“Why is this case here, except as an opportunity to upset Melendez-Diaz?”

So wondered Justice Scalia during oral argument a couple weeks back in the case of Briscoe v. Virginia. For some background, see our previous post on this case here. Briefly, the Supreme Court held last year in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts that, in a drug case, the prosecution cannot prove the existence of a controlled substance by merely introducing the lab report — the chemist has to testify, or else the Confrontation Clause is violated. There was a huge outcry from prosecutors’ offices across the country. It would be too much of a burden to get chemists to testify at every drug trial. There was a concerted effort to get around this new ruling, or better yet to get the Supremes to reverse themselves.

So in Briscoe, Virginia tried to get around the rule by saying the prosecution only needs to introduce a lab report, and if the defense wants to confront the chemist then the defense can subpoena the chemist as a witness.

More than half the state attorneys-general filed an amicus brief, arguing that the expense and administrative burden of getting chemists to testify at trial would just be unworkable. At oral argument on January 11, it sounded like Justice Alito, at least, was buying into that argument (Tr. at 16, lines 16 to 18). And there was hope that Justice Sotomayor would be that one extra vote to undo Melendez-Diaz.

In our previous post, we pointed out various reasons why such hopes weren’t based in reality, and why the claims of expense and burden don’t hold water. We seriously doubt that anyone at the Supreme Court bothers to read this blog. But these observations are fairly self-evident, we think.

So it was no surprise to see a one-sentence smackdown from the Supreme Court this morning:

We vacate the judgment of the Supreme Court of Virginia and remand the case for further proceedings not inconsistent with the opinion in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. ___ (2009).

It is so ordered.

In other words, if the states do not put the chemist on the stand in the People’s case, then they violate the Confrontation Clause. End of story. Bureaucratic convenience does not trump individual rights.

As for all those prosecutors’ offices who whine that it can’t be done? We’d ask them to look at New York City, whose courts are far busier than theirs ever will be, and who nevertheless manage the job as a matter of routine. Defense counsel often stipulates to the substance being what it is, and when there is no stipulation then getting the chemist to court is no more challenging than any other police employee who’d rather not be there. It’s just part of the job, and amazingly enough it works out just fine.

The Fourth Amendment says the police can’t go into your home or other private place without a warrant. Over the years, we’ve come up with a lot of exceptions to the warrant requirement. So many, in fact, that getting a warrant has become the exception, and the exceptions have become the norm.

That’s because privacy isn’t the only interest society has here. The various exceptions to the warrant requirement allow the police to go in when other important interests outweigh the privacy interest.

One common exception to the warrant requirement is the Emergency exception. Under the emergency rule, the police can go in when there is good reason to believe there’s someone inside who needs help right away — either they’re seriously hurt, or they’re in danger.

In New York, that rule was formalized by the Mitchell case in 1976. The Mitchell rule has two objective conditions, and one subjective condition. If all three are met, then the police would be allowed to enter under the emergency rule. The objective conditions require that a reasonably prudent officer would first have thought there was an emergency, and second would have had probable cause to believe the emergency was inside the place to be searched. The subjective condition was that the police had to actually be going inside to help someone — the emergency couldn’t be a pretext for some other ulterior motive such as looking for evidence.

For about 15 years, now, the U.S. Supreme Court has been rejecting subjective rules like that. So far as federal law is concerned, the Supremes don’t care if the police had some ulterior motive or pretext. So long as there was a legitimate basis for the police conduct, they don’t care what the police were actually thinking.

So in 2006, in the Brigham City case, the Supreme Court specifically addressed the three-part Mitchell rule, and said New York’s subjective condition is not required under federal law. All federal law requires is that the police had an objectively reasonable basis to believe that there was an emergency, and probable cause to believe that the emergency was inside the place to be searched.

That’s only the federal rule, however. Federal law only provides a minimum of protections, a base line of individual rights. The states can’t give less protection, but they can certainly grant greater protections. So New York remains free to adopt the Brigham City rule, or keep the Mitchell rule, or come up with a new one. (New York could even get rid of the emergency exception altogether, though that would be a silly result — nobody wants the police to be forced to watch helpless from the sidewalk while someone is being beaten to death on the other side of a window.)

But to date, New York’s courts have neither adopted nor rejected the Brigham City rule. It’s still up in the air whether the subjective prong will continue to be part of the rule in New York. This uncertainty has been going on for nearly four years now, and that’s bad for all concerned. It’s certainly high time to settle the issue.

