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Friday's notes

School's back Monday. To get you in the mood, here's a clip from Back to School:

The DBR reports that the mold lawsuit filed by Ted Klein's family has been dismissed by Judge Story. Apparently, you can only get $1,000 under the Federal Employees Compensation Act when death results from on-duty injuries of a federal employee. Readers, can this law be constitutional? That seems insane to me.

The UBS case keeps going and going and going. This time a banker and a lawyer have been indicted. Via Curt Anderson:

A banker and a lawyer from Switzerland were indicted Thursday on fraud charges for allegedly helping rich Americans evade taxes by hiding assets in Swiss banks, including UBS AG and a smaller Zurich-based institution.

Among the allegations in court documents against banker Hansruedi Schumacher, 51, and 42-year-old attorney Matthias Rickenbach is that they told a New York businessman they paid an unnamed Swiss government official a $45,000 bribe for information on whether the businessman's account would be revealed to U.S. investigators.

Schumacher and Rickenbach each face a single charge of conspiring to defraud the U.S., which carries a potential five-year prison sentence. Prosecutors said both men remain in Switzerland, and it wasn't immediately clear if they had U.S. lawyers to represent them.

The indictment comes one day after the Swiss and U.S. governments unveiled an agreement in which UBS will divulge names of some 4,450 wealthy Americans suspected of dodging taxes through secret bank accounts. Many of those people, and the bankers and attorneys who advised them, could also face criminal charges.

And from the last post, we're debating Plaxico Burress' two year sentence in the comments. Go post your thoughts.

Full post as published by Southern District of Florida on August 21, 2009 (boomark / email).