Judge Federico Moreno is now senior status

As of July 17, Judge Moreno took senior status.  He served the District for 30 years.  A big thank you and congratulations to one of the longest (THE longest?) active serving judges in our District.  In addition to his service, he will also be remembered for his legacy of championing his clerks and having them appointed as judges and other important positions.  His judging tree (like Belichick's coaching tree) is extremely impressive. 

Although we do not yet have an official nominee for Judge Moreno's seat, it is widely known that David Leibowitz is being vetted for that slot.  Leibowitz is a great and very smart guy, so hopefully that process can move forward. 

Will Florida felons be permitted to vote?

It's a huge fight.

Even though Florida voters passed a Constitutional Amendment saying felons get to vote, there has been a lot of wrangling to stop this from happening.  A district judge said that the State was putting up too many hurdles for voting.  So all looked okay... but then the 11th Circuit stayed that order. Up to the Supreme Court it went.  And, shocker, Justice Thomas, denied the motion to vacate the stay.

There were three dissenters (Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan; we need more women on the Court).

So the likelihood is that the 11th Circuit won't get to this one before the November election and 1.4 million people won't be allowed to vote, which is a tragedy.  But there is still hope for the next election.

And there is still quite a bit of litigation to follow.  The latest is this motion to recuse Judges Luck, Lagoa, and Brasher. 

Reminds me of Omar Little:

Miami is new epicenter of corona

That’s the headline everywhere this morning.
Getting much less attention is how that affects the jails and prisons in South Florida.
Criminal defense lawyers know that the local facilities are a true disaster right now.
Clients are on 24-hour lockdown, unable to see family or counsel.
They are locked in their small cells with two other inmates and not permitted to leave.
There is extremely limited testing.
There are no masks.
It’s like being in a Super-Max while the virus creeps around the building.
Here’s one article that at least is covering the issue:

"The virus has already spread inside," Troitino said. "I am highly concerned for public safety. Our facility is in the middle of a community, a very vibrant community."

Internal documents NBC 6 obtained showed that on Tuesday, 11 inmates had the virus. Troitino says there was a big jump, indicating trouble.

"Yesterday alone we discovered in one area that held 60 inmates over 22 tested positive and that’s only after testing 28," he said. "We don’t know where this is going to lead but it looks catastrophic at the moment."

Troitino said officers were given inferior PPE gear. Warden Sylvester Jenkins denied that claim in an email.

Our judges have let a few folks out for compassionate release, but a lot more needs to be done. And Judges Williams and Cooke tried to deal with state and immigration facilities. But how about granting bail? Or contested CR motions? Waiving the 30-day administrative waiting requirement? And so on.

This was not a liberal Supreme Court Term

There's been a lot of commentary that the Supreme Court has shifted to the left with some decisions by Justices Roberts and Gorsuch.  But as Leah Litman points out in this Washington Post commentary, that is wrong.  Here's a portion of her piece:

The conservative legal movement obtained equally significant wins in a series of decisions involving religious freedom, simultaneously requiring that government treat religious institutions equally with nonsectarian ones and exempting religious entities or those with religious concerns from otherwise applicable rules, such as anti-discrimination laws.In one case, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, the court ruled that anti-discrimination statutes such as Title VII and the Americans With Disabilities Act do not apply to religious teachers at religiously affiliated schools — dramatically broadening an exemption that had previously applied to those in the role of “ministers.” In another case involving access to contraceptive coverage, Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, the court held that the Trump administration could exempt employers with religious or even moral objections from the minor requirement that they notify their insurance providers about their objections to providing coverage.The court’s approach augured future wins to conservatives that will limit the scope of civil rights protections. For example, the court this year held that Title VII’s prohibition on job discrimination because of sex extends to gay and transgender workers. But the other rulings strongly indicate that the court will be wary about extending that protection in situations where employers claim religious objections.Even as the court expanded religious entities’ ability to opt out of anti-discrimination legislation, it widened the government’s obligation to provide public support for religious entities. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the court, again in an opinion by Roberts, ruled that a program that provided scholarships for private schools had to make those scholarships equally available to religious schools.Previously, the court had held that a government program that provided help to private schools for playground resurfacing had to be made available to religious schools as well. The Montana case represented a dramatic expansion of requirements for direct funding of religious education, which the court said was mandated by the constitutional protection for free exercise of religion. The combined effect of the religion decisions is to require government support for institutions that are not required to comply with legal prohibitions on discrimination.Even in cases where the conservative argument lost, Republican politicians won. The court’s seemingly progressive decisions on social issues were electoral gifts to Republican politicians up for reelection. The public largely supports women’s ability to have an abortion, protection against deportation for the young immigrants known as “dreamers” and anti-discrimination rights for LGBTQ employees. The Supreme Court’s decisions on these issues prevent Republican politicians from having to defend unpopular rulings by Republican-appointed justices in the lead-up to the election.

Big day at SCOTUS

And I'm not talking about the tax return cases.  It's the "Indian country" case where Justice Gorsuch wrote in a 5-4 opinion that most of Oklahoma is mostly "Indian country," meaning that Oklahoma could not prosecute Jimcy McGirt for raping a child. 

Justice Gorsuch's conclusion:

The federal government promised the Creek a reservation in perpetuity. Over time, Congress has diminished that reservation. It has sometimes restricted and other times expanded the Tribe’s authority. But Congress has never withdrawn the promised reservation. As a result, many of the arguments before us today follow a sadly familiar pattern. Yes, promises were made, but the price of keeping them has become too great, so now we should just cast a blind eye. We reject that thinking. If Congress wishes towithdraw its promises, it must say so. Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right.The judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeals of Oklahoma is
Reversed.

 And Chief Justice Roberts' dissent intro:

In 1997, the State of Oklahoma convicted petitioner Jimcy McGirt of molesting, raping, and forcibly sodomizing a four-year-old girl, his wife’s granddaughter. McGirt was sentenced to 1,000 years plus life in prison.  Today, the Court holds that Oklahoma lacked jurisdiction to prosecute McGirt — on the improbable ground that, unbeknownst to anyone for the past century, a huge swathe of Oklahoma is actually a Creek Indian reservation, on which the State may not prosecute serious crimes committed by Indians like McGirt.  Not only does the Court discover a Creek reservation that spans three million acres and includes most of the city of Tulsa, but the Court’s reasoning portends that there are four more such reservations in Oklahoma.  The rediscovered reservations encompass the entire eastern half of the State — 19 million acres that are home to 1.8 million people, only 10%–15% of whom are Indians.
Across this vast area, the State’s ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hobbled and decades of past convictions could well be thrown out.  On top of that, the Court has profoundly destabilized the governance of eastern Oklahoma.  The decision today creates significant uncertainty for the State’s continuing authority over any area that touches Indian affairs, ranging from zoning and taxation to family and environmental law.
None of this is warranted. What has gone unquestioned for a century remains true today: A huge portion of Oklahoma is not a Creek Indian reservation. Congress disestablished any reservation in a series of statutes leading up to Oklahoma statehood at the turn of the 19th century. The Court reaches the opposite conclusion only by disregarding the “well settled” approach required by our precedents. Nebraska v. Parker, 577 U. S. 481, ___ (2016) (slip op., at 5).