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The other day, we were asked for a solution. We were arguing an appeal here in New York last week, which dealt only with the objective prongs of the rule. The People were appealing from a suppression ruling, and they were claiming that the search was good under the emergency doctrine of Brigham City. The hearing court never applied the subjective prong of the Mitchell rule, so its validity was not really at issue in the case.

So imagine our surprise when the court asked us what New York’s rule ought to be now, whether the state should keep or abandon Mitchell’s subjective prong. We were surprised, but not unprepared of course. We proposed that there does need to be a subjective part of the rule, but not the pretext rule of old.

There needs to be a subjective belief on the part of the police that their search was lawful. They had to have some justification for their search at the time, whether it was an emergency or some other exception to the warrant requirement. Nobody wants a rule that gives the police an incentive to commit a bad search, knowing it’s bad, in the hope that some clever prosecutor down the road can think up some objective justification after the fact.

So what would our proposed rule look like? Let’s take a crack at writing it out in plain English.

Under the Emergency exception, the police may conduct a warrantless search when:

1) Based on evidence actually known to the searching officer before commencing the search, a reasonably prudent officer would have believed that a person was in danger of serious physical injury or death;

2) Based on evidence actually known to the searching officer before commencing the search, a reasonably prudent officer would have thought it more likely than not that the emergency was inside the place to be searched; and

3) Before commencing the search, the searching officer actually and reasonably believed the search to be justified by this or some other exception to the warrant requirement.

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This seems to be nothing more than good common sense.

Unlike previous language, we go out of our way here to specify that the objective basis has to be based on facts known to the officers at the time. They can’t justify their search with facts that they only learned about later — if they don’t have reason to think someone’s injured inside, they can’t justify their bad search just because they happened to find an injured person there. Similarly, they can’t justify their search with baseless suppositions that have no foundation in what they knew at the time — if they don’t have reason to think someone’s injured inside, they can’t justify their bad search after the fact with a hypothetical scenario they clearly hadn’t considered at the time. (And if you think this should go without saying, you should read the People’s brief in the case we just argued.)

We also go out of our way to replace legalese with its plain language definition. So “basis approximating probable cause,” for example, becomes “more likely than not.” This makes the rule more comprehensible, and thus more easy for police to follow and courts to enforce. We’re a big fan of plain language.

Most importantly, of course, we changed the pretext language of Mitchell to a more reasonable requirement that the police at least think they have some lawful basis for their intrusion. And that they have some reasonable basis to think so. They don’t have to have subjectively thought there was an emergency at hand, but they had to have subjectively thought their search wasn’t unlawful.

Any other rule, we think, would send precisely the wrong message to the police. The cops would have an incentive to go ahead and commit searches they know to be bad, on the off chance that some clever prosecutor can think up a justification after the fact (which is precisely what happened in the case we just argued, if you’re wondering).

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We could be wrong, however. So we invite suggestions on what the New York rule ought to be. What do you think?

Yesterday, we were talking with a colleague about whether we’d ever take a terrorism client. We frankly don’t have any more qualms about defending that type of case than about any other type. But the conversation turned to whether such cases ought to be brought in the courts in the first place. And we just don’t think terrorism should be fought in the courts.

In the years before 9/11, the U.S. dealt with terrorism as a criminal matter. Conceptually, it was no different from any other multiple homicide: the bad thing would happen, law enforcement would try to find out whodunit, and if the suspect was still alive and could be arrested then he’d get prosecuted.

This didn’t work so well. Some people eventually got punished, but the system didn’t stop or deter any future attacks. The criminal justice system can’t do that, after all. It’s purely an after-the-fact thing. Its job is to punish people after the crime is already committed. The courts can’t act proactively to prevent crimes that haven’t been committed yet — punishing people before they’ve done anything would be outrageous. No, proactive national defense is the job of the armed forces.

More than that, our criminal justice system is flatly contrary to the goals of counterterrorism. Preventing terrorist acts requires intel. Any client of mine is going to shut up the second I’m retained, if not sooner. And law enforcement isn’t allowed to arrest people before they’ve done anything wrong. Nor can they coerce confessions, or get wiretaps or search warrants on mere suspicion alone — which is all you’ve got during most investigations. So much for your intel. The White House says we can get intel as part of a plea, but as Mike Mukasey points out in today’s WSJ, any plea is going to take place years after the information would have been of any use.

