In an important decision the Eleventh Circuit held in Sebastian v. Ortiz that an arrested person can proceed with a civil rights excessive force claim for substantial injuries arising from a handcuffing following a valid arrest. This is an appeal by Javier Ortiz of the Miami Police Department from the…
White Collar Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog
No illegal seizure following a valid traffic stop
Reginald Gibbs was arrested and pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Before he pleaded guilty to the possession, he filed a motion to suppress the evidence of the firearm seized from him by the police. The district court denied that motion and he appealed the…
Defendant had no standing to contest a vacatur of the criminal forfeiture order
Frank Amodeo pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States for his failure to collect and remit payroll taxes and obstruction of an agency investigation. His offense arose from his scheme to divert his clients’ payroll taxes to his companies’ bank accounts instead of remitting the money to the…
Solicitation of sexually explicit images from a purportedly 13-year-old girl was notice under the criminal statute
Caniff was convicted of attempting to entice a minor to engage in illegal sexual conduct, with advertising for child pornography and attempted production of child pornography. The underlying facts began with an F.B.I. agent posing as a thirteen-year-old girl on Whisper, and online website and cellphone application that allows users…
A defendant has no standing to contest a partial vacatur of the criminal forfeiture order
Frank Amodeo pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States for his failure to collect and remit payroll taxes and obstruction of an agency investigation. His offense arose from his scheme to divert his clients’ payroll taxes to his companies’ bank accounts instead of remitting the money to the…
Investigators were not liable for omitting possibly exonerating information from an arrest affidavit
The three plaintiff’s in Paez v Mulvey case were police officers of the Golden Beach, Florida police department were arrested in 2011 on various charges of public corruption. The criminal accusations alleged that these officers fraudulently failed to report off-duty police work that would have required them to pay administrative fees…
Signing another person’s name to defraud constitutes identity theft
Munksgard applied for a line of credit at a small bank operating in a few counties in west central Florida. To support his application, he submitted a surveying contract with a company Cal-Maine foods showing the signature of a Cal-Maine employee, Kyle Morris. The contract was fraudulent and Munksgard signed…
Prison officer’s extortion conviction upheld
Inmates at the Autry state Prison had a phone scam in which they would masquerade as law-enforcement or court officials and dupe their victims into paying them for fake infractions. Victims paid money to the inmates in the form of Green Dot numbers. Green Dot corporation sells debit cards that…
Civil right claim fails for a victim of a prosecutor’s defamatory statements
After serving seven years in prison for a kidnapping and rape conviction, a DNA test revealed that Echols’s DNA did not match the semen recovered from the victim. His conviction was vacated by a Georgia trial court and the local district attorney, Spencer Lawton, declined to retry the case…
Attorney should have asked for a mistrial given a judge’s repeated direction to the jury to continue deliberating
Brewster appealed from his denial of his 28 U.S.C. 2254 petition for a writ of habeas corpus in which he claimed his trial counsel rendered ineffective assistance by failing to move for a mistrial as any point during the deadlocked jury deliberations. In the decision issued in Brewster v Heztel,…