The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

The Morning Wrap

Corporate Scorecard: The value of corporate transactions in 2012 was up in both mergers and acquisitions and capital markets work, The American Lawyer reports. For its annual Corporate Scorecard, the publication interviewed practitioners at a dozen firms about the deal environment in 2012 and their thoughts on 2013.

Texas Slayings: Texas authorities are investigating the slayings of a state prosecutor and his wife who were found dead on Saturday, The Dallas Morning News reports. The murders of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and Cynthia Woodward McLelland came less than two months after Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse was killed.

FBI Director: Lisa Monaco, who stepped down this month as the head of the U.S. Justice Department's National Security Division to become President Barack Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, is among the top contenders to replace FBI Director Robert Mueller when he leaves the bureau on September 4, The Washington Post reports.

The Morning Wrap

The dealmakers: The American Lawyer spotlights this year's Dealmakers of the Year. "In a shaky recovery, corporate lawyers played an even more crucial role than they did in boom times," the report says.

Off-limits: An appeals court in Georgia has upheld an order barring a divorcing couple from using social media to communicate. The Daily Report has the story here. "Facebook is the new megaphone," said Randall Kessler, former chairman of American Bar Association's family law section. "It sounds like the judges are catching up with society." In other Facebook news, this piece in The New Jersey Law Journal: Party's Deletion of Facebook Page Found To Be Spoliation of Evidence.

Billy clubs excluded: "The U.S. Supreme Court may have guaranteed the right to possess a gun in the home, but it's still illegal to carry a baseball bat modified into a billy club in the backseat of one's car, the First District Court of Appeal ruled Thursday," The Recorder reports.

First, procedure: The Wall Street Journal reports on the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage arguments: "Justices discussed scenarios in which California's Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act might fall not because the court found them unconstitutional in substance, but because the unusual journey of the cases left the court with no legitimate dispute to resolve."

In Public Records Suit, No Extra Time for the FBI

A federal judge today refused to allow the U.S. Justice Department to put on hold, for more than a year, a suit that seeks information about the FBI's use of technology to collect mobile phone data.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the government failed to convince her that "exceptional circumstances" exist to temporarily stop the litigation. The Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington sued the FBI in April 2012 over access to documents about the bureau's use of "StingRay" technology.

"The large volume of requests that the FBI must process, as well as the size and complexity of those requests and the limited resources available to process them, present exceptional circumstances," Kimberly Herb, a Justice Department lawyer, argued in court papers.

Kollar-Kotelly didn't buy the argument. The bottom line, the judge said, is that the FBI didn't show that the bureau is "deluged" with so many public records request to justify a delay in the court action. Click here for the opinion.

D.C. Attorney General Pushes for Expanded Subpoena Power

In the past 27 months, the District of Columbia attorney general's office issued two subpoenas in criminal matters. Testifying yesterday before the D.C. Council in favor of expanding the office’s subpoena power, Attorney General Irvin Nathan said restrictions in place now are a "major impediment to effective law enforcement."

Nathan faced opposition from the local criminal defense bar, however, which said a proposed law to expand subpoena authority would mark a "frightening" expansion of power.

The bill, introduced in January, would effectively undo 2010 legislation that placed limits on the attorney general office's subpoena authority. The office, for instance, can't issue a subpoena if a defendant has already been indicted, if three business days elapsed since the underlying crime took place – a restriction Nathan called "ridiculous" – or if there were other means of getting the information, such as a search warrant.

New D.C. Federal Judge Jackson 'Doesn't Get Fazed'

If newly confirmed U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is smiling when she steps onto the bench, lawyers shouldn't let their guard down. Past and present colleagues described Jackson as cheerful and easy to work with, but warned that attorneys should expect pointed questions that speak to her understanding of the law and breadth of expertise.

"Because she is a person that comes across as very friendly, people should not take that for granted. She is really deeply thinking about the issues before her," said Brian Matsui, a partner at Morrison & Foerster who worked with Jackson when she was of counsel at the firm.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Jackson, 42, to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on March 22. A member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission since 2010, Jackson is expected to keep her position on the commission, serving with two other members who are also judges – U.S. District Chief Judge Patti Saris of Massachusetts and U.S. District Chief Judge Ricardo Hinojosa of the Southern District of Texas.

