RIP Justice Scalia

Wow, this is sad news. Everyone is talking replacement right now, but we should give the guy his due. He will be remember as the best writer ever on the Supreme Court. And, although Rumpole and I disagree on this, he is one of the best Justices for criminal defendants and criminal justice issues. More to follow...

BREAKING -- Judge Abdul K. Kallon nominated to 11th Circuit

This is big news.  The nomination comes out of Alabama to fill Judge Dubina's seat.  This would be the first African American judge to serve on the 11th Circuit out of Alabama.  More to follow...

(H/T Glenn Sugameli).

Huge win for the FPD's office...

...in the Florida Supreme Court for Tracy Dreispul who raised the issue in the 11th Circuit.  This is going to affect a lot of cases.

This case is before the Court for review of a question of Florida law certified by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit that is determinative of a cause pending in that court and for which there appears to be no controlling precedent. We have jurisdiction. See art. V, § 3(b)(6), Fla. Const. In United States v. Clarke, 780 F.3d 1131 (11th Cir. 2015), the court certified the following question to this Court:

Florida law prohibits a person from “own[ing] or . . . hav[ing] in his or her care, custody, possession, or control any firearm . . . if that person has been . . . [c]onvicted of a felony in the courts of [Florida].” Fla. Stat. § 790.23(1). For purposes of that statute, does a guilty plea for a felony for which adjudication was withheld qualify as a “convict[ion]”?

Id. at 1133. Section 790.23(1)(a), Florida Statutes (2008), in pertinent part, makes it a criminal offense for a person to own or have in his or her care, custody, possession, or control any firearm if that person has been convicted of a felony in the courts of this state.1 Thus, this Court is asked by the Eleventh Circuit to determine if, under Florida law, a person is “convicted” for purposes of that statute if the person has entered a plea of guilty to a felony offense but adjudication for that offense has been withheld. For the reasons that we explain, we answer the certified question in the negative and hold that for purposes of section 790.23(1)(a), a guilty plea for a felony for which adjudication was withheld does not qualify as a “conviction” under that statute.

WOW!

Love is in the air...

... at the PD's office!  Check out this nice Herald article about two APDs:

It was not love at first sight, no. Brad Horenstein and Daniela Torrealba met when they were taken to lunch by their respective bosses while working as interns at the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office. Their reaction was … well, meh.
"I got a very bad reading," recalls Horenstein, 35. "She was so serious. I didn’t talk to her for a year after that."
From Torrealba, 29: "I didn’t even remember meeting him at the lunch until he reminded me about it. I was in my final semester of law school and I had blinders on."
A few months later the assistant public defenders were singing a different tune — quite literally. On a road trip to Orlando for a legal conference, they realized how much they loved the same music. They sang along to Kavinsky’s Nightcall and Radiohead’s Idioteque and Crystal Castles’ Vanished. They talked. And talked. And talked.
Horenstein was smitten, but it still took him four months to ask her out. Their first date, in February 2013, was at Scarpetta, a high-end Italian restaurant in Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau. They finished the night at The Corner, a hip bar downtown. Soon they became inseparable.
"I knew he was a wonderful guy who was genuinely concerned about his clients and his work, but I had never dated a friend before," Torrealba says. "When he asked me out, it opened my eyes.”
Two years and four months later, Horenstein popped the question. They’re getting married February 2017.
In the meantime the couple has lived together for 16 months in a Brickell area apartment. They spend most of their work hours together, too. They believe the closeness has helped burnish their new love.
He says: "She’s incredibly bright and quick-witted and positive. She’s so much fun to be around."
She says: "He has what people call good moral fiber."

Cool story!   This one from the 6th Circuit, not so much:

Rocky Houston appeals his conviction of being a felon in possession of a firearm in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). At trial, the primary evidence against Houston was video footage of his possessing firearms at his and his brother’s rural Tennessee farm. The footage was recorded over the course of ten weeks by a camera installed on top of a public utility pole approximately 200 yards away. Although this ten-week surveillance was conducted without a warrant, the use of the pole camera did not violate Houston’s reasonable expectations of privacy because the camera recorded the same view of the farm as that enjoyed by passersby on public roads.

Oh boy.  Big brother is watching!

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/health-fitness/article59222768.html#storylink=cpy

Legal debates...

First: "What's harder, for a man to do 30 pushups or a woman to do 14?"  That's from Althouse discussing the 4th Circuit case of Bauer v. Lynch, which addresses the requirements for the FBI:

"Whether physical fitness standards discriminate based on sex, therefore, depends on whether they require men and women to demonstrate different levels of fitness.... [T]he numbers of push-ups men and women must complete are not the same, but... the fundamental issue [is] whether those normalized requirements treat men in a different manner than women.... [A]n employer does not contravene Title VII when it utilizes physical fitness standards that distinguish between the sexes on the basis of their physiological differences but impose an equal burden of compliance on both men and women, requiring the same level of physical fitness of each."

Second, is Cruz eligible to be President?  From Harvard Law Today:

“Cruz claims that the narrow, historical meaning of the Constitution is literal, except when it comes to the ‘natural born citizen’ clause,” said Tribe, who taught Cruz when he was a student at HLS in 1994.
The crux of the matter is that the Constitution, in Article II, Section 2, Clause 5, states that “no person except a natural born citizen” can be president.
Under English common law, upon which U.S. law was based, a “natural born citizen” would be someone born on American soil. For Tribe, according to this definition, Cruz does not qualify. He compared Cruz to Alexander Hamilton, a founding father who was born in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, but qualified as a U.S. citizen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and former presidential candidate John McCain, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone when it was under U.S. control.
“Unlike Cruz, McCain was born in U.S. territory,” said Tribe. “And unlike Cruz, McCain was born to two U.S. citizens, parents who had been deployed to the Panama Canal Zone by the military to serve the country.”
But for Jack Balkin ’81, a constitutional law professor at Yale University, Cruz is a “natural born citizen” because under U.S. immigration law in 1970, he automatically became an American because his mother was one. The law grants birthright citizenship to a child born overseas if one parent is a U.S. citizen.

I think question 1 might get more commenters' blood boiling...