Law enforcement is not in the job of preventing acts of war. If, during the Cold War, the Soviets had sent a team in to blow up the Capitol Building, it would not have been the FBI’s job to prevent it from happening. Nor would the attackers have found themselves facing criminal prosecution in civilian courts. It would have been treated as an act of war, and the combatants would have been treated accordingly.

Terrorism is no different. And yet there is this bizarre mindset that it is completely different from an act of war, and is instead nothing more than violent crime. But crime is not the same as deliberately sending attackers from foreign lands with the purpose of killing and destroying, in order to attack the nation itself. That’s war, whether it is launched by a governed nation or by a transnational organization.

So it’s hardly surprising that our reliance on the courts and law enforcement alone didn’t get the job done. Because it’s not their job. In the terrorism cases before 9/11, the criminal justice system did its job about as well as can be expected, but it failed abysmally at the task of counterterrorism. It will continue to fail, if we decide that’s how we’re going to fight it.

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On January 25, 1993, Mir Aimal Kansi got out of his car during a red light at an intersection near CIA headquarters, and with an AK-47 shot every male in sight. He drove off and wasn’t pursued. (He actually took a wrong turn into our parents’ cul-de-sac nearby, and our mother watched him trying to find his way, but she thought nothing of it afterwards because the police announcements described a completely different car.) Surprised at the ease of his escape, Kansi caught a flight to Pakistan the next morning. Eventually, his roommate reported him missing and the police found the AK-47 under Kansi’s bed. By that time, he was long gone, being sheltered by a Pashtun tribe in the Afghan border regions (sound familiar?). There was no extradition treaty with Pakistan, so the U.S. didn’t bother with the extradition process. Four years later, they just went in and kidnapped him after luring him out with a smuggling ruse. He was eventually tried in Virginia state court, which sentenced him to death. Kansi was executed at the end of 2002, after many more terrorist attacks had taken place. His body was sent back to Pakistan, and his funeral was attended by province’s entire leadership, the army commander, and the nation’s ambassador to the U.S. It’s safe to say that our criminal justice system didn’t do much here to combat terrorism, or even deter it, though it did eventually punish the culprit.

One month after the CIA shooting, on February 26, 1993, Al-Qaeda terrorists set off a powerful truck bomb under the World Trade Center, hoping to topple Tower One into Tower Two. Ramzi Yousef masterminded it, drove the van an lit the fuse. The project was financed by his uncle Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and several others took part. It didn’t go exactly as planned, but six people were killed and more than a thousand were injured. Law enforcement didn’t know how it had happened, but the NYPD and FBI began looking for clues. The VIN number on a piece of axle eventually led to Abdul Yasin, the Iraqi who had constructed the bomb. Yasin was taken to FBI headquarters in Newark, questioned briefly, and released. Yasin caught a plane back to Iraq the next day, and his whereabouts are now unknown. Ramzi Yousef’s apartment was then searched, where the police found bomb-making stuff and the business card of Al-Qaeda’s chief bomb-maker and money-launderer Mohammed Khalifa. Ramzi Yousef was not captured, and escaped to fight another day. Khalifa was arrested in 1994 for his role in the bombing, as he was preparing to leave for the Philippines, but the U.S. simply deported him to Jordan. Jordan let him go, and he continued to prosper until he was assassinated in 2007. A few of the henchmen were tried in 1994, and got life sentences. Subsequent events show how abysmally the criminal justice system failed here.

In 1995, anti-government radical Timothy McVeigh copied the truck-bomb idea to retaliate against recent atrocities committed by the feds at Waco and Ruby Ridge. He succeeded in blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing and injuring hundreds, including the children in the day care center. McVeigh walked away, but his Darwin-Award stupidity got him arrested and ultimately convicted. He got pulled over 90 minutes after the bombing for driving without a license plate, resulting in his arrest for a concealed weapon. He wasn’t suspected of the bombing yet, but he copied the 1993 bombing so well that he gave the feds a road map that eventually led them right to him: he also rented a Ryder truck, the VIN on a part of the axle identified the truck, which was recognized by the motel workers where he’d checked in under his own name. A couple of days later, after he was released on his gun charge in state court, the feds took him into custody. His accomplice Terry Nichols turned himself in that same day, and a search of Nichols’ home turned up all the bomb-making stuff and plans. McVeigh’s own sister would testify against him. Thousands of law-enforcement personnel took part in the investigation, 28,000 interviews were conducted, literally tons of evidence were amassed, millions were spent, and after a massive trial in 1997 McVeigh was sentenced to death. On June 11, 2001, he was executed. The system did its job here, but that’s all it did.

