Georgia Federal Criminal Lawyer Blog

Last week the Supreme Court decided District Attorney’s Office for the Third Judicial District v. Osborne in favor of the District Attorney’s Office. Although this was technically a civil case, it deals with federal constitutional criminal issues. Mr. Osborne was convicted of kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault in the early 1990s. An early type of DNA testing on the main evidence against him cleared other suspects, but could not narrow the perpetrator down to less than 5% of the population. Mr. Osborne sought access to the evidence now to subject it to a newer type of DNA test that can determine whether biological evidence matches an individual with near certainty.

The Court recognized the power of DNA testing in both exonerating wrongly convicted people and confirming the convictions of others. However, the Court’s “dilemma [was] how to harness DNA’s power to prove innocence without unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.” In a disappointing and surprising 5-4 decision, the Court rejected Osborne’s argument for a Due Process right to DNA evidence.

An insightful analysis of the case by a staff attorney for the Innocence Project is available at this post in the American Constitution Society Blog.

Information on the flaws in the criminal justice system that lead to wrongful convictions of innocent people is available at The Innocence Project’s website, along with information on individual cases. Cases here in Georgia are handled by the Georgia Innocence Project, with information on their website. The Osborne opinion is available here.

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Posted In: Appeals , Criminal Justice Issues , Federal Criminal Law News

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In this post last year, we discussed Yeager v. United States, a white collar federal criminal case on appeal to the Supreme Court. The case involved the prosecution wanting to re-try a defendant who had been acquitted on some counts, but the jury had remained undecided on other counts. Because those other counts relied on facts that the jury must have resolved in the defendant’s favor to acquit, the defense argued (and we agreed) that the doctrine of collateral estoppel precluded the prosecution from retrying the issue. The Supreme Court issued its opinion last week, agreeing with us.

We reviewed the facts and legal issues in Yeager in our previous post. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the acquitted counts meant that the jury found that Mr. Yeager did not have insider information. To prove the hung counts, the prosecution had to show that he had possessed insider information. The Fifth Circuit held that the inconsistency between the jury’s acquittals and hung counts justified a retrial. The Supreme Court declined to review the record to determine whether the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the fact issue was correctly decided, permitting the Fifth Circuit to revisit the issue. Instead, the Court resolved only the narrower legal question.

Justice Stevens wrote the opinion for the court. He focused on the rule in Ashe v. Swenson, a 1970 case that held that the Double Jeopardy Clause precludes the government from relitigating any issue that was necessarily decided by a jury’s acquittal in a prior trial. The government argued, as the Fifth Circuit had held, that the inconsistency between the jury’s decision in acquitting and indecision in the hung counts justified retrial, but the Supreme Court held that courts should scrutinize juries’ decisions, not failures to decide, in identifying what they necessarily determined at trial.

The Court's opinion is available here.

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Posted In: Appeals , Criminal Justice Issues , Federal Criminal Law News , White Collar Crime

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As we discussed in this post, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed to hear media mogul Conrad Black’s appeal regarding whether the honest services fraud statute applies in a purely private setting where the defendant’s conduct risks no foreseeable harm to the putative victims. We are very interested in the outcome of this case because it has the potential to change the law in the Eleventh Circuit (the court that hears federal criminal appeals from Georgia, Florida, and Alabama.) Unfortunately, we will have to wait a while. The appeal will not be heard until after the beginning of the Court’s new term this fall, likely as late as November or December.

As reported over at the SCOTUS Blog, Black has requested bail during the time his appeal is pending. He has served 15 months of a 78-month prison sentence and, if bail is denied, will have served about two years before the Justices decide his case. If his conviction is reversed, those are several months he cannot get back. His lawyers also argue that he should be released from prison in the meantime because his co-defendant, John Boultbee, has been released on a $500,000 bond and allowed to return to Canada to await the Supreme Court’s decision.

You can read Black’s application here.

