Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Federal Judiciary Blogs -> Southern District of Florida

Federal Judiciary

: Southern District of Florida

Amici support Cuban 5

John Pacenti covers the amicus briefs filed in support of the Cuban 5:

Nobel laureates, scholars and international organizations have flooded the U.S. Supreme Court with legal briefs in support of five convicted Cuban spies, arguing the defendants were sandbagged from the start because the Miami trial took place in a city defined by decades of anti-Castro fervor.
A dozen amicus briefs focus mainly on U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard?s denial of a defense motion to move the trial 25 miles north to Fort Lauderdale.
Her refusal "guaranteed that jurors would be drawn from a cross-section of a community inflamed by passion, warped by prejudice, awed by violence and menaced by the virulence of public opinion," according to a petitions filed by the Civil Rights Clinic at Howard University School of Law in Washington.
The Howard brief has particularly offended the Cuban-American community, said Roland Sanchez-Medina, president of the Cuban American Bar Association. If the Supreme Court decides to hear the case, he said his organization would respond with an amicus brief of its own.
"They obvious did zero actual research to do with anything about the Cuban-American community," he said. "It?s unbelievably inflammatory, ignorant and completely baseless."

Supreme Court stud Tom Goldstein is heading up the Supreme Court litigation for the five:

Tom Goldstein of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, who is handling the Supreme Court appeal for the convicted spies, noted support for the defendants has come "from people from all over the world."
Judge Lenard ruled anti-Castro hostility related "to events other than the espionage activities in which defendants were allegedly involved," and any partiality could be vetted during jury selection.
"This was a serious injustice, and it sent all the wrong signals to the world about our commitment to a fair and impartial trial," Goldstein said.

Interesting article, but Pacenti should have given a little more pub to Richard Klugh, who has been guy writing the legal papers throughout these proceedings.

Full post as published by Southern District of Florida on March 19, 2009 (boomark / email).