Wednesday, November 03, 2010

When you have 5 minutes to kill...

Hat tip: AMM

"If Mr. Rothstein thinks setting up Mr. Settineri is going to get him a get-out-of-jail card, he's sadly mistaken.''

That was Jeff Weiner after Judge Cohen sentenced his client Roberto Settineri to four years (via the Miami Herald):


Defense attorney Jeffrey Weiner and federal prosecutors recommended that Settineri receive four years' imprisonment at his sentencing Wednesday morning in Fort Lauderdale.
The U.S. District Judge James Cohn called it a ``fair resolution.'' The maximum is five years.
In exchange for his guilty plea in August, Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Stone dropped the original conspiracy charges, which carried up to 20 years in prison.
After Settineri's sentencing, Weiner said that his client could actually be released from prison in about two years. Settineri received credit for eight months of detention since his arrest in March. The judge also allowed him to enter a 500-hour alcohol abuse program in prison, which, if completed, would cut an additional year off his sentence.
Weiner said that while his client said nothing at his sentencing, Settineri took full responsibility and apologized for his wrongdoing in a court filing.
``His life was fine until he made this terrible mistake in judgment,'' Weiner said. ``He thought he was helping a friend in need. He's embarrassed about it.''

"Some of the Grimm’s fairy tales are quite grim." -- Justice Scalia during oral argument yesterday

So were some of those election results...

Here's the NY Times article on the violent video game argument in the Supreme Court:

The law would impose $1,000 fines on stores that sell violent video games to people under 18. It defined violent games as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that is “patently offensive,” appeals to minors’ “deviant or morbid interests” and lacks “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
“What’s a deviant violent video game?” asked Justice
Antonin Scalia, who was the law’s most vocal opponent on Tuesday. “As opposed to what? A normal violent video game?”
“Some of the Grimm’s fairy tales are quite grim,” he added. “Are you going to ban them, too?”
Justice
Stephen G. Breyer took the other side. He said common sense should allow the government to help parents protect children from games that include depictions of “gratuitous, painful, excruciating, torturing violence upon small children and women.”

Scalia got the better of Alito in this exchange:

But Justice Scalia said there was nothing in the tradition of American free speech that would allow the government to ban depictions of violence. The thought, he said, would have been foreign to the drafters of the First Amendment, drawing a needling comment from Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the lone dissenter in the Stevens case.
“What Justice Scalia wants to know,” Justice Alito said, “is what James Madison thought about video games.”
“No,” Justice Scalia responded, “I want to know what James Madison thought about violence.”


And they better not ban Mortal Kombat!

Justice Elena Kagan, the court’s newest and youngest member, seemed to be the only justice with even a passing familiarity with the genre under review, even if it was secondhand.
“You think Mortal Kombat is prohibited by this statute?” she asked Mr. Morazzini. It is, she added, “an iconic game which I am sure half the clerks who work for us spent considerable time in their adolescence playing.”
Mr. Morazzini said the game was “a candidate” for government regulation.


There was another big oral argument yesterday -- US v. Skilling:

A three-judge appeals court panel grilled attorneys for former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and the government on Monday, trying to decide whether to throw out or order new trials on any of Skilling's 19 convictions.
His defense lawyer, Daniel Petrocelli, argued the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that the government was wrong to use a particular legal theory in charging Skilling with conspiracy means that charge and the remaining 18 should be thrown out.
The government contends that a rational jury would have convicted even without the faulty theory that he deprived Enron of his "honest services," because evidence overwhelmingly supported Skilling's guilt.
But the hearing, in which each side had 30 minutes to provide oral arguments, was more about the judges' questions than the lawyers' answers.
Judge Edward Prado asked if it would make more sense for the federal district court where Skilling was tried in 2006 to decide the issues raised by the Supreme Court decision.
Determining if the "honest services" theory tainted the other charges would involve digging into the voluminous details of the five-month trial, Prado said.
Petrocelli said nothing would prevent the appeals court from sending the issue to the trial judge, but that the question is one of law.
"The court isn't being asked to act as a 13th juror," or guess what the original jury was thinking, Petrocelli said. Rather it needs to look at the court record and determine if a "reasonable jury" could find Skilling not guilty based on the evidence.
"The record is filled with acquittal evidence," Petrocelli said.


You can access the audio of yesterday's Fifth Circuit oral argument via this link (53.7MB Windows Media audio file). Why don't we have that in the 11th Circuit?

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Monday, November 01, 2010

Monday

What's new on this rainy Monday? Well, the Supreme Court took a bunch of cases, including one concerning Miranda warnings and minors. In the District, Judge Middlebrooks and Judge Graham both started mortgage fraud trials this morning. A bunch of those cases are now starting to go and there have been a bunch of acquittals for straw buyers. What else?