Caroline Heck Miller retires

 Jay Weaver has the details here:

A couple of years before The Washington Post exposed the Watergate scandal, University of Chicago intern Caroline Heck worked for a summer in the newspaper’s style section. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English, the aspiring journalist headed for Florida to start a job covering courts for the St. Petersburg Times.

“Every day was a theatrical production,” she recalled. But the legal stagecraft often fell short. “I found myself watching a trial, and I would watch the closing arguments and say to myself, ‘Sit down. I could do this better.’ ‘’

So Heck Miller left the newspaper business for Harvard Law School, then wound up at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami. Until retiring earlier this year, she worked for more than 40 years in a legal career highlighted by her role as the lead prosecutor in the Cuban Five spy case in 2001 — an internationally watched, politically charged throwback to the Cold War era

 Heck Miller came to be known as a trailblazer among prosecutors in the federal courthouse. She also was a “resident rabbi” offering sage advice on the law, ethics and trials to young prosecutors, and a polished writer who did all of her own pleadings and appeals. “She was a role model for everybody” in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said retired Magistrate Judge William Turnoff, who in the 1980s was chief of the major crimes section while Heck Miller served as his deputy. “She and Pat Sullivan tried more huge, important federal cases than probably anyone in the history of the Department of Justice,” comparing her to a retired colleague known for taking on Miami’s most infamous criminals.

In other news, the feds tried to subpoena a sitting state judge to testify.  Judge Gayles said nope:

But after first expressing a “willingness” to testify, Pooler consulted with the Florida Attorney General Office, which advised her not to be a witness in the federal case, saying in a motion to quash the subpoena that she “no longer agrees to testify as to any aspect of this matter.” On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles granted the motion to quash the subpoena, saying Pooler was “excused from the subpoena” and that prosecutors can call other witnesses in her place. Afterwards, they decided to call the former assistant state attorney, Robert Guinn, who handled Hollie’s plea colloquy before Pooler in 2014. But Hollie’s assistant federal public defender objected to Guinn as a substitute witness, according to court papers. Gayles must still decide on whether to let Guinn testify. Prosecutors also tried to persuade Gayles to admit a letter that Hollie had written to the clerk of the Miami-Dade Circuit Court after he violated his five-year probation when he was arrested on the two false-statement gun-buying charges in 2019. Hollie asked the clerk to send him the special conditions of his probationary release for his “cases that I got a conviction four.” [sic] Gayles also rejected that request.