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Last Tuesday, in Abuelhawa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that using a cell phone to make a misdemeanor purchase of drugs does not “facilitate” a felony drug distribution crime. The government charged Mr. Abuelhawa with six felony charges, one for each cell phone call, for facilitating the sale of drugs, although his two, first-time, small cocaine purchases qualified only as misdemeanors. Those charges resulted in a potential sentence of 24 years in federal prison, compared with a potential two-year sentence for two misdemeanors. Just for using a cell phone.

The government argued that Abuelhawa’s use of a phone to buy cocaine counted as “facilitation” because it made the drug dealer’s sale easier, hence violating a section of the Controlled Substances Act that makes it a felony “to use any communication facility in committing or in causing or facilitating” felony drug distribution. While at first glance, the common meaning of “facilitate” may give this impression, the result is absolutely absurd. And, as the Court points out, in any sale, the two parties have specific roles and “it would be odd to speak of one party as facilitating the conduct of the other.”

Justice Souter, in his opinion for the unanimous Court, was diplomatic in his criticism of the government’s inane argument. He called it “improbable” and “just too unlikely” because it “comes up short” and “does not follow.” The Court reasoned that the distinction Congress made in the Controlled Substances Act between distribution (a felony) and simple possession (a misdemeanor) makes it “impossible to believe that Congress intended ‘facilitating’ to cause that twelve-fold quantum leap in punishment for simple drug possessors.”

While we are still disappointed with the Court’s other criminal law decision last Tuesday, we at least take solace in that they recognized blatant government overreaching in this case.

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Posted In: Appeals , Drug Crimes , Federal Criminal Law News

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Eleventh Circuit case law, the controlling federal law here in Georgia, is at risk of changing next fall, when the Supreme Court will likely decide a criminal case and resolve a split among the circuit courts of appeals.

The mail fraud and wire fraud laws are the bread and butter for federal prosecutors bringing white collar cases. Each of these laws requires a scheme to defraud another person out of “money or property.” For many years, federal prosecutors successfully argued that the word “property” included the right to “honest services” from public employees (such as elected officials). In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled that the word “property” does not include “honest services,” but several months later Congress amended these statutes so as to include the concept of “honest services” within the universe of cases that can be prosecuted under the federal mail and wire fraud statutes. Specifically, Section 1346 of the Federal Criminal Code expands the definition of a “scheme or artifice to defraud” under the mail and wire fraud statutes to encompass schemes that “deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.”

Despite the background of this type of fraud, the concept of “honest services” has now been extended by federal prosecutors beyond situations where a public official may have engaged in fraud. Recently, federal prosecutors are bringing more and more cases against people who work for private companies, arguing that the employee breached his or her duty of rendering “honest services” to the employer.

Last Monday the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari in Black v. United States. The Court will decide whether this Section applies in a purely private setting where the defendant’s conduct did not risk any foreseeable harm to the putative victims.

The case involves media mogul Conrad Black, who built an international newspaper empire from a single Canadian newspaper, eventually owning hundreds of community newspapers, as well as several large newspapers, such as the Chicago Sun-Times and London’s Daily Telegraph. In the late 1990s, Black predicted the affect the internet would have on newspapers and suggested that the company sell most of its smaller newspapers. As a part of those deals, purchasers paid Black for covenants not to compete, which the government construed as a scheme to defraud the company’s shareholders, although the money from those deals would have been paid to a different company controlled by Black and his co-defendant, anyway. The trial court’s instructions permitted the jury to convict even if they found that the shareholders didn’t lose any money. Black was convicted. The Seventh Circuit upheld the conviction, even though the law in at least five other circuits would have required reversal.

In 1999, the Eleventh Circuit here in Atlanta decided United States v. DeVegter, requiring the government to prove that economic harm was at least reasonably foreseeable in a private “honest services” case such as this one. Without this rule, Black argued in his petition to the Supreme Court, “[t]he only obstacle to converting every violation of corporate governance or company rules into federal crimes would seem to be the moment-to-moment whims of federal prosecutors.” We hope that the Supreme Court, when it decides this case, agrees with the Eleventh Circuit.

