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The SDFLA Blog is dedicated to providing news and notes regarding federal practice in the Southern District of Florida. The New Times calls the blog "the definitive source on South Florida's federal court system." All tips on court happenings are welcome and will remain anonymous. Please email David Markus at dmarkus@markuslaw.com
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St. Thomas recently renamed its law school the Peter Fay School of Law.
A former clerk emailed me that he was the first person to master barefoot water skiing. In fact, he was inducted into the Rollins sports Hall of Fame for water skiing, basketball, and football.
He was known for his civility and wonderful demeanor. He will be missed.
Please feel free to use the comments to tell stories and remember Judge Fay.
UPDATE WITH COMMENTS:
Here's Judge Federico Moreno:
Pete Fay’s five decades as a magnificent judge is well
known. But his humility, faith and generosity with his time is his legacy. He
was a true American hero, who never forgot what it was like to be a trial
lawyer. FAM
When I started as an assistant federal public defender back in 1999, I was assigned to Judge Ungaro's courtroom (back in the Tower building) and tried many cases before her. She always cut through all of the nonsense and taught me (and the other lawyers in front of her) to focus on what mattered. She is extremely smart and has always been a force on the bench. Her independence is her legacy, along with the graciousness of her chambers staff, Kathryn and Bill.
It will be interesting to see the process for filling her seat, which now makes two openings here (the other is Judge Moreno's). I'm hearing lots of names including Melissa Damian Visconti, Michael Sherwin, Michael Caruso, David Leibowitz, Jackie Becerra, and others.
In any event, congrats to Judge Ungaro and thank you for the many years of service to the community!
We're back! Season 2 of For the Defense launches today with Alan Dershowitz, who will be discussing the O.J. Simpson trial. Here's a clip of Dersh answering whether the prosecution lost the trial or whether the defense won it. Season 2 will continue with new episodes each Tuesday featuring the following guests:
I always enjoy reading Clark Neily's posts at CATO. Here's an interesting one about what a Libertarian AG could accomplish under a Biden Administration:
Inauguration Week seems like an opportune time to think how much more just the Department of Justice could be if President Biden took the bold step of putting a libertarian in charge of it. As I've written before, our criminal justice system is fundamentally rotten — it punishes vast amounts of morally blameless conduct, uses coercion-fueled mass adjudication to perpetuate mass incarceration, and insists upon a policy of near-zero accountability for its own transgressions. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any American institution inflicts more injustice than our so-called criminal "justice" system.
One might argue that because the vast majority of criminal enforcement occurs at the state level there's not much point in focusing on the federal system. I disagree. The U.S. Department of Justice looms large over the entire criminal-justice landscape by establishing norms, setting examples, providing oversight, and offering — or withholding — financial incentives to other agencies and jurisdictions. For better or worse, DOJ represents a kind of industry gold standard for criminal justice. And that's disturbing because, as discussed below, many of DOJ's standard practices are astonishingly unjust.
DOJ is a sprawling, $30 billion-a-year agency that wears many hats. Accordingly, it would be impossible to provide a comprehensive list of proposed reforms in a single blog post. But one of the most consequential things DOJ does — and an area in particular need of fundamental reform — is the enforcement of federal criminal laws. On that front, a libertarian attorney general would be well-advised to address three specific issues: accountability, prosecutorial tactics, and institutional culture.
1. Accountability. The lack of accountability among federal prosecutors is simply astonishing. Perhaps the most stark — but by no means isolated — illustration is the Ted Stevens case, in which prosecutors systematically cheated their way through the prosecution of a sitting U.S. senator, got caught, and were subjected to no meaningful discipline of any kind....
2. Prosecutorial tactics. Many of the tactics used by DOJ prosecutors — especially to induce people to waive their constitutional right to a jury trial and plead guilty, which more than 90 percent of federal defendants end up doing—are simply shocking....
3. Institutional culture. A major part of the problem is that people who work within the criminal justice system come to accept as perfectly normal and unobjectionable the kinds of policies and tactics described above, such as letting misbehaving prosecutors off with a slap on the wrist (if that) and applying such extraordinary pressure on defendants to plead guilty that almost no one chooses to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to a trial anymore....
The bad news is that our criminal justice system is fundamentally broken and unjust. The good news is that criminal justice reform represents a vast orchard of low-hanging fruit—policies that could be adopted overnight and would ameliorate some of the system's worst pathologies and realign many of its most perverse incentives.
Maybe putting someone whose core value is liberty in charge of an agency whose core mission is depriving people of it isn't such a crazy idea after all.