The SDFLA Blog is dedicated to providing news and notes regarding federal practice in the Southern District of Florida. The New Times calls the blog "the definitive source on South Florida's federal court system." All tips on court happenings are welcome and will remain anonymous. Please email David Markus at dmarkus@markuslaw.com
You can’t make this stuff up. We have hair-pulling, wrist-scratching, facepunching, and rock-throwing—all the makings of a good old-fashioned schoolyard scrap. But alas, the combatants in the fracas underlying this Fourth Amendment case were grown-ups—sisters, in fact. Sheesh. Sister No. 1, Lori Huebner, was arrested for simple battery following an altercation with Sister No. 2, Kathleen Dobin. Huebner later sued Deputy Peter McDonough, alleging that he violated her Fourth Amendment rights (1) by arresting her without probable cause—in particular, by relying on what she claimsEnjoy the rest of the opinion.
was untrustworthy information and by failing to conduct an adequate investigation—and (2) by using excessive force in the course of effectuating the arrest. The district court granted summary judgment to McDonough, and Huebner now appeals. We hold that McDonough had ample probable cause to arrest Huebner—the underlying information indicating that she had battered her sister was credible and his investigation was sufficient—and that McDonough didn’t use excessive force in making the arrest.
That brings us to the matter of Agent Russell’s trial testimony. Hawkins and McCree argue that Agent Russell “went far beyond permissible testimony” when he repeatedly provided “speculative interpretive commentary” on the meanings of phone calls and text messages and gave his opinions about what was occurring during and in between those communications. We agree.
Agent Russell—a lieutenant with the Montgomery Police Department assigned to the DEA’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force from 2011 through 2015—was both the lead case agent in the investigation and the Government’s principal witness at trial. He provided extensive testimony about the drug trade, the investigation, and the intercepted phone calls, and—contrary to the Government’s puzzling contention otherwise—he was presented as an expert to the jury.
Hawkins and McCree acknowledge that experienced narcotics agents may testify as experts to help juries understand the drug business, codes, and jargon; indeed, this Court has repeatedly so held. See, e.g., Holt, 777 F.3d at 1265 (“‘The operations of narcotics dealers are a proper subject for expert testimony under [Federal Rule of Evidence] 702,’ and ‘an experienced narcotics agent may testify as an expert to help a jury understand the significance of certain conduct or methods of operation unique to the drug distribution business.’” (quoting United States v. Cesar Garcia,14 447 F.3d 1327, 1335 (11th Cir. 2006))). But that is not the problem here.
Much of Agent Russell’s trial testimony “was not specific to his interpretation of drug codes and jargon” and “went beyond interpreting code words to interpret conversations as a whole.” United States v. Emmanuel, 565 F.3d 1324, 1336 (11th Cir. 2009). During his extensive time on the witness stand, Agent Russell “interpreted” unambiguous language, mixed expert opinion with fact testimony, and synthesized the trial evidence for the jury. His testimony strayed into speculation and unfettered, wholesale interpretation of the evidence. Allowance of this testimony constituted plain error.
A clash between judges on two federal courts in Washington has created an early, unusual test of new rules intended to make sure courthouses across the country are civil, harassment-free workplaces.
And it has exposed the perils of the reply-all email, even among judges for life.
A U.S. District Court judge forwarded an email to about 45 judges and their staffs to flag an upcoming climate-change seminar co-sponsored by the research and education agency of the judiciary branch. His note said, “just FYI.”
Within an hour a judicial colleague responded sharply to the group, questioning the first judge’s ethics and urging him to get “back into the business of judging, which are what you are being paid to do.” He also said, “The jurisdiction assigned to you does not include saving the planet.”
The correspondence, which sparked a lively exchange involving other judges, amounted to an unusual exposure of private conversations on the federal bench. It also poses the question of how the judiciary now will police itself in such instances.
***
The controversy began the evening of July 3, when Sullivan forwarded the invitation.
Soon after, Randolph, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, replied all. He chided Sullivan for “subjecting our colleagues to this nonsense” and suggested he had crossed an ethical line. He asked: “Should I report you? I don’t know.”
“The jurisdiction assigned to you does not include saving the planet. A little hubris [sic] would be welcomed in many of your latest public displays,” Randolph wrote.
“The supposedly science and stuff you are now sponsoring is nothing of the sort,” his email continued. “Get out of this business and back into the business of judging, which are what you are being paid to do.”
More than two weeks after his initial note, Randolph again addressed the email list. After learning more about the Environmental Law Institute’s program and the judiciary’s co-sponsorship, he wrote: “While I continue to disagree with their conclusion about the propriety of the program, I think their position is fairly held.”Oh, how nice of you. I know the judges in our district would not give you acceptance points for that.
