Good luck to those checking on the Florida Bar results

They are in this morning. Good luck to everyone. (And congrats to our own Lauren Doyle for passing!)

The DBR has this local story about a fight between a blogger who used a copyrighted photograph and claimed fair use. Score one for the blogger:

A federal appellate court has ended one of many battles in a widespread landlord-tenant war by upholding the ex-tenant's right to use and blog about an unflattering photo of the ex-landlord, a minority owner of the Miami Heat.

The ruling Thursday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upholds a trial court decision for Irina Chevaldina, a former tenant of the California Club Mall in Miami. Ex-landlord Raanan Katz, a billionaire commercial real estate developer, owns the mall and about two dozen others through his company RK Associates.

11th Circuit says Judge Fuller beat his wife and lied about it

Here's the letter to Congress. The AP covered the story:

Judicial investigators told Congress this week that a former federal judge — arrested last year on a domestic violence charge— had demonstrated "reprehensible conduct" and there was evidence that he abused his wife several times and made false statements to the committee reviewing his behavior.

The Judicial Conference of the United States, in a report to Congress this week, said former U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller of Alabama brought disrepute to the federal judiciary and that his conduct might have warranted impeachment if he had not resigned this summer.

In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, the Judicial Conference noted Fuller's resignation, but said the severity of Fuller's misconduct and its finding of perjury led it to turn the information over to Congress for whatever action lawmakers deem necessary.

"This certification may also serve as a public censure of Judge Fuller's reprehensible conduct, which has no doubt brought disrepute to the Judiciary and cannot constitute the 'good behavior' required of a federal judge," Judicial Conference Secretary James C. Duff wrote in a Sept. 11 letter to House Speaker John Boehner.

"Upon receiving their master’s degrees, certifications, and licenses, Plaintiff-Appellant student registered nurse anesthetists are legally able to put people to sleep. We have heard, though never ourselves experienced, that some legal opinions can do the same thing. We are hopeful that this one will not."

That was how Judge Rosenbaum started this opinion.  She also threw in this footnote: "But, then again, the writer is always the last to know."

Good stuff.

UPDATE: This morning Judge Rosenbaum gave us another entertaining introduction to an opinion:

Dorothy may have said it best when she said, “There is no place like home.” Though we are pretty sure that she was not talking about the Fourth Amendment, she may as well have been. Under the Fourth Amendment, the home is a sacrosanct place that enjoys special protection from government intrusion. The government may not enter a person’s home to effect an arrest without a warrant or probable cause plus either consent or exigent circumstances. For this reason, we hold today that, in the absence of exigent circumstances,2 the government may not conduct the equivalent of a Terry3 stop inside a person’s home. But because the law on this point was not clearly established in this Circuit before our decision today, we affirm the district court’s entry of summary judgment on qualified- immunity grounds to Defendant-Appellee Deputy Kevin Pederson, who reached into Plaintiff-Appellant Elvan Moore’s home to arrest and handcuff him when, in the course of what Pederson described as a Terry stop, Moore declined to identify himself in response to Pederson’s questioning. We also affirm the district court’s dismissal of Moore’s state-law claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Meantime, Colbert interviewed Justice Breyer:

“This case was stunningly weak.”

That was Federal Public Defender Michael Caruso about the case against his client Irfan Khan, which was dismissed before trial.  The New Yorker covers the entire case here in a very interesting read, called "The Imam's Curse."  The article starts with a description of how the feds really pumped up this dud of a case:

At dawn on May 14, 2011, more than two dozen federal agents and local police officers converged on a working-class neighborhood near the Miami airport and surrounded a small green-and-white stucco building—Masjid Miami, one of the city’s oldest mosques. Police sealed off a two-block radius, and F.B.I. agents, some armed with AR-15 rifles, assembled outside the door.

Inside, eight men were kneeling for the first prayer of the day. When agents called for them to open up, one of the worshippers, a former police officer, went out and asked them to wait until the prayer was finished. The agents complied, and then they arrested the mosque’s imam, Hafiz Khan, an émigré from a mountainous corner of Pakistan near the Afghan border. Khan was in his late seventies, an albino with thick glasses and a long colorless rush of beard. He had moved to America, with members of his family, in 1994, at the encouragement of a younger brother in Alabama. They became citizens, but Khan spoke no English and rarely left the mosque or a one-room apartment across the street, which he shared with his wife, Fatima. He was known to some of the locals as el viejito barbón—the old bearded man. Kids referred to him as the Santa Claus imam.