Soon after their 1993 bombing, Al-Qaeda compatriots Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mohammed Khalifa popped up again. Yousef had kept busy in the meantime, first trying to bomb Pakistan’s prime minister a few months after the WTC bombing, and then killing and injuring hundreds in the bombing of the Imam Reza shrine in Iran. Now in 1994 they planned to kill the Pope while he visited the Philippines the following year, and then during the distraction they’d blow up 12 airliners in the air crossing the Pacific from Asia to the U.S., killing 4,000 people. The next phase would involve hijacking planes and flying them into landmark buildings. For the bombings, their idea was to plant small explosives on the planes during the first leg of a two-leg flight, concealing the bombs in childrens’ toys, and then get off the plane so as not to be blown up with it. First, they needed a trial run to see if that would work. So on December 11, 1994, Ramzi Yousef got on a Philippine Airlines 747 en route to Tokyo, went into the lavatory to assemble the explosive, and set it under seat 26K, which in older 747s would have been directly over the center fuel tank. He got off the plane at Cebu, and the bomb went off during the leg to Tokyo. It wasn’t over the fuel tank, so the plane didn’t blow up, but the bomb killed the man sitting in the seat. Also, it had been aligned up-and-down instead of side-to-side, so the wall of the plane wasn’t punctured. Still, those were easy details to correct, and the team started working on a dozen more bombs in Manila. Fortunately, a fire in Yousef’s apartment led to suspicions. The Manila police raided the apartment, had a wild rooftop chase, and ultimately seized a laptop containing all the plans. A later raid turned up the plans for flying planes into buildings. Yousef escaped to Pakistan. He was turned in by one of his recruits in return for a $2 million bounty, and brought back to the U.S. to stand trial for the conspiracy to blow up the flights to the U.S. (We watched that trial while interning with the Southern District’s terrorism and organized crime unit, it wasn’t bad.) He was convicted after a long trial in 1996, and got a life sentence. He was later convicted in 1997 of masterminding the 1993 bombing, and got another life sentence. He was convicted again for conspiring in the 1993 bombing (a complete waste of the system’s resources by this point), and got another life sentence. He’s doing his time in solitary at the Supermax in Colorado. Sure, the system punished the culprit, but as we now know it didn’t do a damn thing to prevent future terrorism.

In July 1996, Eric Rudolph decided to protest against abortion and the “global socialist” Olympics. He did so by setting off a bomb during the games in Atlanta. One person was killed, and over a hundred were hurt. Rudolph put three pipe bombs in an army pack, filled the pack with nails, wedged a steel plate in to direct the blast like a claymore, and hid it under a bench. He called 911 to issue his warning, and meanwhile a security guard had already noticed the pack and was clearing the area so the bomb squad could check it out. Before the bomb squad arrived, the bomb went off, and nails flew everywhere. The security guard, Richard Jewell, was at first praised as a hero, but then the feds started investigating him as a potential suspect. The media had a field day with the idea of a failed police officer who planted a bomb so he could be a hero, but in October the U.S. Attorney formally cleared him of suspicion. The feds then admitted that there were no other suspects, and the case went cold. Rudolph probably would have gotten away with it, but like other similar offenders he was emboldened to try it again. He used similar bombs in 1997 to attack an abortion clinic and a lesbian nightclub in Atlanta. The feds were able to figure out they were all made by the same person. Another bomb at an abortion clinic in Birmingham gave them the last clues they needed, including part of a license plate, to tie it all to Rudolph. They tipped their hand, however, allowing Rudolph to flee into the Appalachians. He remained a fugitive for more than five years. He was arrested by accident: while scavenging for food in a garbage can, a rookie cop suspected him of trying to commit a burglary. Five months later, in October 2003, the feds charged him with the four bombings. Time passed. Then in April 2005, Rudolph took a plea to a life sentence, avoiding the death penalty. He’s with Yousef at the Supermax now.