DOJ Urges D.C. Circuit to Allow Import of Lethal Injection Drug

A U.S. Justice Department lawyer today urged a federal appeals court in Washington to overrule a judge who blocked the import of a drug used in lethal injections.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled last year that food and drug regulators had a mandatory duty to disallow the entry of the drug, sodium thiopental, because it fails to meet certain requirements under federal law. The plaintiffs, represented by a team from Sidley Austin, are a group of death row inmates in Arizona, California and Tennessee.

The closely watched case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit tests the scope of FDA's discretion to decline to enforce its own regulations. The appellate panel—senior judges David Sentelle and Douglas Ginsburg, sitting with Judge Judith Rogers—didn't immediately rule following an hour-long hearing.

The prisoners' lawyers contend the FDA lacks discretion to pass up enforcement. The federal law in question, the challengers argue, mandates that the agency "shall" refuse the admission of a foreign drug that is unapproved in the United States. "Normally, that's a mandatory expression," Sentelle said in court today.

The Morning Wrap

Budget Passes: The U.S. Senate on Saturday approved its first budget in four years, The New York Times reports. The $3.7 trillion blueprint for 2014 would facilitate tax increases and cut spending, but it wouldn't pull the government out of the red 10 years from now.

No Furloughs: Daily furloughs of 3,570 federal prison employees won't happen, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. announced on Friday, The Associated Press reports. Holder transferred $150 million from other U.S. Justice Department accounts to avert the furloughs.

FBI HQ: A secret CIA facility in Springfield, Va., could stand in the way of some Northern Virginia officials looking to make the site the future home of the FBI, The Washington Post reports. "All [Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.)] said was, 'You guys need to understand that this is a major, major problem for you,'  " a Northern Virginia official said. "And he went so far as to suggest that if it doesn't happen in Springfield, it's solely because of that. . . . His thing was, 'If it stops, it's going to be because somebody at the highest level says you can't touch the CIA.' "

The Morning Wrap

Disbarred: From today's National Law Journal: "Plaintiffs attorney Stanley Chesley has been disbarred from practicing law in Kentucky, and the move may crimp his ability to practice in Ohio, where his firm, Waite Schneider Bayless & Chesley, is based."

Charged: Federal prosecutors on Thursday charged the brother of Galleon Group's Raj Rajaratnam with insider trading allegations, The New York Times reports. “As alleged, Rengan Rajaratnam and his brother shared more than DNA; they also shared a penchant for insider trading,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said.

Released: "After spending some 23 years in prison for a murder he says he did not commit, David Ranta walked out of a Brooklyn courtroom a free man yesterday after prosecutors conceded the evidence against him had "degraded" to the point that they could not prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt," The New York Law Journal reports today. The New York Times background piece on the case.

Quitting: A California judge who's charged with bilking an elderly neighbor has resigned from the bench, The Recorder reports. "Judge Seeman has had a distinguished career, and he felt this was an appropriate action to take at this time for the good of the court," said Seeman's attorney, Kathleen Ewins of Long & Levit in San Francisco.

D.C. Council Weighs Eyewitness ID Reform Legislation

The D.C. Council heard testimony today on proposed reforms regarding how police conduct eyewitness identifications during criminal investigations, with the local criminal defense bar pitted against prosecutors and law enforcement.

The bill would require training on best practices and mandate that police use certain procedures in most cases, including "double-blind" lineups, in which the officer administering a photo array doesn't know who the suspect might be. The measure would also put in place sanctions for failing to follow procedures that could affect how evidence is used and considered in court.

Proponents of the bill at today's hearing included the D.C. Public Defender Service, the D.C. Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, and a woman who, having made a wrong eyewitness identification after she was raped, became an advocate for reforming police procedures. The U.S. attorney's office, Metropolitan Police Department, and police union testified against the measure.

Double Homicide Conviction Remanded to Investigate Ineffective Counsel Claim

Jose Portillo was one of three people convicted in a 2008 double homicide in Northwest Washington. Two years after he was sentenced to serve 137 years in prison, however, his case will go back before a trial judge for an investigation into Portillo's pre-trial concerns with his legal representation, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled today.

A three-judge panel found that District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Michael Rankin made a "legally insufficient" inquiry into Portillo's claims that his lawyers weren't communicating with him and that he didn't understand what was going on because he wasn't getting materials in Spanish, his native language.

Judge Anna Blackburne-Rigsby, writing for the court, said Rankin's exchange with Portillo and his lawyer at the time that Portillo expressed his concerns could have been perceived as dismissive and made Portillo "feel less than comfortable voicing legitimate concerns about his legal representation."