The Court's docket for this case is available here.
The Seventh Circuit's opinion below is available here.
Mr. Black's petition for certiorari is available here.
The government's brief in opposition is available here.
Mr. Black's reply brief is available here.

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Posted In: Appeals , Federal Criminal Law News , Fraud , Public Corruption , White Collar Crime

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In a previous post we discussed the federal statutes on money laundering, why they can prove complicated for criminal defense lawyers in defending cases, and how much broader they are than most people think, affecting even white collar cases. Last week President Obama signed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009 (FERA) into law, expanding the money laundering statutes (and many fraud statutes) even further.

In our post linked above, we mentioned that used car dealerships are “financial institutions” under the federal criminal code’s definition, even though most people would never consider them to qualify as such. FERA expands the definition even further, including even businesses that are not directly regulated or insured by the federal government.

FERA also expands the money laundering statutes by reacting to a significant Supreme Court case that was decided last year. In United States v. Santos, the Court held that the word “proceeds” in the money laundering statutes referred only to profits obtained from illegal activity, rather than all money brought in, or the “gross receipts.” FERA overrules that part of the Court’s decision by defining “proceeds” as “any property derived from or obtained or retained, directly or indirectly, through some form of unlawful activity, including the gross receipts of such activity.”

FERA expands the government’s ability to prosecute fraud in a number of ways in addition to those enumerated above. Financially, it authorizes over $500 million in additional funding for the DOJ, SEC, USAO, FBI, U.S. Postal Inspector, and Secret Service. It also amends fraud statutes to punish significantly more broad behavior, enlarging the mortgage applications statute, major fraud statute, and securities statute, and significantly expanding the civil, but punitive, False Claims Act. FERA will have an important impact on white collar criminal law.

Professor Pogdor gives a more detailed analysis of FERA’s impact on the money laundering provisions over at the White Collar Crime Prof Blog.

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Posted In: Federal Criminal Law News , Fraud , White Collar Crime

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Yesterday the Supreme Court eliminated a federal protection of criminal defendants’ right to counsel. Criminal defendants here in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as the rest of the country, now may be interrogated by police even after they secure representation by defense lawyers, if they don’t specifically request the lawyers’ presence or if they are not in police custody.

In yesterday’s Montejo v. Louisiana, the deeply divided Court overruled its 1986 opinion in Michigan v. Jackson, which prohibited police from initiating interrogation of a criminal defendant once he or she had invoked the right to counsel at an arraignment or similar proceeding. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, reasoned that the rule in Jackson was unworkable because some states appoint public defenders without any request from the defendant, whereas other states require defendants to formally request counsel. That discrepancy led to different treatment of defendants based on only geography. Scalia went on to explain that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, which Jackson protected, is sufficiently guarded by the Fifth Amendment right to counsel rules proscribed in Miranda v. Arizona, Edwards v. Arizona, and Minnick v. Mississippi.

Frankly, we disagree. The Fifth Amendment protections are limited to only custodial interrogations, so they do not apply to any defendants who are not in custody or who are interacting with police in a non-interrogation situation, such as a line-up. They are significantly narrower protections than Jackson provided. In addition, the whole point of getting a lawyer is that he or she can evaluate the situation and provide advice to the defendant during a very stressful time. Simply Mirandizing a person who has been formally charged and who has already obtained counsel is not sufficient, particularly if that person has not yet had a chance to even meet his or her lawyer, as was the case in Montejo.

We are very disappointed by this decision.

The Court's opinion can be found here.

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Because our offices are in Atlanta, our firm primarily handles federal criminal cases in Georgia. However, we also have experience in Florida, as well as Alabama. Two of us have lived and worked in Florida and spent a lot of time driving on I-95, where the events relevant to this case occurred. The majority supports heads-I-win, tails-you-lose government evidence and justifies its decision with facts that, viewed by anyone who has spent any time in Florida, demonstrate racial profiling.

