Federal Judiciary

We're second...

I demand a recount.

Well, we're trying to be first, with 41 arrests today. Here's the Herald coverage of all the mortgage fraud stuff going on.

So, will UBS settle? Trial is "looming" Monday. Judge Gold will have one last status conference this Friday.

BLT has a number of interesting posts, including this one on 11th Circuit nominee Beverly Martin. Looks like she will be confirmed...

Effective closing or a lemon in the Representative Jefferson case? We'll find out shortly. Here's the BLT coverage:

Lemons have an odd way of sprouting in the legal lexicon. Lemon laws protect car buyers. The Lemon test helps govern the separation of church and state. And today, lawyers for ex-Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) introduced what might be called "the lemon defense."
In closing arguments this afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Washington defense attorney Robert Trout told the jury that the FBI had targeted Jefferson in a sting operation, in which the bureau tried to catch him paying bribe money to the vice president of Nigeria. But when the money turned up in Jefferson?s freezer instead of the vice president?s house, Trout said, investigators realized they had "a lemon of a case."
"They decided they wanted to make lemonade out of lemons," the Trout Cacheris name partner continued on. ?And before you can do that, you?ve got to squeeze a lot of lemons. And so they squeezed some lemons."
The "lemons" squeezed by the FBI, Trout said, were the witnesses who would eventually testify that they bribed Jefferson to use his congressional connections to set up business deals in Africa.

Full post as published by Southern District of Florida on July 30, 2009 (boomark / email).