Should jurors have a say in sentencing defendants?

I think the answer should definitely be yes. Check out what this federal judge did. I love it:

A federal judge in Cleveland sentenced a Dalton man convicted of child pornography charges Tuesday to five years in prison, a move that frustrated prosecutors who pushed for four times that length based, at least in part, on a recommendation from the U.S. probation office.

A jury convicted Ryan Collins in October of one count possessing, distributing and receiving child pornography and one count possession of child pornography. Police found more than 1,500 files on his computer, and he was charged with distributing because he used peer-to-peer file sharing programs.

Under federal law, a judge can sentence a defendant to up to 20 years in prison if he or she is found guilty of child porn distribution. On Tuesday, during Collins' sentencing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan asked U.S. District Judge James Gwin to give the maximum sentence for the charge.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Probation and Pretrial Services said a guideline sentence for Collins, who is 32 and has no criminal history, would be between about 21 and 27 years in federal prison. While higher than the maximum sentence, the office's calculation accounted for several factors in Collins' case -- including the age of the victims and not taking responsibility for his actions.

But Gwin handed down a five-year sentence to Collins, the minimum allowable sentence for a distribution charge.

The judge said that after Collins' trial, he polled jurors on what they thought was an appropriate sentence. The average recommendation was 14 months, Gwin said.

In addition to citing the juror's various jobs and where they lived, Gwin said the poll "does reflect how off the mark the federal sentencing guidelines are." He later added that the case was not worse than most of the child pornography cases that he sees and that five years "is a significant sentence, especially for somebody who has not offended in the past."

Sullivan objected to the sentence, saying it is based on an "impermissible" survey. He also argued before the sentence was issued that 20 years was justified because prosecutors did not show the jury each one of the images found on Collins' computer.

Why not find out what jurors think of what a reasonable sentence is?

You know you've made it when Jon Stewart makes fun of you

Forward to the 4:45 mark to see Mark Eiglarsh.

In other news, we may be getting close to impeachment proceedings for Judge Fuller:

The House committee responsible for judicial impeachments has asked for a budget increase in case it needs to initiate proceedings against U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller of Alabama, who has been charged with battery.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said this week that the committee may need the extra money to establish an impeachment task force, hire lawyers and conduct an investigation.

Although impeaching Fuller is only a possibility — his colleagues on the federal bench could decide not to recommend that option, or Fuller could resign — the budget request signals Congress is taking steps to prepare for what historically has been a rare but lengthy process.

“We are closely monitoring the recent arrest and ongoing prosecution” of Fuller, Goodlatte told the House Administration Committee on Wednesday.

Joining Goodlatte in presenting the budget request was the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan.

Fuller, a federal judge in Montgomery since 2002, was charged with misdemeanor battery after an August incident involving his then-wife in an Atlanta hotel room. If he successfully completes a pretrial diversion program of domestic violence counseling and drug and alcohol screenings, his criminal record will be wiped clean.

A five-member panel of federal judges is investigating to decide whether further disciplinary action is needed. If Fuller’s colleagues recommend he be impeached, the process would start at the House Judiciary Committee.

Has the Supreme Court tipped its hand on gay marriage?

Yes, according to Adam Liptak:

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday not to delay same-sex marriage in Alabama offered the strongest signal yet that gay rights advocates are likely to prevail in coming months in their decades-long quest to establish a nationwide constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The court's decision came with a blistering dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas, who criticized his fellow justices for looking “the other way” as another federal court pushes aside state laws, rather than taking the customary course of leaving the laws in place until the court addresses larger constitutional issues.

Since October, when the Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from rulings allowing same-sex marriages in five states, it has denied requests to stay orders requiring other states to let gay and lesbian couples marry. Largely as a consequence of the court’s inaction, the number of states with same-sex marriage expanded to 37 from 19, along with the District of Columbia, in just four months.

Last month, the court agreed to hear four same-sex marriage cases. They will be argued in April and probably decided in late June.

In dissenting from the unsigned order in the Alabama case on Monday, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, suggested that the court was poised to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, a question the court ducked in a pair of decisions in 2013.

Justice Thomas accused the majority of an “indecorous” and “cavalier” attitude in refusing to maintain the status quo in Alabama at least until the Supreme Court issues its decision in the four pending cases.

The oldest trick in the book...

The prisoners' we'll-give-you-booze-and-handcuff-you trick worked on these Brazilian prison guards!  From CNN:

Two women, dressed in skimpy, "sexy" police officer costumes, allegedly showed up at a prison in Brazil's interior Mato Grosso state on Thursday, according to local media reports.

The women talked guards into letting them inside and seduced them, spiking their drinks in the process, according to reports.