Given that, he wrote, “I do not believe that Judge Sullivan acted improperly in circulating the invitation to ELI’s program.”
A federal judge in a scathing order this week held the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas in contempt of court for its pattern of misrepresentations, obfuscation and lack of cooperation during an investigation into a growing scandal.
A ruling by U.S. District Court of Kansas Judge Julie Robinson late Tuesday capped a three-year probe that examined the extent to which federal prosecutors in Kansas had accessed recordings of confidential phone calls and meetings between defense attorneys and their clients at a private prison in Leavenworth.
Conversations between clients and their attorneys are confidential in nearly all aspects. Robinson found that federal prosecutors in Kansas determined on their own that they could access recordings of these discussions, tainting several criminal cases along the way.
At least three criminal defendants in Kansas have had their sentences vacated or their indictments dismissed as a result of the scandal. More than a hundred others have filed petitions for similar relief.
“The Government’s wholesale strategy to delay, diffuse, and deflect succeeded in denying the individual litigants their day in court for almost three years,” Robinson wrote as part of a 188-page ruling.
The puffery “doctrine” presumes a relatively (but realistically) savvy consumer—the general idea being that some statements are just too boosterish to justify reasonable reliance. In general parlance, “puffing” is “seller’s or dealer’s talk in praise of the virtues of something offered for sale.” Webster’s Third New International 1838 (2002). Perhaps closer to home for our purposes, it refers to an “expression of an exaggerated opinion—as opposed to a factual misrepresentation—with the intent to sell a good or service.” Black’s Law Dictionary 1428 (10th ed. 2014). As Judge Learned Hand once put it, “[t]here are some kinds of talk which no sensible man takes seriously, and if he does he suffers from his credulity.” Vulcan Metals Co. v. Simmons Mfg. Co., 248 F. 853, 856 (2d Cir. 1918). Think, for example, Disneyland’s claim to be “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Or Avis’s boast, “We Just Try Harder.” Or Dunkin Donuts’s assertion that “America runs on Dunkin.” Or (for our teenage readers) Sony’s statement that its PlayStation 3 “Only Does Everything.” These boasts and others like them are widely regarded as “puff”— big claims with little substance.
During cross-examination of the alleged victim on Wednesday, Vizzi called her an exhibitionist and her husband a voyeur, adding, ″You turn tricks, don’t you?″How would this cross have gone over in today’s climate where the ABA in considering a resolution that would shift the burden to defendants to show affirmative consent. After numerous organizations opposed the resolution, it appears to be dead.
At one point, Vizzi slammed two quarters on the witness stand and said, ″You’ll dance nude for 50 cents. What would you do for a dollar?″
The woman charged that the defendant kidnapped and raped her, but the man claimed he had paid the woman for sex.
Holding Vizzi in contempt, Donner said, ″Any rape victim who had the misfortune to observe your conduct would have never continued with a rape prosecution.
″The cross-examination was scandalous, to say the least.″
Vizzi told Donner that he did not mean to violate her orders.
″I defended this man vigorously because I honestly believed he was falsely accused,″ he said.
"Q. Isn't this place a front for prostitution?SECOND UPDATE -- in the comment section, Judge Amy Steele Donner makes the following comments. Thank you for commenting for the blog Judge Donner:
MR. BAGLEY: Objection; this is irrelevant, Judge.
THE COURT: Sustained.
. . . .
BY MR. VIZZI:
Q. Isn't it true that girls that work at Live Peeps will often take coffee breaks to do things with the customers who liked how they danced and liked their body —
MR. BAGLEY: Objection.
Q. — and wanted to do a little bit more with them that could be done in those rooms where you work?
Isn't it true that that happens all the time?
MR. BAGLEY: Objection; improper question. It's a compound question and furthermore its irrelevant.
THE COURT: Sustained."
Later, he engaged in the following cross examination of the complainant which led to his contempt conviction:
"Q. Isn't it true that your 19-year-old now-husband doesn't like you to work after hours doing extra things other than work at Live Peeps?
MR. BAGLEY: Objection, your Honor; that's irrelevant.
THE COURT: Sustained. Move on, Mr. Vizzi.
BY MR. VIZZI:
Q. Isn't it true that your husband is a voyeur and you're an exhibitionist and he doesn't like it to get any further than that. He gets sexual gratification when you take your clothes off, but he gets very angry when you perform tricks with customers?
MR. BAGLEY: Objection.
THE COURT: Come to side-bar, Mr. Vizzi.
The founder of a South Florida real estate company pleaded guilty Wednesday to orchestrating a $1.3 billion Ponzi scheme that bilked thousands of mostly elderly investors.
