Source: http://sdfla.blogspot.com/2016/07/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 11:46:59+00:00

Document:
She has the cover story in NACDL's The Champion this month. It's a primer on restitution, titled "Restitution in Federal White Collar Cases."
inmates' requests for authorization to file a second or successive habeas petition.
our view, any less wrong.
1. FNU is not the same as FIU. That was easy. But it took the 11th Circuit 50 pages. KMW affirmed.
The Florida Bar filed formal complaints against two Miami lawyers who represented the Miccosukee tribe, alleging they knowingly made false and frivolous claims against former counsel for the tribe.
The complaints against Bernardo Roman III ( read the Roman complaint here) and Jose "Pepe" Herrera ( read the Herrera complaint here) ask the Florida Supreme Court to consider disciplining the attorneys for pursuing meritless claims, withholding evidence and even making a false 911 call during litigation against Miami lawyers Guy Lewis and Michael Tein and their firm, Lewis Tein.
The Thursday filings are the latest development in a nasty saga that led to the tribe agreeing in May to pay $4 million to cover Lewis and Tein's attorney fees in three racketeering and malpractice lawsuits Roman pursued. The tribe cut ties with Roman last year.
"Each court that has examined this issue has determined that Roman's actions resulted from the bad blood, or personal animosity, held by Roman and the new tribal leadership against the former tribal administration and its associates, including Lewis and Tein," states one of the complaints filed by Florida Bar lawyer Jennifer Falcone in Miami.
Yet no other court of appeals appears to be engaging in this kind of case-by-case analysis. They’ve been approving the requests automatically and allowing a federal district court to sort out the details.
Judge Beverly Martin of the Eleventh Circuit issued an unusual and stirring opinion this week declaring that the process in her court wasn’t working.
Martin asserted that among the thousands of applications and hundreds of denials, her court has been making mistakes -- mistakes that, by their legal nature, can't be appealed. “A court of appeals is simply not equipped to construct a new basis for a prisoner’s old sentence in this way,” she wrote.
The upshot is that something very like a travesty of justice is happening in the Eleventh Circuit. And as you know if you’re still reading this, the issue is sufficiently technical that it’s hard to draw attention to the problem.
But real people are spending potentially many extra years in prison on the basis of an unconstitutional law. That’s wrong. In the spirit of Justice Scalia, the Eleventh Circuit should change course and start allowing district courts to review post-Johnson ACCA petitions the way the other circuits do.
Maj. Opn. at 8. Nothing.
Not sure what's going on over there other than a fire alarm went off and everyone is milling around outside. Will update if any further information becomes available.
Update (2pm) -- Apparently the King building has been evacuated as well.
Update 2 (2:40pm) -- back to business. The buildings have been reopened. The Atkins building was never evacuated.
As a former “Bachelorette” contestant, Garofola knows he has no problem scoring with women — he goes on up to five first dates a week, which he says usually include a drink or two and nothing beyond a goodnight smooch on the cheek. But in the past two months, he’s been feeling spent by the mating game.
Garofola meets most of the women he dates on Tinder, Bumble and the League. But while he claims he only swipes right on less than 10 percent of profiles, his good looks still net him more than 100 matches a week — and it’s tiring trying to keep up.
First, she gave the best speech of the convention.
Can't we all just hug it out?
Imagine a sentencing guideline that read, “A defendant is a career offender if ‘[p]uddles do not ask for why not? It is cheese! Breath and wind. It is cheese.’” Boston Legal, “Word Salad Days” (2006), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0770843 /quotes (last visited Apr. 28, 2016). Now imagine that based on the Guidelines range that that indecipherable language required, a district court sentenced a defendant to twice as much time as it otherwise would have. How could the sentencing court know that the guideline applied? How could the reviewing court know that the correct Guidelines calculation included an enhancement under that guideline? Surely doubling a defendant’s sentence based on nonsense would violate due process. But in United States v. Matchett, 802 F.3d 1185 (11th Cir. 2015), we allowed defendants to continue to be sentenced to much more severe sentences than they would otherwise receive, based on the residual clause of the career-offender guideline, a guideline that the Supreme Court has found hardly more scrutable than the hypothetical one above.
No doubt criminal defendants do not have a due-process right to a sentence within a particular Sentencing Guidelines range. But Congress can, and essentially has, required courts to begin the sentencing process by correctly calculating the Guidelines range. The question here is whether, when the Supreme Court strikes language from a statute because it is unconstitutionally vague language and that same language also appears in a guideline, we are constitutionally able to continue to apply that language in the sentencing process that Congress has mandated. The answer, unlike the challenged part of the career-offender guideline, is clear: we are not.
