as part of a compromise package of federal court nominees agreed to by the White House and Georgia's senators.
Court watchers should learn more soon.
A group of doctors' request that the entire court examine a controversial, high-profile ruling on guns has been pending since August. A panel in that case rejected the doctors' First Amendment challenge to a Florida law that limits physicians' ability to talk to their patients about firearms.
The Eleventh Circuit is set to hear three cases en banc in February: two criminal cases and a civil case in which the court will revisit aspects of a panel decision that sided with plaintiffs who filed a Fourth Amendment lawsuit over a raid of a barber shop.
Also in February, a three-judge panel is scheduled to hear an Alabama-based, nonprofit Catholic television and radio network's challenge to the federal contraceptive mandate. Unlike the businesses that won their case before the Supreme Court in June, the religious nonprofit can opt out of providing contraceptive coverage, but it has argued that filling out the required form that would signal its third-party health insurance administrator to provide the coverage is itself a violation of the group's religious beliefs. The Eleventh Circuit recently granted oral argument in a similar case brought by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Savannah.
And, although the U.S. Supreme Court may get to the issue first, the Eleventh Circuit has in November and December received an avalanche of briefs from the parties and other interested groups in a case over Florida's ban on marriages by same-sex couples.

Or how about cleaning up the Department of Corrections?  Did you see the Herald article about the DOC forging a document regarding a criminal investigation?  This is scary:

The Florida Department of Corrections has opened a criminal investigation into whether a public record provided by the agency to the Miami Herald was forged.
The document was a form, purportedly filled out and signed by inmate Harold Hempstead, the whistle-blower who in March leaked details to the newspaper about a gruesome death at Dade Correctional Institution, where inmate Darren Rainey collapsed while locked in a brutally hot shower.
Hempstead’s information led the Herald to investigate the Rainey case as well as other suspicious deaths and possible corruption in the Florida Department of Corrections. By the end of 2014, DCI’s top administrators had been ousted, and the department’s secretary, Michael Crews, had retired.
Last year, in the course of the newspaper’s investigation, Hempstead signed a release giving the Herald blanket permission to obtain all his medical records, waiving the strict health information privacy law known as HIPPA.

The rule provides safeguards to protect the privacy of personal health information, and sets limits and conditions on what may be disclosed without patient authorization. Normally, the department heavily redacts its documents, citing the federal law, including details such as where a prisoner is found injured, beaten or dead, where they are transported after they are found and evidence discovered at the scene that the agency believes may reveal an inmate’s medical condition. Examples of redacted items might include descriptions of bloody clothing or, in the case of Rainey, the fact that pieces of skin had fallen off his body.
After Hempstead signed the waiver, a Department of Corrections spokesman informed the newspaper that he had withdrawn his permission to release his records uncensored. When the Herald questioned whether that was true, the spokesman supplied a document — seemingly not in Hempstead’s handwriting — that expressed his change of heart.
Since then, the inmate said, he has told two DOC investigators in two separate interviews that the second document is a fraud.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article5341200.html#storylink=cpy

"On November 10, 1893, the Washington Post identified an emerging technology that was reshaping American society: Pneumatics!"

That's how Chief Justice Roberts starts his year end report.  He goes on to explain that his hope is that by the end of 2016, the Court will be more automated, having electronic filing and public access to court filings.  But the Chief has quite a lead in to get there.  The intro to his report continues:

The miracle of compressed air had led to the creation of new contraptions, including pneumatic tube systems that relied on air compressors to transport cylindrical containers hundreds of feet within buildings. Pneumatic tube systems had found favor in banks and department stores, enabling clerks to transmit documents rapidly from one office to another. Noting this and other applications of pneumatics, the Washington Post lightheartedly proclaimed, “The present era is likely to be known to history as the pneumatic age.” News of this dawning era was slow to reach the Supreme Court. It was not until 1931 that the Marshal of the Court proposed installing a pneumatic tube system in the Courtroom for the benefit of the press. Architect Cass Gilbert incorporated that technology into the design of the Court’s current building, concealing the gray metal tubes behind mahogany desks and beneath the marble floor. When the Court opened the doors of its new Courtroom in 1935, it also revised its procedure for issuing decisions. Under the new “hand- down” protocol, immediately before a Justice announced a decision in the Courtroom, the Clerk of the Court directed messengers to hand copies to a small group of journalists stationed in front of the bench. The journalists then dispatched the copies through the pneumatic tubes to their colleagues in the press booths one floor below, saving the messengers dozens of steps and precious minutes in communicating the news of Court actions. For thirty-six years, virtually all of the Court’s decisions reached the press through those portals. A notable exception was the Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Chief Justice Warren made a point of delaying delivery of his short opinion until he had read it in full in open Court. But not even things gray can stay, and the venerable steel hardware ultimately outlived its usefulness. In 1968, John P. MacKenzie, the Supreme Court reporter for the Washington Post, described the Court’s process of transmitting decisions as “perhaps the most primitive . . . in the entire communications industry.” The Court’s pneumatic age ended in 1971, when Chief Justice Burger authorized the removal of the pneumatic tube system at the same time that he introduced the Court’s familiar curved bench. The Washington Post’s celebration of the marvels of pneumatics, followed by the Supreme Court’s belated embrace and overdue abandonment of a pneumatic conveyance system, illustrates two tenets about technology and the courts, one obvious and the other less so. First, the ceaseless growth of knowledge in a free society produces novel and beneficial innovations that are nonetheless bound for obsolescence from the moment they launch. No one should be surprised that the same surge of creativity that pushed courts from quills to hot-metal type will inevitably propel them past laser printers and HTML files as new technologies continue to emerge. Second, and perhaps less evidently, the courts will often choose to be late to the harvest of American ingenuity. Courts are simply different in important respects when it comes to adopting technology, including information technology. While courts routinely consider evidence and issue decisions concerning the latest technological advances, they have proceeded cautiously when it comes to adopting new technologies in certain aspects of their own operations.

If you are working today and need more than the Chief Justice's 16-page report to get you through the day, you can hit up Judge Jordan's 150-plus order on a case he kept as a district judge regarding healthcare and  disabled children.  The Miami Herald summarizes the ruling here:

A federal judge Wednesday declared Florida’s healthcare system for needy and disabled children to be in violation of several federal laws, handing a stunning victory to doctors and children’s advocates who have fought for almost a decade to force the state to pay pediatricians enough money to ensure impoverished children can receive adequate care.In his 153-page ruling, U.S. Circuit Judge Adalberto Jordan said lawmakers had for years set the state’s Medicaid budget at an artificially low level, causing pediatricians and other specialists for children to opt out of the insurance program for the needy. In some areas of the state, parents had to travel long distances to see specialists.The low spending plans, which forced Medicaid providers for needy children to be paid far below what private insurers would spend — and well below what doctors were paid in the Medicare program for a more powerful group, elders — amounted to rationing of care, the order said.“This is a great day for the children in this state,” said Dr. Louis B. St. Petery, a Tallahassee pediatrician who is executive vice president of the Florida Pediatric Society and helped spearhead the suit. “This action was taken because we found that children weren’t being treated properly if they were on Medicaid. Our position as pediatricians,” he added, “is that children do not choose their parents. They don’t have a choice to be born into a rich family or a poor family.”

UPDATE -- Here is the order.  Thanks to a reader for sending it along.

The blog will be back Monday with regular posts.  Hope everyone had a nice holiday.  Happy new year!

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article5242959.html#storylink=cpy