Robert H. Shapiro, the former CEO of the Woodbridge Group of Companies, admitted in Miami federal court that he “misappropriated” between $25 million and $95 million of the investors’ money to himself and his family to pay for an estate in the Los Angeles area, chartered planes, global travel, jewelry, diamonds and vintage wines. Shapiro also collected artworks by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Pierre-August Renoir and Alberto Giacometti. He also owned a Mercury convertible.
Now, all those luxury items belong to the feds.
Shapiro, 61, who was arrested in April, faces up to 20 years for wire and mail fraud conspiracy and an additional 5 years for tax evasion at his sentencing on Oct. 15 before U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga. In pleading guilty, Shapiro avoids going to trial but still is looking at a total of 25 years in prison.
We are told that there is a great divide in our country, and at the voting booth that is apparent. But in the jury room, we were just 12 random people pulled out of our daily lives and asked to administer the final decision in a case. It felt like our justice system at work.Meantime, let me be a proud dad for a moment and post the op-ed of my daughter in today’s Miami Herald:
I’ll vote in November, and it will be important. But I don’t think I’ll ever feel as significant as a citizen as I did in that jury room.
And though I identify as an activist, I wish I did not have to. There is a large part of me that resents the fact that fellow teens and I have to wake up and focus on whether the government will pass the simplest background checks bill, or if there will be a shooting near me that kills someone I know.
I resent it because it should be adults and elected government officials focusing on these issues.
I would much rather spend my time dancing around the house, modeling clothes and makeup for my friends, and going to the beach. You know, typical things that those in government think teenagers do when they call us incompetent and assert that we do not know anything about politics, all the while allowing the gun violence epidemic to continue in an endless cycle. But I can’t.
“For 23 years, I was a jailhouse lawyer,” said Calvin Duncan, a former inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. “That was my assigned job.”This is so true:
He had a 10th-grade education, and he was serving a life sentence for murder. The prison paid him 20 cents an hour to help his fellow prisoners with their cases.He got good at it, and he used his increasingly formidable legal skills to help free several inmates. He knew how to spot a promising legal issue, and he was relentless. Seasoned lawyers sought his advice.One issue in particular consumed Mr. Duncan. He could not understand how a Louisiana law that allowed non-unanimous juries in criminal cases could be constitutional. He would not let it go, working on about two dozen failed attempts to persuade the Supreme Court to address the issue.The justices finally agreed in March to decide the question. They will hear arguments in the case, Ramos v. Louisiana, No. 18-5924, on the first day of their new term, on Oct. 7.
Mr. Duncan visited Professor Mattes’s law school clinic not long after he was released. The students were in their third year, tired of studying and perhaps a little jaded.Mr. Duncan asked to see the law library, and he marveled at the vast and pristine collections of cases, codes and treatises.“All of a sudden, he stops and he turns to the students,” Professor Mattes said. “He gets very serious and he says: ‘You guys need to know how incredibly lucky you are. Because what you have here is power.’”
Of course, I concur in every word of the Court’s opinion. See United States v. Hough, 803 F.3d 1181, 1197 (11th Cir. 2015) (Carnes, C.J., concurring) (“Not surprisingly, as the author of the Court’s opinion I concur in all of it.”). Usually, there is nothing else for the author of a majority opinion to say, but here there is.There’s been a lot of this lately. Judge William Pryor has done it twice in the last couple of days, here and here. In fact, in the latter case the whole panel concurred, per Judge Pryor, with the majority opinion, written by Judge Pryor. But unlike Carnes’ concurrence, which was written to make some additional points, Pryor takes on prior precedent in the 11th Circuit in both of his concurrences. I wonder how conservative judges would have viewed the Pryor concurrences (saying the 11th Circuit had gotten it wrong in the past) had they been written by the more liberal wing of the 11th Circuit.
After a police officer in South Bend, Ind., shot and killed Eric Jack Logan last month, contentious meetings between the public and Mayor Pete Buttigieg showed that there is often a serious lack of faith that allegations of police misconduct will be fairly investigated. We can fix this: Public defenders, not law enforcement officials, should be responsible for determining whether police misconduct occurred.
The skepticism about the way investigations are currently conducted makes sense: Police departments’ internal investigations are reliably lenient. The New York Police Department, for example, took nearly 2,500 reports of biased policing from residents since 2015 and found not a single one credible. Prosecutors and state police, the two other entities most likely to carry out an investigation of police misconduct, often decline to press charges even when video evidence seems to leave little doubt that an officer’s conduct has violated departmental policy.
***
Not surprisingly, communities of color, who are disproportionately exposed to police violence and misconduct, have a much less favorable view of the police than the population overall, and little belief that misdeeds will be revealed or punished. In a 2017 Pew Research poll, 64 percent of Americans said they had generally warm feelings toward the police. But for black Americans it was just 30 percent. If mayors, police chiefs and legislatures are serious about instilling real faith in these communities, they should hand over full control of investigations to the one group of lawyers used to treating the police in an adversarial fashion, all of them experts in police rules and procedures: public defenders.