I concur in all but Section I.A of Judge Martin’s well-reasoned concurrence. I agree that the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. United States, 576 U.S. __, 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015), holding the Armed Career Criminal Act’s (“ACCA”) residual clause unconstitutionally vague renders the exact same language in the Sentencing Guidelines unconstitutional as well.
On the topic of this court’s singular approach, I add one more observation. Last month the Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case of a Texas prisoner named Duane Buck. See Buck v. Stephens, No. 15-8049, __ S. Ct. __, 2016 WL 531661 (U.S. June 6, 2016). The Court took the case even though the lower court ruled that Mr. Buck’s appeal was so meritless that he couldn’t even file it. Mr. Buck’s petition for certiorari asked: “did the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit impose an improper and unduly burdensome Certificate of Appealability (COA) standard?” Our treatment of applications for successive § 2255 motions may be even more troubling than the issue raised in Buck. Unlike for the denial of a COA, AEDPA provides that “denial of an authorization . . . to file a second or successive application shall not be appealable and shall not be the subject of a petition for rehearing or for a writ of certiorari.” 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(3)(E). This means no motion for reconsideration, no motion for en banc review, no appeal, and no petition for certiorari. The decisions we make in these cases are therefore, as a practical matter, not reviewable.
A month after AEDPA became law, the Supreme Court held that these “new restrictions on successive petitions . . . do not amount to a ‘suspension’ of the writ.” Felker v. Turpin, 518 U.S. 651, 664, 116 S. Ct. 2333, 2340 (1996). Three Justices filed a concurrence warning that “the question whether the statute exceeded Congress’s Exceptions Clause power” might need to be revisited “if the courts of appeals adopted divergent interpretations of the gatekeeper standard.” Id. at 667, 116 S. Ct. at 2342 (Souter, J., concurring). I hope someone better equipped than me will take this opportunity to look at whether the divergent views taken by this court require reexamination of this question asked by these Justices so soon after AEDPA was enacted. Twenty years later, I worry that our court’s harsh view of our § 2244(b) gatekeeping role brings us perilously close to a suspension of the writ.
last day of this year’s term, the Supreme Court accepted certiorari in Beckles v.
granting authorization to file second or successive § 2255 motions in more cases.
Court on appeal (and maybe even ultimately in the Supreme Court).
rights that the Constitution protects.
as our nation’s designated guardians, will be at the front.
Most of the criticism from these judges, I believe, is directed at Judge Hull, who continues to issue orders, like this one, denying successive petitions.
The greatest form of flattery?
The discarded logo was a sight to see. And now this. Fun times.
At least he got an hour for lunch.
That was fast: Kosher meals case decided two days after argument.
This appeal requires us to decide whether the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc et seq., prevents the Secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections from denying kosher meals to inmates whose sincere religious beliefs require them to keep kosher. After the United States sued the Secretary to compel the Department to provide kosher meals, but before the entry of an injunction, the Secretary voluntarily created a religious diet program. Even so, the Secretary continues to insist that the Department need not provide kosher meals because denying them is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest in containing costs. But the Secretary’s argument lacks any support in the record. We affirm the summary judgment for the United States and the permanent injunction requiring the Secretary to provide kosher meals to the inmates.
Johnny Marshall has already spent seventeen years in jail for a $261 robbery that he very well may not have committed. And after our decision today, he may spend the rest of his life there. But Marshall’s attorney almost certainly could have prevented Marshall’s conviction, had he done what any other competent attorney would have on this record: pursued a motion to suppress the illegally obtained sole eye-witness’s identification of Marshall, an identification that the same witness’s earlier description of Marshall squarely contradicted.
I write separately because I believe that Marshall was denied effective assistance of counsel, in violation of the Sixth Amendment. Nevertheless, despite the weak evidence underlying Marshall’s conviction and the substantial error his trial counsel made, I agree with the Majority’s ultimate conclusion that 28 U.S.C. § 2254 offers Marshall no relief. Whether because of § 2254’s strict statutory exhaustion requirements or its highly deferential standard of review of state-court decisions, we have no choice but to deny Marshall’s claim. At this point, any potential relief Marshall might obtain must come from the state, such as an act of clemency by the state’s executive branch.
Thin. That’s a generous way to describe the evidence against Marshall. The only evidence tying Marshall to the robbery consists of Geraldine Jenkins’s identification of him. But Jenkins—the Pizza Hut employee who was present during the robbery—identified Marshall within about an hour of providing a description of the robber that bore about as much resemblance to Marshall’s actual appearance as broccoli does to carrots. Both are in the same general category—men and vegetables, respectively—but that’s where the similarities end.
