Don't eat the Snickers!

I found this open letter to Blago, giving him advice regarding federal prison, pretty interesting.  Although Jeff Smith (a former state Senator from Missouri) only did a year and Blagojevich has 14, there are still some good nuggets:

1. As your grandma probably taught you, God gave you two ears, two eyes and one mouth — use them in proportion.


• When you get to prison, listen, watch and learn. You'll have a hundred questions on your first day and in one month you will know the answer to 90 of them without having to ask and risk looking stupid.

•Don't ever ask anybody about their crime. If they want to tell you what they did, fine. But you won't know if they're telling the truth. And if you ask and strike a nerve with someone, the result may not be pretty.

•Don't talk about how you got railroaded. So did everyone else.

•Don't ask anything about anyone's family; it will be a sore subject with many, especially those who have not seen or heard from their children or ex-wives in years.

•Don't ever talk about how much time you have. Someone else has more.


***
12 Don't eat the Snickers.
• You'll go through orientation. You will be shown a mandatory sexual assault prevention video featuring a guy warning you not to eat the Snickers bar that may be waiting for you on your bed in your cell. (The actor ate the one left under his pillow, unwittingly signaling the predator who left it for him that he was ready and willing.) All the guys watching the video will laugh. But take the video's message to heart: Don't accept sweets from anyone.

The Fairness in Disclosure of Evidence Act

On the day that the 514-page report detailing the prosecutorial misconduct in the Ted Stevens case, Senator Murkowski (R-Alaska) proposed legislation to reform Brady disclosure by federal prosecutors.  It is entirely non-controversial and has support of both Democrats and Republicans.  One problem -- DOJ will oppose the bill.  And for no good reason except that it doesn't want to have to turn over favorable information if its not material. 

Here's Sen. Murkowski explaining why the legislation is needed:

It is the solemn responsibility of federal prosecutors to secure justice -- not simply convictions. It is the responsibility of the government to prove an individual's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and if the government cannot, it is expected to voluntarily abandon the case. To keep Americans' faith in the system we must raise the standards for government prosecutors and cut the chances that we will see the same "hide the ball" tactics Sen. Stevens faced.

The Stevens case was not unique.

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/03/10/2364196/justice-not-convictions-more-important.html#storylink=cpy

*** 
Enough is enough.

When his conviction was overturned, Sen. Stevens said, "What some members of the prosecution team did nearly destroyed my faith." Ted Stevens was a life-long public servant. He and all Americans deserve to have full faith in the judicial system in this country.

We cannot allow the government to have a finger on the scales of justice. My bill will ensure that another legacy of the Alaskan of the 20th Century is fairness and justice for the centuries ahead.

Senator Murkowski is my new favorite Senator.

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/03/10/2364196/justice-not-convictions-more-important.html#storylink=cpy

Hoops Holiday

The best two sports days of the year are today and tomorrow with the first round of the tournament. Unless something big happens in the SDFLA, there won't be much blogging. Enjoy the tourney.

U.S. News Rankings out today

The Florida schools:


UF                  48
FSU                51
UM                 69
FIU                113
Stetson           119

Ave Maria     not ranked
Barry             not ranked
FAMU          not ranked
Fl. Coastal     not ranked
Nova             not ranked
St. Thomas    not ranked
Cooley          not ranked

Watch Roy Black live in trial

Here.

It's fantastic to watch and a good example of why trials should be televised.  The public can see what's going on and lawyers can learn from the proceedings. 

It's a DUI Manslaughter case.  Here are the details from the Palm Beach Post:

There were shots dropped into pints of Guinness and drinks with names like "Mind Eraser."
Traffic homicide prosecutor Ellen Roberts described each one in detail this morning, letting jurors that by the time International Polo Club founder John Goodman caused the crash that killed Scott Wilson, he'd had the equivalent of 16 to 18 drinks at a charity event and an impromptu after-party.
When Goodman's Bentley hit Wilson's car, Roberts said "it literally pushed the little Hyundai into the canal," and Wilson eventually drowned.
These were the first statements jurors heard today in the DUI manslaughter trial of Goodman, heir to a Texas heat and air conditioning fortune.
And as expected, Goodman's defense attorney Roy Black told jurors that Goodman's Bentley malfunctioned shortly before the crash, surging forward while Goodman frantically tried to stop it.
Black promised engineers would testify to prove this occurred, and Black said jurors will also hear evidence that Goodman left the crash scene to get help but was hampered because he had suffered some painful injuries – including a broken wrist, fractured sternum and an aggravation of a previous back injury.
That pained, confused journey took him to a sophisticated barn belonging to an acquaintance, Kris Kampsen, where he found what has been described as a "man cave."
"He sits down on the couch, he's hurting. This man is in pain and he sits down and right in front of him, there is this bar," Black told jurors. "He takes out one of the bottles and he swigs it down."
That's why, Black said, Goodman's blood alcohol content was at more than twice the level at which drivers are presumed impaired when his blood was drawn some three hours after the accident.
Black said that though Goodman had three drinks over the course of the night, witnesses will testify that he was lucid as he was leaving the Players Club Bar and restaurant, his last stop before the crash.

