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Quick hits

1. At the 59th Annual Green Eyeshade awards Jay Weaver won first prize in the category of Courts and the Law Reporting for his medicare series. Carol Rosenberg (also from the Herald) got second prize for her Gitmo coverage. Green Eyeshade? Well, it's the major journalism society... Congrats to Jay and Carol.

2. "The One Hundred" is reuniting (it's a non-partisan group established in 1994 which brought prominent speakers to South Florida). On August 28th for The One Hundred's first event of 2009, the speaker will be John Conyers, Jr. (D-Michigan). Conyers heads the House Judiciary Committee which oversees the Justice Department, the Federal Judiciary, the FBI and other important Federal departments. He is also the second highest ranking Congressman. This will be Chairman Conyer's second visit to South Florida to speak to The One Hundred. The luncheon will be at The Four Seasons Hotel on Brickell Avenue in Miami. RSVP here.

3. A bunch of people are emailing me about prosecutors leaving the office, like James Kukios, Matt Axelrod, and David Weinstein. Good luck to the departing AUSAs. Anyone else leaving?

4. The government made the right call not retrying Helio Castroneves on the hung count. According to SCOTUSBlog: "In a[] major ruling on criminal law, available here, the Court, dividing 6-3, decided that if a jury finds an individual not guilty on some counts, but can?t agree on the others, prosecutors may not try that individual again on the ?hung? counts if they had a common element with those on which the jury acquitted. The ruling came in a case growing out of the Enron Corp. scandal ? Yeager v. U.S. (08-67). Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. UPDATE: The charges against F. Scott Yeager on which the jury could not reach a verdict were insider trading and money laundering. He was convicted on none of the charges against him. He sought to bar retrial on the ?hung? charges, but that challenge failed in lower courts. While the Supreme Court ruled that he could not be retried on those charges if a jury verdict on other charges had resolved an essential element of those crimes, the Court did not decide that issue itself, treating it as a factual question. It said that the government could raise in the lower courts its claim that the jury did not actually resolve that factual issue. The Fifth Circuit Court may revisit the issue, the Court said. END OF UPDATE."

4. Rumpole was cited in Judge Gold's order in the Ranck case and he's all excited that I went over to state court this morning. (Rumpole, the escalators were all working.)

Full post as published by Southern District of Florida on June 18, 2009 (boomark / email).