"You haven't litigated much against the State of Florida then."
Pryor: [to lawyer arguing for the prisoners] You should quit while you are ahead [and sit down with 5 minutes left during your argument].
Lawyer: I've never been in this position before.
Pryor: You haven't litigated much against the State of Florida then.
OUCH! Maybe that will change now that Florida has a new SG.
Wow, big opinion today by the 11th Circuit, reversing the B-girls convictions. The blog covered (and frequently criticized) the prosecution and lengthy trial, which involved bar girls getting guys drunk and running up tabs at bars. Welcome to Miami!
The 11th Circuit held that the court should have instructed the jury as follows: that they must acquit if they found that the defendants had tricked the victims into entering a transaction but nevertheless gave the victims exactly what they asked for and charged them exactly what they agreed to pay.
The panel was Ed Carnes, Martin and visiting district judge Amul Thapar (EDKY).
The appellate defense team included Howard Srebnick, Richard Klugh, Marcia Silvers, and John Bergendahl.
This is just some of the really fun stuff in the opinion. Check it out.
By definition, there is no such thing as a majority, much less a unanimous, concurrence. That essay is either the rationale for the holding or obiter dicta. Since we can assume that these judges know what a "concurrence" is, the question is, why deliberately mislabel this writing in a way guaranteed to draw maximal attention to it? The sub-text may be an awakening to the fact that the court has fetishized the superfluous and redundantly named "prior precedent" rule to the point where the first opinion on an issue is treated as legislation rather than as a precedent. The reach of a precedent in a common-law system is limited by the case's facts and the judges' analysis, subject to revision under different facts or a more complete analysis. Given that, what need is there for a "rule"? If the first panel is convincing, its opinion controls. Why should an unconvincing opinion control? The first-panel-makes-law rule is harmful to litigants. It encourages judges to overreach the facts and the law so as to "bind" the whole court (the way Matchett did). In that way, later litigants are "bound" by the first brief on an issue, even if it was not very well researched or presented. Hopefully, this writing is a sign that this insidious and unnecessary rule's days are numbered.
Although the mandatory Sentencing Guidelines operated to cabin the discretion of judges, just like sentencing statutes passed by Congress, a panel of our Court recently held that the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015), which struck down the residual clause of the Armed Career Criminal Act, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e), as unconstitutionally vague, does not apply to the identical residual clause of the mandatory career offender guideline, U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a)(2) (2003). See In re Griffin, No. 16-12012, __ F.3d __, 2016 WL 3002293 (11th Cir. May 25, 2016). The Griffin panel also concluded that, even if Johnson did apply to the residual clause of the mandatory career offender guideline, the Supreme Court’s decision in Welch v. United States, 136 S. Ct. 1257 (2016)—which held that Johnson was retroactive to cases on collateral review—did not make Johnson retroactive in cases involving challenges to the Sentencing Guidelines. Although we are bound by Griffin, we write separately to explain why we believe Griffin is deeply flawed and wrongly decided.
Lozman’s troubles began when Riviera Beach “arrested” his houseboat in April 2009 and later destroyed it. Lozman, a former Marine Corps officer, argued that the city couldn’t regulate his home as a maritime vessel.
His houseboat had been moored at the Riviera Beach marina after Hurricane Wilma destroyed his former marina in North Bay Village in 2005. The structure did not have an engine and was equipped to be connected to sewer lines on dry land.
In 2013, the Supreme Court, by a 7-2 vote, overturned an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, deciding that Riviera Beach didn’t have the jurisdiction to have his boat seized. He said he still hasn’t recovered his financial losses — including the cost of the boat — from the city, and hopes he will soon.
Justice Sotomayor went on to write eight dissents before the term ended last week. Read together, they are a remarkable body of work from an increasingly skeptical student of the criminal justice system, one who has concluded that it is clouded by arrogance and machismo and warped by bad faith and racism.
Only Justice Clarence Thomas wrote more dissents last term, but his agenda was different. Laconic on the bench, prolific on the page and varied in his interests, Justice Thomas is committed to understanding the Constitution as did the men who drafted and adopted it centuries ago.
Justice Sotomayor’s concerns are more contemporary and more focused. Her dissents this term came mostly in criminal cases, informed as much by events in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 as by those in Philadelphia in 1787.
Tomorrow the blog turns 11 years old, which is very old in blog years! It's been pretty cool covering the District ... we are at 3000 posts and counting.
Thanks to all of you for reading, sending me tips, and commenting.

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