Unlike prosecutors, who often work hand-in-hand with the police to make a case for conviction, defenders are used to questioning the stories police officers tell. For example, in a case of mine many years ago, the prosecutor and his police witness seemed confident that their evidence was unassailable: Two officers had walked up to the car my client was sitting in, looked in the windows, and seen what looked like cocaine. What never occurred to them, although it was easy enough for me to find out, was that their walk from the police car to my client’s car took them from one city to another. When they arrived, they were out of their jurisdiction and had no authority to make an arrest. It seems minor, but it exemplifies the different approach that defenders must take to protect our clients’ interests — and the rigor we are accustomed to bringing to our investigation of everything the police say and do.
Elord had been in the Miami-Dade Regional Juvenile Detention Center for only three days when he and Johnson confronted each other in the lockup’s cafeteria, records show. Elord rose from his seat without asking Johnson for permission. Johnson told the teen to return to his seat. Elord cursed at the officer, telling him to “f--- off,” prosecutors say.
Prosecutors say Johnson, unwilling or unable to dispense discipline himself, did the next best thing: He ordered the other detainees in Module 9 to beat him up, instead.
Elord died at Jackson Memorial Hospital at 11:17 p.m. on Aug. 31. An autopsy concluded he died from a tear to a vein under his left shoulder, which slowly oozed blood until he stopped breathing.
Federal agents arrested Johnson last April, after a grand jury indicted him. The indictment was handed down a year after state prosecutors concluded they lacked sufficient evidence to charge Johnson with either homicide or official misconduct, and after an internal investigation by the state Department of Juvenile Justice failed to confirm allegations that Elord was the victim of a “honey bunning,” or a beating orchestrated by officers.
In October of 2017, the Miami Herald published a series of stories, called “Fight Club,” that detailed a host of abuses within facilities operated by DJJ, or by private providers under contract with the state. The improprieties included rampant unnecessary and excessive force, sexual misconduct and an unspoken disciplinary tool called “honey bunning,” in which officers deputized detainees to act as enforcers against other youths who got out of line, often rewarding them with a honey bun from the employee vending machine.
Johnson “unleashed a commonly used, illegal bounty scheme on Elord,” McLaughlin said in opening remarks to the jury. He emphasized that detention officers are not allowed to hit or discipline the juveniles in their charge, so when Elord began violating rules and mouthing off, Johnson decided “to take matters into his own hands and discipline Elord for disrespect.”
“You will hear testimony from these Mod 9 kids, especially those in the know, that they knew, as they put it, ‘exactly what time it was,’ ” McLaughlin said.
Prior to Monday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga denied a series of motions filed by prosecutors, including a motion to exclude references to Johnson’s good character from his DJJ employment records.
Altonaga’s decisions could make it more difficult for prosecutors to get a conviction. In one such decision, Altonaga forbade prosecutors to show video footage to jurors of other fights and what prosecutors claim are officer-directed beatdowns — which prosecutors claim could help them build the case for the conspiracy charge.
Johnson’s defense counsel argued that the “honey bunning” bribery system that is the crux of the federal conspiracy charge simply does not exist.
“The idea that these kids could be incentivized by a 75-cent doughnut is ridiculous,” said Hector Dopico, Johnson’s lawyer.
Dopico described the juvenile offenders in custody as “carjackers, some of which carry guns to school, some of which are rapists” who are “filled with piss and vinegar.” Dopico accused the federal government of conspiring with the witnesses to cover up the true motive behind the attack that killed Elord.
“The government knows the name of every one of those kids,” the defense counsel said. “Not one of them has been charged with a single crime. The government made a deal with them and Antwan is the scapegoat.”
Trying to inoculate journalists against hindsight bias is like trying to teach your cat algebra—it’s an uphill slog.Happily, the Washington Post last Sunday gave us a history of the decade-old Jeffrey Epstein sex-crimes prosecution that didn’t rely on the anachronistic innuendo that filled a Miami Herald series entitled “Perversion of Justice.” The furor caused by that series led last week to the resignation of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who had the misfortune of being the U.S. attorney whose office prosecuted the long-ago case.
The Post investigation, with a non-tabloidal realism the Herald couldn’t muster, found “not a crisp portrait of white hats tilting against black hats, but rather a mottled mural of prosecutors who were eager to stop Epstein from preying on girls, but also sensitive to the young women’s desire not to have their names made public.” It adds that Mr. Epstein’s high-priced defense team “took advantage of the fact that many victims felt a bond with their accused abuser.”
To put it more bluntly than even the Post wants to, prosecutors seem to have feared losing in court because their witnesses were unreliable. If so, this echoes the apparent experience of a state prosecutor in Palm Beach County in the same matter, who ended up going before a grand jury with a single witness, who wasn’t even underage. It also echoes a declaration, in the Herald’s own words, by the Manhattan district attorney in a subsequent matter that the “underage victims failed to cooperate” in the Florida prosecution.
Most cogent about the paper’s own role was an op-ed published in February in the Herald itself by Jeffrey H. Sloman, another member of Mr. Acosta’s team. He points out that though the Herald’s decade-after-the-fact revelations “made a strong case that [Epstein] should have gone to jail for much longer,” the paper “never explained or substantiated its accusation that we schemed with Epstein’s lawyers to avoid that result.”
Bingo. However disappointing, inadequate or even weak-kneed the punishment may look in retrospect, nothing in the record even slightly suggests prosecutors were anything but hostile to Mr. Epstein and eager to extract the strongest realistic sanction. The Herald itself only began metronomically referring to the outcome as a corrupt “sweetheart deal” in 2017 when Mr. Acosta became associated with the Trump administration.
Notice something else: Between 2005 and 2009, when the case was unfolding and making news in South Florida and around world, the Herald produced a single item about Mr. Epstein’s travails, according to the Factiva database. It was buried in a news roundup and portrayed the matter as a simple prostitution case. It didn’t mention underage girls or Mr. Epstein’s status as a crony of Bill Clinton.
I guess this was some kind of sweetheart treatment.
In January 1999, Robert Clarence Potts III was sentenced to life in prison. He was 28, and had been convicted of drug and weapons charges. The federal judge sentencing him seemed to express some regret at the gravity of the penalty. But under the law at the time, Mr. Potts faced a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without release because of the type of offenses and his two previous convictions for drug and other offenses.Rosenberg was Judge Paine’s law clerk! She goes on to explain her decision:
“You are facing a very tough sentence here, and it is very regrettable that you are,” the judge, James C. Paine of the United States District Court of the Southern District of Florida, told him. The judge added that “we are governed by the law and the guidelines and we are going to have to go by those.” And the law and sentencing guidelines meant “a term of life imprisonment,” he explained.
To that, Mr. Potts responded, “Sir, there is not much I can say.” But it was what he did afterward that ultimately made the difference.
On Friday, Mr. Potts, now 49, is scheduled to be released from prison after more than 20 years — a turn of events made possible by the First Step Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Trump last year. Among other things, the law expanded early-release programs, modified sentencing laws and allowed defendants like Mr. Potts to seek a reduction in their sentence, a step toward correcting the country’s history of disproportionate sentences.
Mr. Potts had served over 20 years in a high-security federal penitentiary when the First Step Act became law last December. The First Step Act made the Fair Sentencing Act — signed by President Barack Obama in 2010 to reduce the disparity in sentencing for powder cocaine and crack cocaine offenses — applicable to past cases. The First Step Act also allows a defendant like Mr. Potts to seek a sentence reduction even when the original sentence was for life. The law provides wide discretion to the court to determine whether to reduce a sentence and by how much.
At his sentence reduction hearing, Mr. Potts had much more to say than he did back in 1999. Before me, he was remorseful, dignified and hopeful. He was proud of all that he had accomplished in over two decades in prison — proud of the courses he took in personal growth, responsible thinking, legal research and software, proud of his participation in nearly every health, nutrition and fitness class available. Perhaps he derived his greatest pride from conquering a debilitating addiction and maintaining his sobriety. As his lawyer explained to me, sobriety is not a foregone conclusion in prison, where drugs are widely available.
I wanted to know how Mr. Potts had managed his life in prison. He told me, “A lot of times I felt like giving up, but I didn’t want to let my mom down, my family.”
He continued: “I kept myself away from a lot of people in prison. I wasn’t around the average people in prison. Prison is an awful place. You have all these different types of organizations and gangs and foolishness. That is not me, ma’am. I’m not like that.
“I made some bad decisions in my life," he added, “but I am not a bad person.”
The true marker of a person’s character is what he does when he thinks no one is watching. Because Mr. Potts was sentenced to life, no one had really been looking at what he had been doing. But his unwavering dedication to improve himself over the last two decades, despite his circumstances, convinced me that his hope in his own future wasn’t misplaced.
After a long hearing, I concluded that 20 years was more than sufficient as punishment for his past — and serious — crimes, and ordered his release. To help his transition, he will spend six months in a residential re-entry center .
I believe Mr. Potts’s story is one of redemption through self-improvement. His case speaks to the importance of criminal justice reforms such as the First Step and Fair Sentencing Acts. His story illuminates the human impact of such reforms and a person’s capacity for hope and redemption.