The case is United States v. Bautista-Silva. In March 2008, a Border Patrol agent was parked in a marked car at a rest stop along I-95 in Orlando, Florida, watching the southbound traffic. He saw a Chevy Suburban with California plates with two Hispanic men in the front seat and four more passengers in the back. As it drove past the rest area, it passed a pickup truck pulling a flat trailer. At this point the agent decided that this was an alien smuggling case and took off to catch the SUV. He had to drive 90 miles per hour to catch up. When he finally caught up, the driver slowed down to let him pass. None of the passengers made eye contact, even when the agent waved at them. That is when he pulled them over.

The United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida held that the agent lacked reasonable suspicion to stop the vehicle and granted the defendant’s motion to suppress all statements and evidence obtained as a result of the stop. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, holding that the agent had acted based upon specific and articulable facts that, under the totality of the circumstances, created a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity. Judge Pryor wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judge Farris from the Ninth Circuit, and Judge Barkett dissented.

The “specific and articulable” facts were:

1. The vehicle was an SUV;
2. The six passengers were Hispanic males;
3. The vehicle was registered in California;
4. They traveled south on I-95;
5. They passed by a pick-up truck pulling a flat trailer;
6. The defendant may have accelerated, then slowed down when the marked car caught up; and
7. The passengers refused to look at the agent.

Judge Pryor ignored the usual rule that appellate courts construe the facts in the light most favorable to the party who prevailed in the court below (in this case, the defendant.) Instead, he focused on the agent’s testimony that smugglers often use large vehicles to transport illegal aliens, California is a known staging area for human smuggling, and the passengers were nervously avoiding his attention. The judge also said that southbound I-95 is a route known to be used by smugglers to transport aliens to South Florida and characterized the defendant’s driving as an attempt to hide behind the flat trailer, then evade the agent by driving erratically.

The district court judge in Florida and Judge Barkett, who has spent most of her life living in Florida, viewed most of the facts as neutral and too commonplace to lend any meaningful weight in a totality of the circumstances analysis. Our firm’s former Florida residents agree. SUVs are too popular, I-95 is too crowded, and tourism is too large a sector of Florida’s economy for those facts to support reasonable suspicion, even when added together. In addition, the District Court found no evidence that smugglers use I-95 disproportionately and there was no evidence that the defendant had even seen the agent’s car when passing the trailer.

And, of course, the occupants were Hispanic. Did I mention this case took place in Florida? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 20 percent of Florida’s population was of Hispanic or Latino origin in 2007. They were headed toward Miami-Dade County, where 62 percent of the population was of Hispanic or Latino origin in 2007.

In weighing the occupants’ “suspicious” behavior, the Court majority supported the common heads-I-win, tails-you-lose government approach to evidence. The defendant “hid” behind the flat trailer, which, by the way, was not an eighteen-wheeler or other object that could actually hide a Suburban from view. He also “evaded” the agent, staying on the road despite an available exit and driving with the flow of traffic. He drove “erratically” by slowing down when approached by a marked car. The passengers were “nervous” because they didn’t look at the agent (although, in our experience, agents tend to claim that looking at them is suspicious behavior, too.)

The Border Patrol agent saw Hispanic men in an SUV and had a hunch they may be illegal immigrants. Because a hunch isn’t legally sufficient, he had to come up with specific, articulable facts to support his decision to pull them over. We are disappointed that the majority’s zeal for helping the police seems to have led to a ruling that allows law enforcement officials to engage in racial profiling.

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On Monday the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Flores-Figueroa v. United States, resolving a split in the circuits in favor of criminal defendants. The Court held that a federal aggravated identity theft statute requires the government to prove that the defendant knew that the means of identification that he or she used, transferred, or possessed actually belonged to another person. This decision overrules a prior decision by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears appeals from federal cases in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama.

The statute is 18 U.S.C. § 1028A, entitled “Aggravated Identity Theft,” which provides, in pertinent part:
Whoever, during and in relation to any felony violation enumerated in [§ 1028A(c)], knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person shall, in addition to the punishment provided for such felony, be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 2 years.