Robin Rosenbaum scheduled for vote...

...by the Judiciary Committee for this Thursday.

Spring Break!

What's going on in the District?  Any trials?  Or is most of Miami is in Aspen this week for spring break?

The NY Times has an op-ed saying that everyone should push for trial and that would crash the system.  

But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.

“The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. In other words: the system is rigged.

In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for nearly all crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws; the result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to prosecutors.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. 

***

On the phone, Susan said she knew exactly what was involved in asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial. “Believe me, I know. I’m asking what we can do. Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?”

The answer is yes. The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.”

Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency” fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass protest would force a public conversation that, to date, we have been content to avoid. 

This has been talked about for quite some time, but no one ever has the guts to do it....  It would be interesting...

Friday news and notes

Your pre-spring break reading list:

1.  The Federal Public Defenders Association strikes back against the TRAC report on sentencing, saying "TRAC’s analysis fails to meet minimal academic standards and should not be a basis for policy making."  For example: 

● The cases sentenced by the judges in the study are not similar.
○ The only similarity among the cases sentenced in each district is that prosecutors
categorized them as “drug,” “white collar,” etc. All other case differences are ignored.
Heroin or marijuana cases, involving 1 gram or 1 ton, are all called “similar” drug cases.
First-time offenders are lumped with lifetime criminals.
○ Academic researchers studying disparity use data from the U. S. Sentencing Commission
to categorize cases along dozens of different variables, but this data was not used in
TRAC’s analysis.

 2.  Justice Scalia spoke yesterday at Wesleyan.  Some highlights:

Near the end of the speech, some of the demonstrators dropped banners from the balcony railing. One read, “There can be no justice in the court of the conqueror.”

The justice looked up and read it and quipped, “Oh, that’s very persuasive.”
***
At the end of the speech, Scalia took questions from the audience. One person asked about the Bush-Gore case, where the Supreme Court had to determine the winner of the election.

“Get over it,” Scalia said of the controversy surrounding it, to laughter from the audience.

Scalia reminded the audience it was Gore who took the election to court, and the election was going to be decided in a court anyway—either the Florida Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It was a long time ago, people forget…It was a 7-2 decision. It wasn’t even close,” he said.

3.  Inmate can sue for having to wear pink underwear:

In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said a jury should consider whether Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's policy of requiring inmates to wear pink underclothes had led to the death, and questioned whether the policy was legal.
"Given the cultural context, it is a fair inference that the color is chosen to symbolize a loss of masculine identity and power, to stigmatize the male prisoners as feminine," Judge John Noonan said in the majority opinion. "... The dress-out in pink appears to be punishment without legal justification."

4.  The Constitution Project is calling for Brady Reform.  It's interesting to see the signatories, including many former U.S. Attorneys.  They say:

We have concluded that Brady violations, whether intentional or inadvertent, have occurred for too long and with sufficient frequency that Congress must act. Self-regulation by the DOJ has been tried and has failed. It is ultimately not a solution to the injustices that continue to occur. Nor is an amendment to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure a solution. Such a proposal has been considered at least twice by the Advisory Committee on the Rules of Criminal Procedure, only to be rejected by either the Advisory Committee or the full Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, at least partly in deference to the DOJ’s attempts to address the issue internally. But, again, DOJ’s own internal efforts have not remedied the problem.

5.  10 Years of Rakontur.  Very cool.  Check it out at the O Cinema March 26-30.

6.  Watch out what you say on Twitter and Facebook (and here on the blog).  You could be committing a crime (via NY Times):

Last month, at a Supreme Court argument over a federal law that makes it a crime to lie about military honors, Justice Elena Kagan asked about laws like the one that had ensnared Mr. Miller. “There are more of them than I thought that there would be,” she said, though she did not say which ones she had in mind.

It turns out there are at least 17 states that forbid some kinds of false campaign speech, according to a pending Supreme Court petition in a case involving a Minnesota law. The lower courts are split about whether such laws are constitutional.

At the argument last month, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who was defending the federal law banning lies about medals, said the broader state laws are harder to square with the First Amendment because they “are going to pose a particular risk of chill.”