The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

The Morning Wrap

Russian Warning: The FBI in early 2011 received a warning from Russian officials about suspected marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a firefight with police Friday morning, The Boston Globe reports. The Russian authorities said he may have been a follower of “radical Islam." Police captured his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, on Friday evening after a more than 20-hour manhunt.

Death Penalty: Kaufman County, Texas, special prosecutors are weighing the death penalty for a former justice of the peace and his wife, who are charged with murdering the county's district attorney, his wife and one of his assistant prosecutors, the Texas Lawyer reports. "Obviously, the case is still under investigation," said Toby Shook, one of the special prosecutors. "That decision won't be made until the investigation is complete."

USA Today: USA Today founder Allen Neuharth died Friday at 89, the newspaper reports. He died after sustaining injuries in a fall at his home.

On Gideon's 50th, Lawyers Lament Lack of Access to Justice

Updated 4/22/13 at 9:04 a.m.

The District of Columbia is home to what's widely considered the gold-standard of local public defender offices, but a panel of right-to-counsel advocates today challenged the courts and the criminal justice community not to grow complacent.

"D.C. is a place where the expectations are incredibly high, and they should be," said Jonathan Rapping, a former local public defender who founded Gideon's Promise, an Atlanta-based organization that supports public defender offices in southern states. When it came to ensuring access to justice, he urged local attorneys and judges to ask among themselves, "What else can we do?"

Rapping was part of a panel today during the annual joint session of the Judicial Conference of the District of Columbia and the D.C. Bar. The theme of this year's bench-bar conference was access to counsel, in light of the 50th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that secured the right to counsel for criminal defendants.

U.S. Courts Announce Sequestration Plan for Defenders

Updated at 5:35 p.m.

It's rare for a furlough announcement to be considered good news, but that was the case yesterday for the federal public defender office in Washington.

The Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference, the body of judges that decides how the federal judiciary spends its money, announced it had reached a plan for the defender services budget under federally mandated cuts known as sequestration. The details are still being hammered out, but federal public defender offices would face no more than three weeks of furloughs—a significant amount of time, but less than originally projected for many offices.

The D.C. federal public defender's office faced 27 furlough days under sequestration. Federal Public Defender A.J. Kramer said today that the announcement was "welcome news." Still, he said that until the final details are worked out and they know exactly how many furlough days attorneys and staff will have to take, "you don't count on anything until it's done."

Good News, Bad News and Uncertainty for Defense Lawyers

Updated at 5:10 p.m.

Depending on which side of John Marshall Memorial Park in downtown Washington criminal defense lawyers practice, the budget cuts known as sequestration could mean a pinch to the bottom line at the end of the summer—or nothing at all.

Private lawyers who are paid under the Criminal Justice Act to represent indigent defendants in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia could go for weeks without pay this summer. The word down the street at the District of Columbia Superior Court has been cheerier. Court officials don't expect to cut CJA attorney pay, with the caveat that circumstances could change if, for instance, crime rates suddenly skyrocketed.

As officials in both courts grapple with the effects of sequestration between now and the end of the federal fiscal year on September 30, members of the CJA panels say they're waiting for official word.

D.C. Circuit Invalidates Class in Special Education Case

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed the certification of a class in a sprawling lawsuit against the District of Columbia over the provision of special education services, a setback for the plaintiffs more than a year after a judge found the city liable.

In the April 12 ruling, the appeals court vacated the liability finding, ordering U.S. District Chief Judge Royce Lamberth to reconsider class certification under the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 2011's Wal-Mart Stores Inc. v. Dukes. In Wal-Mart, the high court said a class had to suffer common harm from a policy or practice that affected each member. The three-judge appellate panel found that the plaintiffs in the special education case failed to meet that "commonality" standard.

Writing for the panel, Judge Judith Rogers said the D.C. Circuit decision did not rule out the possibility of a class or set of subclasses, a solution that the plaintiffs previously suggested. But as the class currently stood, she said, Lamberth failed to identify a "single or uniform policy or practice that bridges all their claims," except that the class members were all allegedly denied an appropriate education under federal law.

The Morning Wrap

Spectrum: The U.S. Justice Department on Friday called on the Federal Communications Commission to give small wireless companies the opportunity to obtain a fair amount of spectrum in the upcoming auction, Reuters reports. The DOJ's request is a setback for Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. as they seek to acquire the airwaves.

Tax Cheats: New Carrollton, Md., is a hot spot for likely tax cheats, The Associated Press reports. The AP reviewed a study of Internal Revenue Service data that focused on small-business owners and sole proprietorships.

Changing Rules: Following setbacks in two spy cases, the U.S. Justice Department is taking steps to make it easier to prosecute foreign entities with no domestic presence, The Recorder reports.

Georgetown Law Argues for Dismissal of Age Discrimination Lawsuit

A Washington federal judge heard arguments Monday on whether the use of words such as "young" or "pick of the litter" in discussing law professor applicants was evidence of discrimination against older applicants in Georgetown University Law Center's hiring process.

Former North Dakota Attorney General Nicholas Spaeth sued Georgetown and five other schools after he failed to get an interview through the Association of American Law Schools faculty recruitment conference in 2010.

Georgetown moved for summary judgment, arguing that they had non-discriminatory reasons for rejecting Spaeth, in particular his lack of expressed interest in legal scholarship. U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle heard arguments yesterday afternoon.

The Morning Wrap

'Iron Lady': Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has died after a stroke, the BBC reports. She was 87.

More Jobs: The legal sector picked up 2,000 positions in March, The Am Law Daily reports. This was the highest single-month gain in almost a year.

'No Poach': A federal judge in San Francisco on Friday denied class certification to the plaintiffs in the "no poach" litigation against tech behemoths including Google Inc. and Apple Inc., The Recorder reports. The plaintiffs allege that the companies had negotiated a series of agreements that restrained competition for highly skilled employees.

Sequestration Drives Scheduling Changes at D.C. Federal Court

To accommodate expected furloughs in federal law enforcement and defender services agencies, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will stop scheduling most criminal matters on alternating Fridays from April 26 through September 30, court officials said.

Unlike those agencies and some federal courts, however, the D.C. court isn't planning to furlough or fire staff before the end of the fiscal year in September as part of mandated federal budget cuts known as sequestration. Under sequestration, which took effect March 1, non-defense agencies faced five percent in budget cuts.

New arrests will still be processed on the alternating Fridays, U.S. District Chief Judge Royce Lamberth said, while ongoing criminal trials will be recessed. He said the decision was made in consultation with the local U.S. attorney, U.S. Marshal, and Federal Public Defender's offices. Civil cases won't be affected; Lamberth said the U.S. attorney's office indicated that they expect to have lawyers available.

Ex-clients Sue Hogan Lovells Over $36M Loss

Hogan Lovells is being sued by two Montgomery County, Md. landowners who allege the law firm’s advice led to a $36 million jury verdict against them.

The malpractice suit, filed April 1 in D.C. Superior Court, stems from the work attorneys from the legacy firm Hogan & Hartson did for the Camalier and Davis families in a real estate deal.

The plaintiffs in the malpractice suit leased two adjacent properties to the Penrose Group, which intended to construct apartment buildings. According to the complaint, the Hogan attorneys who were retained in September 2006, including commercial litigation partner David Hensler, advised the landowners not to produce an estoppel certificate, a guarantee that developers were in compliance with the lease.

Without an estoppel certificate Penrose, the developer, was unable to get financing for the project. Penrose subsequently sued the landowners for loss of profit.