How much time should Anthony Bosch get?

Apparently MLB thinks he should get a big reduction even though he damaged the sport.  From the Miami Herald:

As Bosch awaits sentencing in February, lawyers for Major League Baseball — whose operation he corrupted from his anti-aging clinic in Coral Gables — are pointedly telling prosecutors what a great help he has been in cleaning up the sport. In a letter, they likened Bosch to a onetime New York Mets batboy who got caught up in an earlier steroid scandal and received lenient treatment after cooperating with authorities. ...
A short sentence of one year — as opposed to three times that long — is possible for Bosch, 51, who pleaded guilty in October and is free on bail despite testing positive for cocaine use during court-ordered monitoring that began after he surrendered in August. Prosecutors have already agreed to recommend a sentence reduction in his plea deal, as long as Bosch, who is in a substance-abuse program, tells the truth.
Despite his tarnished reputation, Bosch began attracting support from MLB officials soon after the steroid scandal broke and the league sued him in 2013 — especially when the onetime anti-aging guru agreed that June to turn on his customers, including New York Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez.
Soon after, high-powered MLB lawyers, including former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, sought a meeting with the U.S. attorney in Miami to promote Bosch’s role as the league’s star witness against Rodriguez and the other ballplayers, according to newly disclosed court records. They were hoping to gain assurances from the U.S. attorney’s office that it would consider Bosch’s assistance to Major League Baseball.
The meeting was held in U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer’s office in September 2013. Mitchell, the former Democratic Senate majority leader, and two other league lawyers pitched him on Bosch’s contribution to MLB’s investigation of banned substance use. Members of Ferrer’s senior staff were also present.
In a follow-up letter, baseball’s lawyers thanked Ferrer for hosting the meeting, while stressing that Bosch’s assistance “was critical to MLB’s efforts to successfully sanction” the 14 players with lengthy suspensions, including Rodriguez.
MLB’s lead attorney, Charles Scheeler, with the Washington law firm, DLA Piper, highlighted Bosch’s “full cooperation” — including testifying against Rodriguez at an arbitration hearing in New York. He explained that, in exchange, the league agreed to inform authorities of his assistance.

Nice memorial for Judge and Mrs. Davis

There was a beautiful memorial for Judge Edward B. Davis and his wife Pat Davis at their old house in Miami over the weekend.  Lots of old law clerks, family, and friends attended.  Here's some pictures of the good judge and his lovely wife.  The second one is of Ron Rosengarten, Gary Dumas, Miriam Palahach, and Kevin Murray, his first law clerks and judicial assistant.  The judge kept pictures of his law clerks, which they are holding.

The pendulum is swinging

The Koch brothers are now fighting the prison problem in America.  Here's Charles Koch's piece in Politico: 

As Americans, we like to believe the rule of law in our country is respected and fairly applied, and that only those who commit crimes of fraud or violence are punished and imprisoned. But the reality is often different. It is surprisingly easy for otherwise law-abiding citizens to run afoul of the overwhelming number of federal and state criminal laws. This proliferation is sometimes referred to as “overcriminalization,” which affects us all but most profoundly harms our disadvantaged citizens. 
Overcriminalization has led to the mass incarceration of those ensnared by our criminal justice system, even though such imprisonment does not always enhance public safety. Indeed, more than half of federal inmates are nonviolent drug offenders. Enforcing so many victimless crimes inevitably leads to conflict between our citizens and law enforcement. As we have seen all too often, it can place our police officers in harm’s way, leading to tragic consequences for all involved.
How did we get in this situation? It began with well-intentioned lawmakers who went overboard trying to solve perceived or actual problems. Congress creates, on average, more than 50 new criminal laws each year. Over  time, this has translated into more than 4,500 federal criminal laws spread across 27,000 pages of the United States federal code. (This number does not include the thousands of criminal penalties in federal regulations.) As a result, the United States is the world’s largest jailer—first in the world for total number imprisoned and first among industrialized nations in the rate of incarceration. The United States represents about 5 percent of the world’s population but houses about 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

...Reversing overcriminalization and mass incarceration will improve societal well-being in many respects, most notably by decreasing poverty. Today, approximately 50 million people (about 14 percent of the population) are at or below the U.S. poverty rate. Fixing our criminal system could reduce the overall poverty rate as much as 30 percent, dramatically improving the quality of life throughout society—especially for the disadvantaged.

Meantime, in local news, Judge Darrin Gayles spoke to the Federal Bar Association today.  A nice turnout and a good talk about practice dos and don'ts in his courtroom.

