For as long as we can remember, the word on the street has always been that cops cannot lie. So if you’re doing a drug deal with an undercover cop, and you ask him point blank if he’s a police officer, then he has to tell you the truth. He...
So Jacki called the cops on her man. She didn’t mean for him to go to jail, really. But it was a stressful situation, and this was the best way she could think of to get back at him. It felt great, and having the cops on her side — having...
“Nathan, when you become mayor, I’m gonna be the first volunteer for your security detail.” This was a detective speaking, back when we were an ADA in the Manhattan DA’s office. My office, as usual, had about five cops in it. I liked this detective, and asked how come he...
Extortion is a kind of threat. A threat that’s so bad, it’s criminal. For a threat to be criminal extortion, it needs to be of a kind to make someone do something against his will, that’s adverse to his own interests. Threatening to kill a child if the parents...
What’s with all the lawyers getting arrested these days, being charged with financial frauds, Ponzi schemes and the like? Is this a new trend? It sure seems like one.
The latest news is the announcement about an hour ago that the SDNY is charging one Kenneth Starr (no, not that one, this one), money manager for a bunch of celebrities, with yet another Ponzi scheme, funnelling $30 million of investors’ money into his own pockets. He’s a lawyer in New York. (You can read the complaint here.)
Then there’s the former law firm partner Michael Margulies, charged the other day with embezzling $2 million from his firm and clients in Minneapolis over the past 16 years. Coincidentally-named lawyer James Margulies of Cleveland was charged the other day in a $60 million stock swindle. A couple of weeks ago, two lawyers were charged with a mortgage-rescue fraud involving stripping $3 million in equity. A lawyer went to prison a little before that for rigging tax-lien auctions.
That’s just a handful of headlines from this month alone. But it’s been going on for several months now. We’ve been noticing lawyers getting charged with increasing frequency ever since last July when Marc Dreier got sentenced to 20 years for hedge fund swindles totaling God knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars. It really kicked into high gear, however, in December, after Scott Rothstein was arrested for a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme. And now there are several cases being announced every month.
What’s going on here?
Sure, these kinds of schemes tend to get noticed all at once, when the economy goes south, and the market’s gains no longer mask the fraud. So we’re not wondering why all of a sudden there’s a bunch of financial-fraud arrests. Our question is how come so many of these cases involve lawyers.
Has the profession changed? Is it something new about how lawyers are getting more involved as investment managers and financial advisors? Or is there a new focus by law enforcement? We really don’t know.
But it sure looks like something’s going on out there. What do you think?
There’s a great post today on the New York Criminal Defense blog, explaining the history and proper use of the Bill of Particulars in NY criminal practice. Our readers are encouraged to check it out here.
This has long been a pet peeve of ours. An astounding number of prosecutors just don’t get the concept of a Bill of Particulars in this state. And far too few defense attorneys and judges hold the People to their obligations here.
Which is bizarre, because it’s really quite simple. All the Bill needs to do is specify what facts the People intend to prove which make out the elements of the crimes charged in the indictment, without explaining how the People intend to prove those facts.
For example, a buy-and-bust with stash and cash might have a Bill that states, at such-and-such time and place, “the defendant handed to an undercover police officer two bags containing crack cocaine in exchange for money. Twenty-four bags containing crack cocaine were recovered from the ground where the defendant threw them.” That’s all that’s needed. No mention is required of how the People will prove the stuff is crack, or anything about the money that was recovered, or anything else.
And yet prosecutors keep doing it wrong. We routinely get Bills of Particular that contain nothing more than bare conclusions of law, such as “the defendant sold crack cocaine to a police officer and possessed crack cocaine with the intent to sell it.” Or worse than that, just a recitation of the time, date and location, and an assurance that the indictment contains all the information that is needed.
Failure to provide a sufficient Bill renders the indictment defective. We’re amazed that more defense counsel don’t pursue this aggressively, and educate their judges who may be a little complacent given the lack of rigor by many attorneys.
Once again, we highly recommend this article to our readers. It was written, by the way, by Jill Paperno of the Monroe County Public Defender’s office, so kudos to Jill.
Last night, we attended a domestic violence forum sponsored by the Children’s Aid Society here in Manhattan. We’ve been involved with the CAS for many years, and they do some pretty awesome things for kids in intense situations. And domestic violence is a deep and complex social issue we come across plenty. So we figured it might be worth checking out, and maybe come away with some new insights.
It was, and we did, but not in the way we’d expected. There was very little discussion of the causes of domestic violence, the various patterns of behavior of abusers and victims, what actions work to stop it and what doesn’t work, and challenges to be overcome in reducing the incidence of domestic violence. Those are sort of the kinds of topics we expected a domestic violence forum to get into, but unfortunately the talks were pretty much surface discussions of what the speakers do in their jobs, and the kinds of things they deal with.