While the F.B.I. was arresting Khan, another team of federal agents and police assembled forty miles away, in the city of Margate. They surrounded Jamaat Al-Mu’mineen, a large mosque presided over by Hafiz’s youngest son, Izhar Khan. Izhar, who was twenty-four, was about to lead the morning prayer when agents in F.B.I. windbreakers confronted him in the parking lot. Izhar had moved to Florida when he was eight years old, and he spoke barely accented English. He wore a long dark beard, a black cotton robe, and a skullcap. The agents examined the computers in his office, and when they searched his cell phone they noticed that many of his text messages were about the Miami Heat and other teams.

Meanwhile, a third maneuver in the F.B.I.’s operation against the Khans was unfolding in Los Angeles, where it was 3 A.M. and Izhar’s brother Irfan, a thirty-seven-year-old software programmer, was asleep in his room at the Homestead Studio Suites, an inexpensive business hotel in El Segundo. Married, with two kids, Irfan was a sitcom buff who made hammy jokes about his waistline. (“This won’t be good for my diet!”) He lived in Miami and worked for American Unit, an I.T. company. For the past three months, he had been commuting every two weeks to an assignment in El Segundo. He was awakened by a phone call from the police, advising him to go to the door. He was handcuffed and led to a waiting car, past bomb-sniffing dogs and helmeted men in camouflage.

After the arrests, federal authorities announced that, in all, six people in Florida and abroad had been charged with funnelling tens of thousands of dollars into a conspiracy to “murder, kidnap, or maim persons overseas,” orchestrated by the Pakistani Taliban, an ally of Al Qaeda. The group was known for having trained Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American who, in May, 2010, tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square. In 2012, Pakistani Taliban gunmen boarded a bus in northwest Pakistan and shot Malala Yousafzai, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who had called for the education of women.

The F.B.I. had been secretly tracking the Khans for at least a year, monitoring their finances and recording thousands of hours of conversation, in person and on the phone. Two other members of the family were also indicted—a daughter and a seventeen-year-old grandson, who live in Pakistan—along with a Pakistani shopkeeper, who had served as a middleman. In the indictment, they were accused of conspiring to buy guns, shelter the Taliban, and send students “to learn to kill Americans in Afghanistan.” The indictment described phone calls from Miami, in which the father “called for an attack on the Pakistani Assembly” and “called for the death of Pakistan’s President.” The U.S. Attorney Wifredo A. Ferrer told the Sun Sentinel that a list of cash transfers totalling fifty thousand dollars was “just the tip of the iceberg,” and declared, “We will be able to prove that there is more than fifty thousand dollars that went to the Taliban.” Each of the accused faced between forty-five and sixty years in prison.

While the feds do have some resources to fight cases like this, the State Public Defenders do not.  John Oliver does this amazing piece on how state PDs need more funding:

Federal courts are open today...

...while public schools and state court are closed.  I always thought that the feds should line up with the state on this issue and close because it's too hard on everyone with kids home and so on.

But if you are working today, check out the four on the short list for federal judge in the Middle District.

Or this NRP article on an NACDL report on federal indigent defense:

A tough new report has concluded that the federal government's system for defending poor people needs to change. The nearly two-year study by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said judges who are supposed to be neutral arbiters too often put their fingers on the scales.
The report said defense lawyers for the poor who work in the federal court system need more resources to do their jobs. That means money, not just for themselves, but to pay for experts and investigators.
"Having good, fully resourced defense counsel with access to ancillary services is an absolute must in a society that is arresting 14 million people a year," said Norman Reimer, executive director of the NACDL.
In an adversary system, lawyers for poor defendants say, they need to operate on equal footing with prosecutors. But the study, the first of its kind in more than 20 years, found the source of most concern rests with judges who exercise too much control over the process.
Bonnie Hoffman, a deputy public defender in Virginia, led the task force.
"There's some significant ways we feel the federal system is not measuring up — most importantly, in the area of independence," Hoffman said.
That's because judges are in charge. They have a role in selecting the defense lawyers for the poor clients who appear in court. They act as umpires during a plea hearing or a trial. And then those same judges approve or reject the defense lawyers' fee requests.
"It's a shame to think that somebody agrees to do this work, they do the work that they're asked to do ... to be a zealous advocate for somebody who's accused of a crime," Hoffman said, "and then when they finish that somebody can come back and say, 'I know you did good work ... but we don't feel like we should pay you for all the work that you did.' "

H/T: AB

Or, watch this for your moment of zen: