SDFLA launches new website

Check it out here.

Make sure to look at it from your phone and your desktop as it has a mobile version.

After you take a look, then you can take this survey.

I think it's a big improvement.

State Court

So I don't know what Rumpole is always complaining about. I was in state court this morning. No lines. Nice Judge. I even found a meter... Then, back in the office by 10:15. All good.

Let's see what happened this weekend -- Scalia and Kagan go skeet shooting. Seriously:

According to two witnesses, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia took fellow Justice Elena Kagan out for a lesson in skeet shooting at his shooting club in Virginia last week.
The witnesses saw Scalia at the Fairfax Rod and Gun Club, where he is a member, around noon on Wednesday of last week. He was with a woman who was noticeably diminutive in height, like Kagan, who stands at about five feet three inches. The witnesses, who got a very close look at the pair, say that the woman was the newest Supreme Court Justice.
Scalia was bending down in order to teach Kagan how to hold the shotgun, the witnesses say, and the pair were shooting skeet.

Maureen Dowd on the Court: "Supremely Bad Judgment." The conclusion:

The 5-to-4 Citizens United decision last January gave corporations, foreign contributors, unions, Big Energy, Big Oil and superrich conservatives a green light to surreptitiously funnel in as much money as they want, whenever they want to elect or unelect candidates. As if that weren’t enough to breed corruption, Thomas was the only justice — in a rare case of detaching his hip from Antonin Scalia’s — to write a separate opinion calling for an end to donor disclosures.
In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court chose the Republican president. In Citizens United, the court may return Republicans to control of Congress. So much for conservatives’ professed disdain of judicial activism. And so much for the public’s long-held trust in the impartiality of the nation’s highest court.
Justice Stephen Breyer recently rejected the image of the high court as “nine junior varsity politicians.” But it’s even worse than that. The court has gone beyond mere politicization. Its liberals are moderate and reasonable, while the conservatives are dug in, guzzling Tea.
Thomas and Scalia have flouted ethics rules by attending seminars sponsored by Koch Industries, an energy and manufacturing conglomerate run by billionaire brothers that has donated more than $100 million to far-right causes.
Christine O’Donnell may not believe in the separation of church and state, but the Supreme Court does not believe in the separation of powers.
O.K., have a good day!

"Calling John Roberts"

That's the headline of Linda Greenhouse's article in the NYTimes, calling for Justice Roberts to issue a strong end-of-year report explaining that the Senate is imperiling the judicial branch with all of the vacancies (as Justice Rehnquist had done in the past). Here is the conclusion to the article:


Unlike the president’s State of the Union message, which is required by Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the annual report on the state of the judiciary is a modern tradition. It was begun just 40 years ago by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and carried on with enthusiasm by Chief Justice Rehnquist, who often used it for significant pronouncements on judicial policy.
Chief Justice Roberts has had a rather problematic relationship to the tradition during his five years in office. The focus of his first report, on Dec. 31, 2005, was judicial pay. Noting that federal judges’ earning power had eroded by 24 percent since 1969, he said that Congress’s failure to raise judicial salaries presented a “direct threat to judicial independence.” While in my view he was completely right on the merits of the issue, some members of Congress resented what they viewed as hyperbole from the new chief justice, and the public responded with a shrug. The much-deserved pay raise has yet to happen.
Then last year, Chief Justice Roberts went minimalist, so much so that it left many people scratching their heads. Here was his report, in full, minus the statistical appendix:

Chief Justice Warren Burger began the tradition of a yearly report on the federal judiciary in 1970, in remarks he presented to the American Bar Association. He instituted that practice to discuss the problems that federal courts face in administering justice. In the past few years, I have adhered to the tradition that Chief Justice Burger initiated and have provided my perspective on the most critical needs of the judiciary. Many of those needs remain to be addressed. This year, however, when the political branches are faced with so many difficult issues, and when so many of our fellow citizens have been touched by hardship, the public might welcome a year-end report limited to what is essential: The courts are operating soundly, and the nation’s dedicated federal judges are conscientiously discharging their duties. I am privileged and honored to be in a position to thank the judges and court staff throughout the land for their devoted service to the cause of justice.

Best wishes in the New Year.

Tony Mauro, a longtime observer of the court, responded on The Blog of Legal Times, “Imagine if the president, instead of giving a full State of the Union address, sent a note to Congress telling the legislative branch that life is good, all is O.K., and let’s catch up next year.”
I’m willing to assume that last year’s baffling report was the result of judicial modesty rather than an idea deficit. In any event, I look forward to waking up on New Year’s Day to this headline or its reasonable equivalent: “Senate Imperils Judicial System, Roberts Says.”

Why aren't more judges speaking out against the guidelines?

Here's an article about Judge John Gleeson's recent response to DOJ's criticism of fraud sentences:

A federal judge in Brooklyn has rebutted the criticism by a top Department of Justice official that many federal judges have "lost" their "moorings to the sentencing guidelines" in major fraud cases.
The attack on a "regime" of judges who impose fraud sentences "inconsistently and without regard to the federal sentencing guidelines" appeared in a letter sent in June by Jonathan J. Wroblewski, the director of the Office of Policy and Legislation to the chief of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Judge William K. Sessions III.
Last week, Eastern District Judge John Gleeson responded to Wroblewski's implication that, as Gleeson put it, fraud sentences "are inexplicably and unjustifiably all over the lot."
In a 16-page "statement of reasons" for a fraud sentence, Gleeson wrote that the discrepancies between guideline sentences and actual sentences is not evidence of the unmooring of judges, but rather indicative of the difficulty of capturing the nuances of a complex case in a list of guidelines.
The 539-page Sentencing Guidelines Manual is only one of eight factors that judges are statutorily required to consider at sentencing, Gleeson added.
He also noted that if judges had truly become unmoored from the guidelines, then prosecutors would appeal sentences more frequently -- only 18 of the 1,711 below-range fraud sentences issued last year were appealed.
"[I]n determining whether reforms are needed, and especially in determining whether the existing guideline should be burdened with even more adjustments, the Commission should examine whether our system already provides an adequate solution for the claimed 'unacceptable' outcomes the Department complains about," Gleeson wrote in United States v. Ovid, 09-CR-216. "I suggest that it does, in the form of appellate review, and for all of the handwringing in the DOJ Letter about unacceptable sentences, the Department for the most part has not even tried to avail itself of that solution."

Gleeson is no push over. He is a former federal prosecutor and the prosecutor who put away John Gotti. He's tough but he's known as fair and extremely smart. I'm hoping that, like Gleeson and others are doing, more and more judges will start to stand up to these draconian guidelines that have no relationship to the goals of sentencing.

Hat tip -- Sentencing Law and Policy

Domestic disputes resulting from marital infidelities and culminating in a thumb burn are appropriately handled by local law enforcement authorities.

That was Paul Clement to the Supreme Court in this fascinating case about the reach of the feds and whether the 10th Amendment could be a new weapon in the fight against the over-criminalization by the federal government. From the NY Times:

The Tea Party’s favorite part of the Constitution — the 10th Amendment, which limits federal power — arrived at the Supreme Court last week. In keeping with the spirit of the times, it came wrapped in the plot of a soap opera.

The amendment has played a starring role in challenges to the recent federal health care legislation. But the justices have not made the task of divining their own views particularly easy.

Their most recent consideration of where Congress’s constitutional power ends came in a case involving the civil commitment of sex offenders.

Now the court has decided to consider what to do about a woman hellbent on poisoning her best friend.

The woman, Carol A. Bond of Lansdale, Pa., was at first delighted to learn that her friend was pregnant. Ms. Bond’s mood darkened, though, when it emerged that her husband was the father. “I am going to make your life a living hell,” she said, according to her now-former friend, Myrlinda Haynes.

Ms. Bond, a microbiologist, certainly tried. On about two dozen occasions, she spread lethal chemicals on her friend’s car, mailbox and doorknob.

Ms. Haynes, who managed to escape serious injury, complained to the local police. They did not respond with particular vigor. After checking to see whether the white powder on her car was cocaine, they advised her to have it cleaned.

Federal postal inspectors were more helpful. They videotaped Ms. Bond stealing mail and putting poison in the muffler of Ms. Haynes’s car.

When it came time to charge Ms. Bond with a crime, federal prosecutors chose a novel theory. They indicted her not only for stealing mail, an obvious federal offense, but also for using unconventional weapons in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, a treaty aimed at terrorists and rogue states.

Had she been prosecuted in state court, Ms. Bond would most likely have faced a sentence of three months to two years, her lawyers say. In federal court, she got six years.

Ms. Bond’s argument on appeal was that Congress did not have the constitutional power to use a chemical weapons treaty to address a matter of a sort routinely handled by state authorities.

She relied on the 10th Amendment, the one so beloved by Tea Party activists. It says that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

Now on to the First Amendment (via ATL). Go to the 2:20 mark... It's too good to pass up: