News & Notes

1. Last night was the Federal Bar prom. It was very well attended with federal judges and lawyers, all mingling on an outdoor deck on a beautiful Miami night.

2. Former U.S. Attorneys Bob Martinez and Marcos Jimenez come to the defense of FBI agents in this op-ed in the Miami Herald. From the piece:

Today’s FBI agents, like their fallen colleagues, live and work among us, mostly maintaining a low profile. They send their children to our local schools, raise their families in our communities, and maintain a modest and law-abiding lifestyle. They live like average Americans. Yet, on a daily basis, their jobs are not average. They are the ones that Americans have assigned the responsibility to shield us from terrorism and espionage, from predators targeting children, to ferret out public corruption, to protect us from fraud, from kidnappers, from violent predators. To guard our civil rights. They are located in cities and towns across our country and throughout the world. Their work is essential to a safe and free society. Many Americans are trying to make sense of the current effort to purge potentially thousands of hard-working, dedicated agents from the FBI. What would be the impact of the removal of so many federal law enforcement officers on the safety and security of our nation? Who will want to join the FBI if their employment can be terminated, and their identities exposed to retribution by the very criminals they investigated, whenever a new politician takes over?

3. Congress has tasked the Sentencing Commission with describing extraordinary and compelling reasons that may warrant a sentence reduction. The Commission issued a Policy Statement in 2023 that allows defendants to move for a sentence reduction if they can show that their original sentence is “unusually long.” In issuing that Policy Statement (section 1B1.13(b)(6)) the Commission wanted to clarify that defendants may present—and district courts may consider—nonretroactive changes in law as the basis for concluding that a sentence is “unusually long.”

Judge Ruiz has concluded, in this 40 page order, that district courts cannot apply section 1B1.13(b)(6) of the United States Sentencing Commission’s Policy Statement as a matter of law, because the Commission exceeded their statutory authority in allowing district courts to consider nonretroactive changes in law. The Eleventh Circuit will be weighing in on this issue soon, I'm sure, as district judges on our Court are coming out on different sides of the issue.