11th Circuit year in review

 I usually don't post events on the blog, but this looks like a cool one by ACS on March 10:

Event Details

A discussion about the Eleventh Circuit's jurisprudence in criminal cases over the last year, featuring:

Panel:
Andrew Adler, Appellate Attorney, Federal Public Defender's Office, Southern District of Florida
Tamara F. Lawson, Dean and Professor of Law, St. Thomas University College of Law, Miami
Hon. Kathleen Williams, U.S. District Judge, Southern District of Florida
Emily Smachetti, Executive Assistant United States Attorney and Co-Chief, Appellate Division, U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of Florida

Moderated by:
Michael Caruso, Federal Public Defender, Southern District of Florida

"Senators, it’s time to add some 305 to the U.S. Supreme Court"

 That's the title of my op-ed in the Miami Herald, urging Sens. Rubio and Scott to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.  Here's the intro:

No Floridian has ever been appointed to the Supreme Court. Even though Florida has the third most electoral votes in the country, we have been shut out on the highest court in the land. It’s time to change that. This is a wonderful opportunity for Florida’s two senators to get behind the first Florida-reared nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson. Miami is absolutely bursting with pride, and U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott should embrace this nominee.

Jackson went to Miami Palmetto High School, where she was a rock-star national debate champion. Her parents started their careers as public school teachers. While Jackson was in preschool, her father went to law school. She spoke glowingly about sitting next to him reading law-school text books while she was doing her preschool homework.

Ryon McCabe sworn in as your newest Magistrate Judge

 Congrats to Magistrate Judge McCabe, who was sworn in yesterday by Judge Marra.  

BRIAN HEBERLIG FOR ALI SADR

FOR THE DEFENSE SEASON 4, EPISODE 6

BRIAN HEBERLIG FOR ALI SADR

 

Season 5 of For the Defense continues today with Brian Heberlig for Ali Sadr, the big prosecutorial misconduct case in New York. You can check it out on all podcast platforms (including Apple, Spotify and Google. All other platforms can be accessed on this website.) 

We launched a few weeks ago with Bruce Rogow for 2 Live Crew and Luther Campbell and followed up with Mark Geragos for Susan McDougal, Juanita Brooks for John DeLorean, Gerry Goldstein for Richard Dexter (Deep Throat), and last week with Geoffrey Fieger for Dr. Jack Kevorikian.  

At the end of the season, I will post the Florida CLE code.   

We will have new episodes every other Tuesday.  Upcoming episodes include:

• John Gleeson (Holloway Project)
• Ed Shohat (Carlos Lehder)

Please send me your feedback -- and of course, subscribe, like and comment!  If you or a  friend would like to receive these updates, please have them sign up here. 

Thank you! --David

 

Hosted by David Oscar Markus and produced by rakontur

NYT covers Palmetto Debate and KBJ

 Patty Mazzei has the wonderful lookback at Palmetto* debate here:

Let Miami Palmetto Senior High School brag for a moment: It has a swoon-worthy alumni roster. The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, class of ’82. Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the United States surgeon general, class of ’94. And Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court, class of ’88.

Decades have passed since Judge Jackson, 51, was a stellar student at Palmetto, a large public school nestled among the palm trees of the South Florida suburbs. But the school held outsize importance in her life, thanks to a competitive speech and debate team led by a famed coach who molded her protégés into sharp-tongued speakers and quick critical thinkers.

“That was an experience that I can say without hesitation was the one activity that best prepared me for future success in law and in life,” Judge Jackson said at a lecture in 2017.

From the tightknit and wonky debate team emerged accomplished professionals who remain unusually close 30 years later. (Judge Jackson’s prom date? A guy who would become a United States attorney, the chief federal prosecutor in Miami.) Now the team offers a glimpse into how Judge Jackson’s early life led to a Supreme Court nomination — and how her success is inspiring a new generation of debaters to dream big.

***

The debaters’ résumés are impressive. Nathaniel Persily, a constitutional law professor at Stanford. Judge Laura Anne Stuzin of Florida’s 11th Judicial Circuit. Benjamin G. Greenberg, the prom date turned United States attorney, now in private practice.

“It’s like doctor, doctor, professor, professor, lawyer, lawyer, professor, judge, judge, doctor,” said Stephen F. Rosenthal, a Miami lawyer who has known Judge Jackson since junior high and counts her as one of his best friends. He met his future wife, Mindy Zane Rosenthal, a debater at Miami Beach Senior High, in a competition. (Then he went to Harvard.)

Last month, when Judge Jackson’s name floated to the top of most lists of candidates to replace the retiring Justice Stephen G. Breyer, even Palmetto debaters who were no longer in frequent touch began texting each other to gawk. Someone sent around a photo of the debate team from back in the day, and also a photo of Judge Jackson and Mr. Rosenthal from their senior yearbook.