"Your honor this is the Southern District of New York," Rossmiller said, in what may be fairly read as a veiled dig at the Southern District of Florida.— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) July 15, 2019
Dear Florida Supreme Court: We need your help. Among other much simpler issues, this case presents a knotty and important state-law contract question that is more appropriately answered by you than by us. Accordingly, after clearing away some underbrush, we will respectfully certify to you the following question:
Is a contractual “exculpatory clause” that purports to insulate one of the signatories from “any … damages regardless of kind or type … whether in contract, tort (including negligence), or otherwise” enforceable? Or, alternatively, does the clause confer such sweeping immunity that it renders the entire contract in which it appears illusory? Or, finally, might the clause plausibly be construed so as to bar some but not all claims and thus save the contract from invalidation?Each possibility finds at least some support in Florida law, each comes with its own equitable pros and cons, and each has dramatically different implications for the case before us.
The late Justice Scalia often joked that he was “the darling” of the criminal defense bar and the “poster child” for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He was right. More than any other Justice on the Supreme Court with him, he ruled for criminal defendants on important cases dealing with the confrontation clause, sentencing issues, the right to a jury, and probable cause to name a few.
When Justice Gorsuch replaced Scalia, many feared that he would not be nearly as friendly to criminal defense issues. But Gorsuch has proved those critics wrong. Like Scalia, Justice Gorsuch may also get his own poster from NACDL. Some examples from this Term:
1. Haymond v. United States. Justice Gorsuch wrote the 5-4 majority opinion, which is joined by the 4 more liberal Justices, in favor of a defendant who was found guilty of possessing child pornography. The question for the Court was whether judges had the power to sentence defendants to additional an additional term of imprisonment without a jury finding beyond a reasonable doubt. Justice Gorsuch said no way: “Only a jury, acting on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, may take a person’s liberty.” There’s lots of other really good language in the opinion, explaining that the right to trial by jury, together with the right to vote, is “‘the heart and lungs, the mainspring and the center wheel’ of our liberties, without which ‘the body must die; the watch must run down; the government must become arbitrary.’” (Quoting letter from Clarendon to W. Pam (Jan. 27, 1766), in 1 papers of John Adams 169 (R. Taylor ed. 1977)). Great stuff.
Justice Gorsuch is far from perfect. He is pro-death penalty. He dissented in Flowers v. Mississippi, the case where the prosecutor illegally struck black jurors. These decisions have led some to rightfully criticize Gorsuch, like the well-respected Leah Litman in this piece. But Litman is wrong to minimize what Gorsuch has done, saying he only “sometime departs” from his conservative colleagues. The truth is that he’s been quite good for the rights of criminal defendants, as was his predecessor Justice Scalia. He doesn’t knee-jerk vote for the government like Justices Alito and Thomas. And as Litman rightfully points out, he even votes for criminal defendants when his more liberal colleagues (like Breyer) do not. Instead of criticizing Gorsuch for not doing the right thing on every single criminal justice issue, we should be optimistic that he will continue to channel Justice Scalia’s independent streak on these issues.
Only a jury, acting on proof beyond a reasonable doubt,may take a person’s liberty. That promise stands as one ofthe Constitution’s most vital protections against arbitrary government. Yet in this case a congressional statute compelled a federal judge to send a man to prison for aminimum of five years without empaneling a jury of hispeers or requiring the government to prove his guilt be-yond a reasonable doubt. As applied here, we do not hesitate to hold that the statute violates the Fifth and Sixth Amendments
Petitioner Hamid Rehaif will be among those who get a hearing on whether he actually knew he was out of immigration status. He had come to the United States on a student visa to study at a university in Florida, but he was academically dismissed. In informing him about his dismissal, the university’s email notified him that his immigration status would be terminated if he did not transfer to another school or leave the United States, neither of which he did. Instead, he stayed in Florida. During that stay, he went to a firing range, purchased ammunition and fired weapons. Hotel staff tipped off the FBI that Rehaif was engaging in suspicious behavior.
At the ensuing trial, the district court instructed the jury that it need not find that Rehaif knew he was out of immigration status, and the jury convicted. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed, noting substantial agreement among its fellow circuits that the term “knowingly” in 18 U.S.C. § 924(a)(2) applies to possession of the weapon, but not to the status category of the possessor.
Breyer’s majority opinion rejected that position. “In determining Congress’ intent, we start from a longstanding presumption, traceable to the common law, that Congress intends to require a defendant to possess a culpable mental state regarding ‘each of the statutory elements that criminalize otherwise innocent conduct,'” wrote Breyer. “Here we can find no convincing reason to depart from the ordinary presumption in favor of scienter [requirement of guilty mind].”