In February 1997, a Palestinian named Ali Hassan Abu Kamal went to the observation deck of the Empire State Building to carry out a suicide attack. He’d left Ramallah in December, and entered the U.S. on Christmas Eve. He bought a gun in Florida, then went up to New York. On the evening of his attack, he went to the observation deck, pulled out his gun, and started shooting into the crowd. One tourist was killed and six others were injured. Then he put the gun to his head and shot himself. Under orders from Yasser Arafat’s regime, the gunman’s family gave a false story that he was suicidal after a failed business venture, but in 2007 the family revealed that it had been a politically-motivated attack on the U.S. for its support of Israel. Law enforcement wasn’t able to piece together his sudden entry from a place known for its suicide bombers, his purchase of a firearm, and travel to a landmark population center. Nor should that have been law enforcement’s job. But others could have.

In September 2001, a lot of bad things happened. Al-Qaeda did it, masterminded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed again, using a barely-tweaked version of his and Ramzi Yousef’s Phase II plans from Manila. A lot of finger-pointing went on afterwards, because although U.S. intelligence agencies knew a lot, and were expecting “something very, very, very big,” and in August the president’s CIA brief even said Al-Qaeda was determined to strike inside the U.S., the intelligence community didn’t — indeed, believed that they couldn’t — share this information with domestic law enforcement. CIA had minimal capacity to conduct paramilitary operations of its own, and the military was completely uninvolved in countering Al-Qaeda. The FBI had almost no capabilities that could have prevented the attacks, even though it had significantly ramped up its counterterrorism efforts after the 1993 WTC bombing. But as with any other law enforcement agency, its focus was exclusively after-the-fact and case-specific. The FBI’s ability to gather intel was limited, there was no sharing of intel from other agencies, and the FBI didn’t have the training or resources to do anything about it even if they did get anything useful.

But that was because the FBI is not in the job of preventing acts of war. If, during the Cold War, the Soviets had sent a team in to blow up the Capitol Building, it would not have been the FBI’s job to prevent it from happening. Nor would the attackers have found themselves facing criminal prosecution in civilian courts. It would have been treated as an act of war, and the combatants would have been treated accordingly.

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Terrorism is no different. And yet there is this bizarre mindset that it is completely different from an act of war, and is instead nothing more than violent crime. But crime is not the same as deliberately sending attackers from foreign lands with the purpose of killing and destroying, in order to attack the nation itself. That’s war, whether it is launched by a governed nation or by a transnational organization.

Timothy McVeigh wasn’t sent by some foreign opponent, though. Does that make his acts a crime as opposed to war? Yes, and more: They are treason, as well as crime. Article III Section 3 defines treason, and puts it within the realm of the federal courts: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.” Congress duly adopted that definition of the offense in 18 U.S.C. §2381, which allows a sentence of death.

What about Eric Rudolph? Yes, that sort of terrorism counts as crime. If he was trying to force a political decision by violence, then it was terrorism, but he wasn’t trying to attack America, so it stays at the level of a crime. And his attack on the lesbian bar wasn’t so much political as a hate crime, really. Not all mass-murder is war, nor is it treason.

So who should be prosecuted in the criminal courts? Not terrorists directed from abroad. Not combatants captured during war, whether declared or not. It should be limited to offenders like Eric Rudolph.

On June 25 last year, the Supreme Court held in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts that in a drug case the prosecution can’t simply use a sworn lab report to prove the existence of a controlled substance. If the chemist doesn’t testify, it violates the Confrontation Clause. (See our previous post about it here.)

Four days later, on June 29, the Court granted cert. in Briscoe v. Virginia, to decide whether the states can get around this requirement if they permit the defendant to call the lab analyst as a defense witness. Oral arguments are scheduled for next Monday, and we can’t wait to hear how the Commonwealth of Virginia tries to make its case.

It seems to us that there is an obvious burden-shifting problem here. The state, and only the state, has the burden of proving every element of the crime. Since the Winship case in 1970, this has been a due process requirement of the Constitution. Unless he asserts an affirmative defense, the defendant has no burden to prove a thing.

So the prosecution has to prove an element. It needs a forensic test to prove it. It needs the testimony of the analyst to introduce the results of that test. The defense does not have a burden to prove anything, one way or the other, about the test.

But Virginia wants to be able to prove its case using only the lab report, and get around the Confrontation Clause by saying the defense is allowed to call the analyst if they want to confront him.