The analysis of the statute involved its syntax – the sentence diagrams of grade school. The basic sentence that the Court analyzed was “Whoever knowingly uses identification of another.” In this sentence, “whoever” is the subject, “uses” is a transitive verb, and “identification” is the direct object. “Of another” is a prepositional phrase modifying the direct object. The dispute boiled down to whether the adverb “knowingly” modified the entire predicate, including the propositional phrase. The government argued, and the Eleventh Circuit held in United States v. Hurtado, that the knowledge requirement in the statute did not extend to the phrase “of another person.” The Supreme Court disagreed “as a matter of ordinary English grammar.”

Justice Breyer, writing for the majority, first pointed out that it would be nonsensical to claim that “knowingly” modified only the verb, penalizing someone who uses “a something, but does not know, at the very least, that the ‘something’ (perhaps inside a box) is a ‘means of identification.’” Rather, “knowingly” must modify both the verb and the direct object.

The government argued that “knowingly” applies to all but the last three words, which are the propositional phrase modifying the direct object. The Court explained, though, that “[i]n ordinary English, where a transitive verb has an object, listeners in most contexts assume that an adverb (such as knowingly) that modifies the transitive verb tells the listener how the subject performed the entire action, including the object as set forth in the sentence.” In this statute, the object was set forth as modified by the prepositional phrase. The opinion included several examples of sentences with a similar structure in which a listener would assume “knowingly” modified both the verb and the direct object, but could not come up with any sentences that would lead the hearer to believe that the adverb modifies only a transitive verb without the full object.

Following its syntactic analysis, the Court emphasized its consistency with how courts ordinarily interpret statutes, saying, “courts ordinarily read a phrase in a criminal statute that introduces the elements of a crime with the word “knowingly” as applying that word to each element.” Criminal defense attorneys can use this reasoning to renew challenges to other statutes in which mens rea has not been applied to all elements, including statutes involving minors and aliens ineligible to enter the country. This potential for new challenges makes this decision extremely important.

The Court also rejected the government’s legislative history argument and practicality of enforcement concerns.

The opinion in Flores-Figueroa is available here.

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We first discussed Dean v. United States in December, when the Supreme Court agreed to review the Eleventh Circuit’s opinion of the federal case. During a robbery of a bank in Rome, Georgia in 2004, Christopher Michael Dean accidentally fired his gun while taking money from a teller drawer. No one was injured.

The Eleventh Circuit, here in Atlanta, Georgia, upheld Dean’s eighteen-year sentence, which included a ten-year minimum sentence for firing the gun. We hoped that the Supreme Court would overturn this decision, because such significant criminal liability should never be imposed without criminal intent OR injury.

In the last couple of weeks, the Supreme Court has guarded our 4th Amendment rights against unlawful searches and protected us from secret detention and government overreaching. This week, however, the Court ended its short streak with Dean. The Court held that a ten-year mandatory minimum sentence applies if a gun is discharged during a violent or drug trafficking crime, even if the gun is fired entirely by accident. This disregard for the most basic element of criminal liability, mens rea, is extraordinarily disappointing.

The Supreme Court's opinion is available here.

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In 1996, in United States v. Mejia, the Eleventh Circuit federal appeals court in Atlanta, Georgia, held that a court order granting a criminal defendant’s motion for additional time to file pretrial motions tolled the Speedy Trial clock for the duration of the extension of time. Last July, the Eight Circuit agreed with the Eleventh Circuit and five others in United States v. Bloate. However, two circuit courts of appeals, the Fourth and the Sixth, have held the opposite. Due to this split, the Supreme Court of the United States has granted certiorari in Bloate. We hope the justices of the Court agree with the Fourth and Sixth Circuits when it hears arguments in the fall.

The federal Speedy Trial Act requires that a criminal defendant be tried within 70 days of whichever is later: the indictment or the defendant’s first appearance in court. In calculating the 70-day period, the Act excludes “delay resulting from other proceedings concerning the defendant, including but not limited to… delay resulting from any pretrial motion, from the filing of the motion through the conclusion of the hearing on, or other prompt disposition of, such motion.” Rather than the time between filing and disposition of motions, Bloate and Mejia have dealt with the time defendants request for preparing motions, prior to filing.