The phrase “otherwise innocent conduct” strongly echoed concerns voiced by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh at oral argument. They had noted that possession of a gun alone is not blameworthy and therefore that one’s membership in a prohibited status category is all that stands between innocent and criminal conduct under Section 922(g). If the status divides innocent from criminal conduct, then the defendant should have to know of that status in order to be convicted, they suggested. Along those lines, the majority opinion acknowledged that the statute’s “harsh” maximum punishment of 10 years played a role in its decision.
Now that the court has decided that knowledge of status is required for a conviction under Section 922(g), prosecutors must think about what kinds of tangible evidence can be used to show that state of mind, and those looking to challenge their convictions must scour their records to find some evidence casting doubt on the existence of such knowledge. These tasks are complicated greatly by the fact that there are nine different status categories. While reminding prosecutors that they may prove state of mind through circumstantial evidence, the majority refused to get too specific, saying, “We express no view … about what precisely the Government must prove to establish a defendant’s knowledge of status in respect to other Section 922(g) provisions not at issue here.”
However, the majority opinion did mention two hypothetical fact scenarios in which there could be reasonable doubt that the defendant knew his status. Echoing a remark by Justice Sonia Sotomayor at argument, the majority pointed out that a failure to require knowledge would criminalize firearm possession by “an alien who was brought to the United States unlawfully as a small child and was therefore unaware of his unlawful status.” The court made the same observation about “a person who was convicted of a prior crime but sentenced only to probation, who does not know that the crime is ‘punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.'” This would seem a particularly important scenario, given that the vast majority of convictions occur by plea bargain, where the lawyer, not the defendant, does the negotiating. Moreover, the average defendant’s curiosity only extends to the prosecutor’s actual offer, not to the theoretical maximum punishment that the prosecutor could have sought under the statute.
Aileen Cannon (AUSA, Fort Pierce)
John Couriel (former AUSA, partner at Kobre Kim)
David Leibowitz (former AUSA, general counsel Braman)
Migna Sanchez-Llorens (former AFPD, state judge, Miami)
Meenu Sasser (state judge, West Palm Beach)
Michael Sherwin (AUSA, Miami)
The potential payoff for her: From $1 million up to $10 million in bribes, according to her defense attorney, but with the downside that she might spend more time in prison herself if she was convicted.2. In other news, Rumpole covers Judge Altman's announcement that it is his policy to remand defendants at sentencing. Rumpole rightfully says that the better practice is to allow self-surrender.
The strange snitching twist came to light in a massive narcotics distribution case that has already seen nine of the 10 defendants plead guilty. Bravo and Belalcazar are cooperating with the feds after both pleaded guilty to conspiring to transport hundreds of kilos of cocaine into the United States — loads that were confiscated at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. They now face up to life in prison — though the scheme described in open court and court documents suggests they were angling for far more lenient punishment.
The payoff plan could now backfire on them: the sole defendant, Yina Maria Castaneda Benavidez, who was supposed to face trial alone on Friday, was clueless about their plot to bribe her, according to her lawyer, Erick Cruz. And her intention was to go to trial anyway to fight the trafficking-conspiracy charge, Cruz said.
“She had no idea that this was going on,” he told the Miami Herald after the federal court hearing. “It caught her and everybody else by by surprise.”
Cruz and his client, whose trial has now been postponed until September, said they learned about the alleged bribery plot from federal prosecutors. They recently found out about it from a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, who got a tip from a paralegal, who somehow picked up on the scheme at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami. That is where the two Colombian cooperating witnesses, Bravo and Belalcazar, are in custody — along with Castaneda.
The FDC, a towering concrete building that mainly holds defendants who are awaiting trial or have pleaded guilty with cooperation deals, is notorious for inmates swapping dirt on one another to gain some ground against a long sentence.
In a court filing, Cruz said the two Colombian witnesses in the drug-trafficking case discussed their planned testimony about his client with other FDC inmates, and that they agreed to deposit money in her commissary account for the rest of her incarceration if she went to trial, was convicted and they received a sentence reduction.
Cruz has asked U.S. District Judge Robert Scola to disallow their appearances as government witnesses because “their desperation” to obtain a sentence reduction by testifying against Castaneda “impairs” her due process rights.
“The court should sanction [Bravo] and [Belalcazar] by not permitting them to testify at [Castaneda’s] trial,” Cruz wrote in the court filing. “Their conspiracy to devise a scheme in which they would bribe [Castaneda] to go to trial so that they could testify against her and receive a sentence reduction is novel, even by South Florida standards.”
Initially, prosecutors Joseph Schuster and Brian Shack said they still wanted to use the two Colombians as cooperating witnesses against her, but Judge Scola warned them that it may not be possible under the circumstances.