*I went to Killian high school and we often traveled with the Palmetto team as we were a much smaller team. Killian debaters have turned out pretty good too! -- Just to name a few off the top of my head: Aya Gruber (HLS, law professor at U of Colorado); Jodi Mazer (Wash U; Special AUSA for EPA); David Gevertz (HLS; Partner at Baker Donelson).  Some other debaters from that era from other South Florida schools that jump to mind: Magistrate Judge Jackie Becerra, Brad Meltzer, Mindy Zane Rosenthal, Esther Feuer...  who am I forgetting?

Ketanji Brown Jackson to be SCOTUS nominee

Woohooo!

This is great news.

Miami Debate.

Palmetto High School.

First African American woman.

First former public defender.

And first Floridian!

This blog started back on July 2, 2005, arguing that it was time for President Bush to appoint a Floridian to the Court:

There has been a great deal of discussion about whom Bush should appoint. But perhaps an equally important question is where this jurist should come from. Florida is the best choice.
No Floridian has ever been appointed to the Supreme Court. True, 18 other states are also unrepresented, but Florida's population is more than three times the size of the next largest of the 18, Wisconsin. 

The current court is made up of justices from Arizona (Rehnquist and O'Connor), Illinois (Stevens), New York (Ginsburg), Massachusetts (Stephen Breyer), California (Anthony Kennedy), Georgia (Clarence Thomas), Virginia (Antonin Scalia) and New Hampshire (David Souter). Certainly there is a place for a Floridian. Consider the fact that we have produced some of the major cases to go before the court (Bush vs. Gore) and that we have more than 75,000 lawyers and judges to choose from. Only California (55), New York (31) and Texas (34) have more electoral votes than Florida (27).

17 years later, it's going to happen! The only member of the Court that's the same as the blog start is Thomas.  Crazy. 

Congrats to a wonderful person, Ketanji Brown Jackson.  She will make an excellent Supreme Court Justice.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Reverses Course on Turkey Point

 

By John R. Byrne

Looking for some light reading on a Friday?  Check out the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's fifteen page order reversing its earlier decision allowing FPL to operate the nuclear reactors at Turkey Point until 2052 and 2053 respectively.  There's even a dissent!  In short, the Commission said that the Commission's staff didn't conduct a sufficient environmental analysis before extending the licenses.   The Herald covers the "unusual move" here.  The Commission said appeals from advocacy groups, including the Miami Waterkeeper, prompted its order.  So, at least for now, Turkey Point's "lease" expires in 2032/2033.

Caroline Heck Miller retires

 Jay Weaver has the details here:

A couple of years before The Washington Post exposed the Watergate scandal, University of Chicago intern Caroline Heck worked for a summer in the newspaper’s style section. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English, the aspiring journalist headed for Florida to start a job covering courts for the St. Petersburg Times.

“Every day was a theatrical production,” she recalled. But the legal stagecraft often fell short. “I found myself watching a trial, and I would watch the closing arguments and say to myself, ‘Sit down. I could do this better.’ ‘’

So Heck Miller left the newspaper business for Harvard Law School, then wound up at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami. Until retiring earlier this year, she worked for more than 40 years in a legal career highlighted by her role as the lead prosecutor in the Cuban Five spy case in 2001 — an internationally watched, politically charged throwback to the Cold War era

 Heck Miller came to be known as a trailblazer among prosecutors in the federal courthouse. She also was a “resident rabbi” offering sage advice on the law, ethics and trials to young prosecutors, and a polished writer who did all of her own pleadings and appeals. “She was a role model for everybody” in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said retired Magistrate Judge William Turnoff, who in the 1980s was chief of the major crimes section while Heck Miller served as his deputy. “She and Pat Sullivan tried more huge, important federal cases than probably anyone in the history of the Department of Justice,” comparing her to a retired colleague known for taking on Miami’s most infamous criminals.

In other news, the feds tried to subpoena a sitting state judge to testify.  Judge Gayles said nope:

But after first expressing a “willingness” to testify, Pooler consulted with the Florida Attorney General Office, which advised her not to be a witness in the federal case, saying in a motion to quash the subpoena that she “no longer agrees to testify as to any aspect of this matter.” On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles granted the motion to quash the subpoena, saying Pooler was “excused from the subpoena” and that prosecutors can call other witnesses in her place. Afterwards, they decided to call the former assistant state attorney, Robert Guinn, who handled Hollie’s plea colloquy before Pooler in 2014. But Hollie’s assistant federal public defender objected to Guinn as a substitute witness, according to court papers. Gayles must still decide on whether to let Guinn testify. Prosecutors also tried to persuade Gayles to admit a letter that Hollie had written to the clerk of the Miami-Dade Circuit Court after he violated his five-year probation when he was arrested on the two false-statement gun-buying charges in 2019. Hollie asked the clerk to send him the special conditions of his probationary release for his “cases that I got a conviction four.” [sic] Gayles also rejected that request.