Good luck to John Pacenti

John is leaving the Daily Business Review and headed back to the Palm Beach Post.  He's been a fantastic federal courts reporter and will be sorely missed. 

He is a graduate of the University of Arizona and has been a reporter since he was a sophomore in high school. He has worked as a sportswriter and a music critic but his forte has always been hard news. After working 10 years for the Associated Press in Phoenix and Miami as a newsman and a sportswriter, he went to work for the Palm Beach Post in 1999 covering civil and criminal justice, as well as sports news.

He started as the federal courts writer for the Daily Business Review in 2007 where he won awards for his coverage on crooked court-appointed trustees, pill mills, and police shootings. 

He should be particularly proud of his Justice Watch column, as well as coverage on prosecutorial misconduct and the Miccosukee litigation.

Same as it ever was?

Such a waste....

Let's see if 2015 is the year that judges really step up and start putting a check on the executive by making that chart curve back downwards.  Some are hoping that the 11th Circuit will start to change things with all of the new judges, but others are more realistic.  From the Daily Report:

... Obama's Eleventh Circuit nominees as a group do not appear to be particularly liberal—and, to the extent they lean left, they may be hamstrung by years of conservative precedent. Jill Pryor once sat on the ACLU of Georgia's legal committee, and Martin has spent considerable time penning dissents to conservative rulings since joining the court. But all of Obama's Eleventh Circuit nominees except Pryor have spent time as prosecutors, and she has spent the bulk of her career as a business litigator. Julie Carnes was appointed to the district court by George H. W. Bush and was selected for the Eleventh Circuit as part of a compromise package of federal court nominees agreed to by the White House and Georgia's senators.
Court watchers should learn more soon.
A group of doctors' request that the entire court examine a controversial, high-profile ruling on guns has been pending since August. A panel in that case rejected the doctors' First Amendment challenge to a Florida law that limits physicians' ability to talk to their patients about firearms.
The Eleventh Circuit is set to hear three cases en banc in February: two criminal cases and a civil case in which the court will revisit aspects of a panel decision that sided with plaintiffs who filed a Fourth Amendment lawsuit over a raid of a barber shop.
Also in February, a three-judge panel is scheduled to hear an Alabama-based, nonprofit Catholic television and radio network's challenge to the federal contraceptive mandate. Unlike the businesses that won their case before the Supreme Court in June, the religious nonprofit can opt out of providing contraceptive coverage, but it has argued that filling out the required form that would signal its third-party health insurance administrator to provide the coverage is itself a violation of the group's religious beliefs. The Eleventh Circuit recently granted oral argument in a similar case brought by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Savannah.
And, although the U.S. Supreme Court may get to the issue first, the Eleventh Circuit has in November and December received an avalanche of briefs from the parties and other interested groups in a case over Florida's ban on marriages by same-sex couples.

Or how about cleaning up the Department of Corrections?  Did you see the Herald article about the DOC forging a document regarding a criminal investigation?  This is scary:

The Florida Department of Corrections has opened a criminal investigation into whether a public record provided by the agency to the Miami Herald was forged.
The document was a form, purportedly filled out and signed by inmate Harold Hempstead, the whistle-blower who in March leaked details to the newspaper about a gruesome death at Dade Correctional Institution, where inmate Darren Rainey collapsed while locked in a brutally hot shower.
Hempstead’s information led the Herald to investigate the Rainey case as well as other suspicious deaths and possible corruption in the Florida Department of Corrections. By the end of 2014, DCI’s top administrators had been ousted, and the department’s secretary, Michael Crews, had retired.
Last year, in the course of the newspaper’s investigation, Hempstead signed a release giving the Herald blanket permission to obtain all his medical records, waiving the strict health information privacy law known as HIPPA.

The rule provides safeguards to protect the privacy of personal health information, and sets limits and conditions on what may be disclosed without patient authorization. Normally, the department heavily redacts its documents, citing the federal law, including details such as where a prisoner is found injured, beaten or dead, where they are transported after they are found and evidence discovered at the scene that the agency believes may reveal an inmate’s medical condition. Examples of redacted items might include descriptions of bloody clothing or, in the case of Rainey, the fact that pieces of skin had fallen off his body.
After Hempstead signed the waiver, a Department of Corrections spokesman informed the newspaper that he had withdrawn his permission to release his records uncensored. When the Herald questioned whether that was true, the spokesman supplied a document — seemingly not in Hempstead’s handwriting — that expressed his change of heart.
Since then, the inmate said, he has told two DOC investigators in two separate interviews that the second document is a fraud.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article5341200.html#storylink=cpy