The government and the majority of circuit courts have argued that such time should be excluded from the 70-day period because that time is “delay resulting from other proceedings concerning the defendant.” They say that the phrase “including but not limited to” in the Speedy Trial Act indicates that the specifically enumerated delays are only examples, rather than an exhaustive list. The Fourth and Sixth Circuits point out, though, that the Congressional decision to specifically address a time period involving pre-trial motions, but to limit it to the time between filing and disposition, strongly indicates that Congress did not intend to exclude the preparation time from the Speedy Trial Act.

One particularly disconcerting aspect of Mejia did not factor into the Bloate decision, but we hope that the Supreme Court takes notice of the issue. The district court judge in Mejia granted an indefinite extension of time, allowing for filing of pre-trial motions until fifteen days prior to trial, rather than extending the deadline a certain number of days. Trial did not begin for another ten months in that case. The opinion does not reveal when additional motions were filed, if any, and whether any non-excludable delays accounted for any part of that ten-month period. Furthermore, in this multi-defendant case, the request for extension of time by only one defendant resulted in an extreme excludable delay for all of the codefendants.

The Eleventh Circuit placed the burden on the defendant, suggesting he limit his request for extra time to a definite period, choose not to request an extension at all, or object to an open-ended extension. Just three years later, though, in United States v. Williams, the Eleventh Circuit decided a similar question regarding a court’s sua sponte grant of addition time for filing motions, and stated, “[W]e believe that the burden should not be on the defendant to take affirmative steps to keep the speedy-trial clock running.” Even failing to consider the affect one defendant’s actions can have on all of his codefendants, such a view of the defendant’s burden is a fundamental principle of criminal law.

The United States Supreme Court must not address the issue of defendants’ requests for additional time without taking into consideration whether the court limits the extension to a definite time period. An indefinite period until only days before trial allows courts to vitiate the Speedy Trial Act altogether. We most hope, of course, the Supreme Court renders this point moot by agreeing that extensions granted for filing pre-trial motions are not excludable for purposes of calculating time under the Speedy Trial Act.

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In a potentially huge decision for criminal law in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, the Eleventh Circuit federal appeals court in Atlanta held that twenty-one days was an unreasonably long time for law enforcement to wait before obtaining a search warrant after seizing a man’s computer hard drive. Because the circumstances of this case, United States v. Mitchell, failed to justify the three-week delay, the trial court should have suppressed the evidence discovered on the hard drive.

The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable seizures both guards us against unreasonable arrests and protects our possessory interests in personal property. Even with probable cause to seize property, the duration of the seizure pending the issuance of a search warrant must still be reasonable. Courts determine reasonableness by weighing the government interests against private interests. This rule ensures the prompt return of property, should a search reveal no incriminating evidence.

In Mitchell, the Court acknowledged the substantial possessory interest people have in their computers’ hard drives. Computers are heavily relied upon for both personal and business uses, storing information including financial information, passwords, photos, e-mails, and countless other items. The Court called the hard-drive “the digital equivalent of its owner’s home, capable of holding a universe of private information.”

On the other hand, in this case, the government’s justification for the delay was less than compelling. Although the eventual search warrant application contained only three pages of original content, the hard-drive was detained for three weeks due to an agent’s attendance at a two-week training program. The agent “didn’t see any urgency” in obtaining the warrant because of the defendant’s admission that the hard drive contained contraband. The Court noted that another agent could have been assigned the task and that the defendant’s admission could have been wrong.

The Court emphasized that this rule depends on all of the circumstances of the case. The opinion noted situations in which the Court would be sympathetic to delays, such as where resources of law enforcement are overwhelmed. However, this case will potentially impact future cases involving seizure of computers, due to the importance (rightfully) placed on the private interests in such property.

The full opinion is available here.

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Posted In: Appeals , Criminal Justice Issues , Federal Criminal Law News , Internet Crimes

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