“I don’t know how you can come to that conclusion,” the judge said, raising the obvious problem of the two witnesses’ credibility and integrity.
A judicial ruling this month that will stop questionable stem-cell treatments at a clinic in Florida is widely seen as a warning to a flourishing industry that has attracted huge numbers of patients, who pay thousands of dollars for unproven, risky procedures.
But with little regulatory oversight for the hundreds of clinics operating these lucrative businesses across the country, it’s too soon to tell how far the impact might reach.
The decision, by a federal court on June 3, empowered the Food and Drug Administration to stop U.S. Stem Cell, a private clinic in Sunrise, Fla., from injecting patients with an extract made from their own liposuctioned belly fat.
The clinic had claimed that the extract contained stem cells with healing and regenerative powers that could treat a range of illness and injuries, from back problems to Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, and heart and lung diseases.
But medical experts say there is no proof that these treatments work, and three patients, who each paid $5,000 to be treated at U.S. Stem Cell in 2015, went blind after the fat extracts were injected into their eyes to treat macular degeneration.
In granting the F.D.A.’s request for an injunction against the clinic, Judge Ursula Ungaro agreed with the agency that extracting stem cells from fat requires so much processing that it essentially transforms them into a drug. That alteration firmly places such treatments under the jurisdiction of the F.D.A., which has the authority to regulate drugs.
“There is a reasonable likelihood that the defendants will continue to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act,” the federal law that gives the F.D.A. its regulatory authority, Judge Ungaro wrote. She also noted that when the agency warned U.S. Stem Cell about unsafe practices at the clinic, the company responded not by correcting the problems, but by arguing that it was exempt from F.D.A. regulation.
In 1946, a crowd of people in Walton County, Georgia gathered as twoPolitico covers the en banc grant:
African American couples were dragged from a car and shot multiple times.1
Many consider this event, known as the Moore’s Ford Lynching, to be the last
mass lynching in American history. Racial tensions in Georgia were high. African
American citizens were allowed to vote in a Georgia Democratic Party primary for
the first time that year.2 The murders occurred shortly after the primary and
immediately garnered national media attention. National outrage, including
condemnation from then Special Counsel to the NAACP Thurgood Marshall,
ultimately led President Harry Truman to order an FBI investigation. In late 1946,
a district court judge in Georgia convened a grand jury. But after sixteen days of
witness testimony, no one was ever charged. The case remains unsolved.
Over seven decades later, Anthony Pitch, an author and historian, petitioned
the Middle District of Georgia for an order unsealing the grand jury transcripts.
The district court granted his request. The government now appeals, arguing the
district court abused its discretion in unsealing the transcripts. After careful review
and with the benefit of oral argument, we affirm.
A federal appeals court announced Tuesday that its full, 12-judge bench plans to revisit whether judges have the authority to disclose usually secret grand jury information in exceptional cases.
The Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said it plans to take up, en banc, a case involving a historian’s request for access to records of a federal grand jury investigation into the 1946 lynching of two African-American couples in Walton County, Ga.
Legal disputes about access to grand jury information are drawing unusual attention at the moment because of a standoff between the House Judiciary Committee and Attorney General Bill Barr over access to various materials related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe.
Part of that fight is a disagreement over whether lawmakers are entitled to see testimony and evidence that is typically kept secret because it was obtained by a grand jury.
The 11th Circuit’s brief order Tuesday wiped out the victory historian Anthony Pitch won in February, when a court panel voted 2-1, to uphold a lower-court order allowing disclosure of the records.
The Justice Department has steadfastly opposed disclosure in such cases, saying that judges can only permit release through six explicit exceptions to the grand jury secrecy rule. However, government lawyers did not seek en banc rehearing of the decision.
The court’s order Tuesday said an unidentified 11th Circuit judge acting on his or her own sought a vote on further review of the case. A majority of the court’s active judges agreed.
It’s unclear precisely what triggered the rehearing, but Pitch’s attorney, Joe Bell, told POLITICO he believes it may be some combination of factors including a heated dissent by a district court judge who sat on the 11th Circuit panel and a conflicting, 2-1 ruling issued in April by the D.C. Circuit on a similar case involving another author, Stuart McKeever. He has asked the full D.C. Circuit to rehear his case, and there was a sign last month that they might do so.
“I know it probably involves the McKeever decision and it might also be that everyone saw what’s going on with Mueller in Washington and they want to come out with some sort of united front,” Bell said.
Whatever the 11th Circuit ultimately does, it won’t iron out disagreements among courts on the issue.
Other appeals courts, including the New York-based 2nd Circuit and the Chicago-based 7th Circuit, have upheld judges’ right to release grand jury material sought by historians or in other circumstances not mentioned in the rule.