What happened next is what one might expect when strangers in lingerie appear unannounced at your work place: the guards were found the next morning, naked and handcuffed with little recollection of the night before.

And 26 prisoners had escaped from the prison, located in Nova Mutum, a small city near Cuiaba.

A spokesman for the Justice Secretariat of Mato Grosso, which oversees prisons, confirmed to CNN that officials found bottles of spiked whiskey and a pair of provocative, police-themed costumes next to the handcuffed guards, who were passed out.

"We assume that is what the women were wearing when they seduced the guards," spokesman Willian Fidelis said.

In other news, Alcee Hastings just crushed this dude from Texas:

Big federal bar shindig tonight

It's the 34th annual federal judicial reception.  Click here to get your tickets. 

I wonder if the judges like going to this thing or whether they dread it....

Hell hath no fury....

Congrats to Marc Caputo on his new gig at Politico. His parting piece with the Herald is fittingly on Ana Alliegro here:

David Rivera’s former girlfriend repeatedly told a federal grand jury that the ex-congressman was the mastermind behind a complicated campaign finance scheme that landed her and another in prison.

Nearly two dozen times, Ana Alliegro says, she testified that Rivera supplied more than $81,000 used in the crime, that he plotted the cover-up and he then helped her twice escape to a getaway in Nicaragua.

Yet she’s angry that Rivera has yet to be indicted, despite her hour-long Dec. 18 testimony and a mountain of evidence: corroborating witnesses, a trove of emails, a handwritten note from Rivera and even fingerprints. Also, a federal judge last year demanded that Rivera be named in open court.

“Are politicians above the law? I don’t get it,” Alliegro told the Miami Herald in an interview. Rivera, who has long maintained his innocence, couldn’t be reached.

Should the Yankees trade A-Rod?

Justice Sotomayor wouldn't say... but she answered lots of other questions yesterday in Palm Beach:

Being the first Hispanic justice of the U.S. Supreme Court isn’t the only characteristic that sets Sonia Sotomayor apart from her colleagues, the 60-year-old native New Yorker told a capacity crowd at the Palm Beach County Convention Center on Monday.

The most obvious differences are entertainment choices. “My colleagues all love the opera,” she said. “I like jazz and dance.”

But, she said, the key distinctions run far deeper.

“I come from a background they don’t,” she said. “It’s not just dancing salsa but a little bit from the passion of my personality.”

That passionate personality, which she said prompted Justice Antonin Scalia to dub her a “bulldog,” stems from her hard-scrabble life growing up in housing projects in the South Bronx as the daughter of Puerto Rican parents. While she got her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her law degree from Yale Law School, her Ivy League education came from scholarships, not birthright

She recalled cockroaches scurrying across the floor of her family’s “tenement” and mice nestled in boots kept in the bathroom on winter days. “You change, yes, but you don’t become completely someone else,” she said. “You carry with you that background.”

The luncheon speech, sponsored by the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches and the county bar association, attracted a record-breaking crowd of more than 1,200 people.

Shunning a podium, Sotomayor walked among the dozens of tables in the cavernous ballroom, offering her thoughts about TVs in the courtroom, judicial activism and even Billy Joel.

Happy Groundhog Day

Somehow it's already February...

Interesting story last week about Judge Rakoff. He got annoyed and resigned from a forensic panel he was on because DOJ was dictating what evidence would get disclosed to the defense. But DOJ has backed off and Rakoff is back. From the Washington Post:

A federal judge Friday returned to a presidential commission on forensic science after the U.S. Justice Department reversed a decision to bar the panel from discussing changes that would give criminal defendants more information about forensic evidence before their trials, a federal official said.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York had resigned in protest Wednesday from the Obama administration panel, accusing the department of placing “strategic advantage [for prosecutors] over a search for the truth.”

However, Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates invited Rakoff to return, saying she had not been aware the commission had worked openly on its plans for nearly a year.

Yates told the National Commission on Forensic Science that “it seemed only fair” that it “make its determination as to what information should be provided to the Attorney General.”

“This is obviously a critically important issue to the Department,” Yates said. “We take very seriously our obligation to ensure that defendants receive a fair trial.”

A Justice Department official said the initial decision that pretrial evidence discovery rules were beyond the commission’s scope was made by Yates’s predecessor, James Cole, before his departure Jan. 8. The official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, added that Yates may not agree with the panel’s suggestions.

Rakoff, the commission’s only federal judge, thanked Yates and said he looks forward to a discussion “on the merits.”

Good for Judge Rakoff.

Here in the SDFLA, we have a visitor from the High Court. Justice Sotomayor is speaking in WPB:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor will be at the Palm Beach County Convention Center today, speaking at a luncheon gathering of the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches and the county Bar Association.

With 1,250 tickets sold, the event is sold out.