First, who cares whether the state allows the defense to call the analyst or not? Last time we checked, the defense could call any witness they chose, by subpoena if need be. The defense always has the opportunity to put the analyst on the stand as a defense witness. This “permission” doesn’t actually give the defense permission to do anything it couldn’t already do. All it does is imply wrongly that the defense couldn’t have done so otherwise.

Second, the state cannot impose a burden of proof on the defense like this. Virginia’s scheme essentially precludes the defense from challenging the state’s evidence during the state’s case. It forces the defense to act affirmatively and put on a defense case in order to challenge the state’s evidence. That’s a big due process violation.

Third, the state does not get around the Confrontation Clause by shifting the burden to the defendant to call those witnesses it wishes to confront. In a murder case, it would absurd to let the prosecution introduce an eyewitness’s written account of what happened, and no more, so long as the defendant himself could have called the eyewitness if he wanted to. That’s indistinguishable from what Virginia wants to do.

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Lots of prosecutors’ offices are hoping that the Supremes will side with Virginia on this one. Particularly in the more amateurish offices, there is a feeling that the Melendez-Diaz decision imposes too great a cost on the criminal justice system, and imposes unworkable inefficiencies, by requiring chemists to take time off from their busy jobs to testify at trial. An amicus brief filed by half the nation’s attorneys general makes these arguments.

But just look here at New York City, the busiest criminal courts and crime lab in the world. Lab reports are used in the grand jury, where there is no confrontation right, but the chemists themselves must testify at trial. Somehow, this requirement has not bankrupted the city. Getting the chemist to show up is just one more minor hassle that prosecutors have to deal with, no more challenging than getting cops to show up. The requirement is so minor that nobody really thinks about it.

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Still, Melendez-Diaz was a 5-4 decision. And one of the five, Justice Souter, has been replaced by former prosecutor Justice Sotomayor. So people are thinking that she’s going to be more pro-prosecution here, and help the Court either reverse or severely limit that decision.

We don’t think so. We’d remind Court observers that Sotomayor came out of the Manhattan DA’s office, not one of the “amateur hour” offices. Her own personal experience is that requiring the chemist to testify at trial is really no big deal.

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So we’re looking forward to the oral arguments next week. If Scalia gives as good as he did in last June’s decision, and if we’re right about Sotomayor, then Virginia’s in for a spirited beatdown.

We’re on vacation starting tomorrow, and that means we’ve been extra-busy trying to get as much work done as possible beforehand. So we’re not taking the time to post anything particularly thoughtful today. Maybe while we’re on vacation, but not today.

Still, we were pleased to see we were quoted in Crain’s this morning. Essentially, we were asked to comment on a recent USA Today article claiming that white-collar prosecutions plummeted even as the economic crisis worsened. First of all, USA Today’s stats exaggerate things. As the actual statistics (shown below) show, the drop wasn’t that big. And it’s easily explained by the shift in the FBI’s focus after 9/11. And once the political pendulum started to swing back to financial crimes in 2007, more investigations got started, and we’re now beginning to see plenty more white-collar cases.

We weren’t quoted as accurately as we’d have liked, and they said we used to be a federal prosecutor when we were really a state prosecutor, but they did spell our name and firm correctly, so we’re not complaining.

Anyway, it occurred to us that we’ve been getting some good press lately. And that gave us a great idea for a post. Instead of writing anything of substance, we’d just post some links to the various articles, and call it a day. So here’s some shameless self-promotion:

How Dirty Are Hedge Funds? (Forbes, Oct. 20)

Galleon SEC, FBI Informant Roomy Khan Worked at Intel (Bloomberg, Oct. 22)

Galleon Wiretap Defense Not ‘Hopeless,’ Experts Say (Bloomberg, Oct. 28)

Bear Stearns Defense Holds Lessons For Execs (Forbes, Nov. 17)

After Lull, Financial-Crime Prosecutions Seen Set to Rise (Crain’s, Dec. 22)

And for those who need some useful CLE credits, here are the lectures we gave this year (CLE credit good for most states):
Hope for Hopeless Cases I: Defending an Internet Pornography Case

Hope for Hopeless Cases II: Defending Wiretaps and Tape Recordings

Hope for Hopeless Cases III: Better Loss Calculations for Lower Sentences in Financial Crimes

Hope for Hopeless Cases IV: Your Client Confessed! Now What?

Enjoy!