That’s okay, we guess. The speakers were social workers, and most of the audience seemed to be social workers. So it’s probably nice that they got to hear what others in their field are seeing. But for anyone with a passing familiarity with domestic violence issues, there wasn’t much we’d consider enlightening.
Except for one thing. …
The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration wants Congress to change the Miranda rule, so that in terrorism cases law enforcement will be able to interrogate longer before having to give suspected terrorists their Miranda warnings.
This is stupid, and unnecessary.
The general idea is to expand the “public safety exception” to the rule. The way that exception works, cops don’t have to Mirandize someone when there’s an immediate danger, and they’re trying to get information so they can deal with it right away. The second the threat stops being imminent, the exception no longer applies.
Attorney General Eric Holder now says that this isn’t enough in terrorism cases, because it doesn’t give investigators enough leeway. Last week’s Times Square bombing suspect was questioned for three or four whole hours before being Mirandized, and last Christmas’ underwear bomber was questioned for (egads!) nearly fifty minutes before the warnings were given. And these delays, Holder says, are already “stretching the traditional limits of how long suspects may be questioned.”
The Obama administration wants to keep terrorism suspects in the civilian criminal justice system, rather than putting them in the military system or designating them as enemy combatants. The Miranda rule is a cornerstone of the civilian criminal justice system, precluding the use at trial of a defendant’s statements made in response to questioning while in custody, unless first informed of the right to remain silent and to a lawyer, and then waiving those rights before speaking. So if the administration is going to keep terrorists in the civilian system, but still wants to get useful intelligence, they’re going to need time to interrogate first before the defendant gets Mirandized and shuts up. That’s what Holder’s saying, anyway.
But that’s complete bullshit, and anyone with any actual experience in the criminal justice system knows it.
First of all, nobody — and we mean nobody — shuts up just because …
As everyone reading this is probably aware, last Monday the website Gizmodo announced an exclusive look at Apple’s iPhone 4, which hasn’t been officially released yet. In their post (here), they said “you are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It’s the real thing, and here are all the details.” The post was written by blogger Jason Chen, and featured video of him showing details of the phone, and a lot of photos.
As time went on (see all the posts here), it came out that Gizmodo had paid $5,000 for the phone. The guy they bought it from wasn’t the phone’s owner, but had merely found it in a beer garden back in March. An Apple employee had lost it there.
So, if they bought it from someone who wasn’t the owner, and they knew it was supposed to be a secret, did the folks at Gizmodo commit any crimes here?
Law enforcement got involved very fast. By Friday, law enforcement in San Mateo had gotten a search warrant (viewable here) to seize Jason Chen’s computers, disks, drives, and any records pertaining to the Apple prototype 4G iPhone.
The search warrant was executed that same day, and a bunch of computer stuff was seized (the inventory is also viewable here).
Yesterday, the chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County told the WSJ’s “Digits” blog (here) that nobody’s saying a crime happened or not. They’re still investigating.
Meanwhile, however, Gawker Media (the owner of Gizmodo) issued a letter on Saturday (viewable here) stating that “under both state and federal law, a search warrant may not be validly issued to confiscate the property of a journalist.”
In support of that statement, Gawker Media cited California Penal Code §1524(g) (viewable here), which prohibits search warrants for items described in Evidence Code §1070.
Evidence Code §1070 (here) says a judge can’t hold a journalist in contempt for refusing to disclose his sources, or for refusing to disclose unpublished information gotten while preparing a story.
So we have to ask, does Gawker Media know what it’s even talking about?
…
On Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a lengthy article on that city’s abysmal conviction rate for violent crimes. For every three violent-crime arrests in Philadelphia, only one results in a conviction. There are a lot of worse-sounding statistics in that article, but they’re completely meaningless, as they refer only to...
The Chief was at it again. Everyone had their theories. J.P. said the Chief had lost it, gone soft in the head. Nino thought he was just having fun. Sam didn’t say anything, so he was probably in on it. None of us thought it made any sense, though. Except...
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The LSAT is essentially the law school entrance exam in the United States. One’s score on that test is a big factor in determining which law school one will get to attend (if any). The law school one attends has an enormous influence on what sort of jobs will be...
We’ve asked it before, but what the heck is going on with some of these federal prosecutors nowadays? There was the whole Ted Stevens fiasco over the winter, when the feds actively withheld exculpatory evidence and witnesses in their rush to convict the former Senator. Then the 7th Circuit directed...
If you are charged with a crime, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Unlike civil lawsuits, which are merely about money, criminal prosecutions are the real deal. You can lose your liberty, rights, reputation, and opportunities down the road. You can lose your life, or a substantial part of it. So...
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