Controlled Substances The Boston Globe recently reported a story about a settlement that Massachusetts General Hospital will pay to the federal government after allegations that the hospital’s lax internal controls over employee access to controlled substances resulted in the theft of thousands of prescription pain medication pills. Drug diversion, which is the use of controlled substances for nonmedical purposes, was alleged against the hospital after it was discovered that a handful of nurse employees were stealing oxycodone and other painkillers over a period of three and a half years, spanning from October of 2011 until April of 2015. The reserves of controlled substances that a hospital pharmacy generally holds is for use by the patients of the hospital, and when drugs are stolen from the hospital pharmacy patients that truly need those medications are unable to get access to them. Although Mass. General Hospital attests that no patients were deprived of the…
Theft of Controlled Substances Causes Mass. General to Pay $2.3 Million in Settlement
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Prosecutors Preventing Claims of Innocence Pervert Justice
In dismissing an ethics complaint against Fort Bend, County District Attorney John Healy, Denton County District Judge Jonathan Bailey ruled that the Texas Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 3.09(d) placing an ethical responsibility on prosecutors to disclose favorable material to a defendant does not apply in the post-conviction setting. Put simply, once a criminal conviction has been obtained a conviction, a Texas prosecutor owes no duty, either to the defendant or the court, to either disclose or act upon newly-discovered evidence that calls into question the validity of the conviction or the defendant’s actual innocence. Finality More Important than Justice The “doctrine of finality” is the holy grail of prosecutors. Actual innocence takes a back seat to the doctrine. This tragic reality was given absolute credence in 1993 by the Supreme Court in Herrera v. Collins which held that when a criminal defendant is given a…
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Charity Fraud
A person or business may be guilty of charity fraud if they take donations from others based on information that is false or misleading. Million dollar charity fraud In May of 2015, ringleaders of four deceptive cancer charities were found guilty of charity fraud after authorities discovered $187 million dollars had been swindled out of […] The post Charity Fraud appeared first on Salt Lake Criminal Defense.
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Pizzi on Comparative Reflections on Jury Trial
William T. Pizzi has posted Comparative Reflections on Duncan v. Louisiana and Baldwin v. New York (Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This article takes a look back at two...
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United States v. Conti, No. 14-30232 (10-21-15)(Gould with Goodwin and Ikuta). The 9th embraces the Neder-world regarding jury instructions and error. Here, the defendant was charged with defrauding a federal program designed to aid juveniles on an Indian Reservation. The grant aid was for mental health and substance abuse. The grant funds ended up in the defendants' pockets, with the theft amounting to millions. The defendant was convicted on numerous fraud counts and conspiracy. This opinion deals with the conspiracy conviction.At trial, the court erred in instructing on the conspiracy count: 18 U.S.C. § 371, the trial court instructed on the "offense" clause (the means) and not the "defrauds" clause. To convict on the "defraud clause," the government must prove (1) an agreement; (2) to obstruct a lawful government function; (3)) by deceitful or dishonest means; and (4) one overt act. The difference is that the…
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DEAR JUDGE ....PLEASE FOLLOW THE LAW
The following sign is posted on a door to a courtroom.Dear Judge:There are lots of things you can do by virtue of your job as a circuit court judge. You can (in no particular order of importance- and BTW the following is not directed at any particular judge...if the robe fits...)Deny motions without reading them; have your JA refuse to put motions on calendar without lawyers first faxing them to you (although you don't read them); start court whenever you want; show up late; finish court whenever you want; make juries stay until midnight in a misguided effort to show everyone how hard you work; lecture lawyers from the bench about how you tried every case you had within sixty days of inception (in other words, lie); brag about how you are on the short list for an appointment to a higher court (ditto); and otherwise feel that you and only you stand between the rule of law and anarchy.Here's what you must do: follow the law.Which means here's what you can't…
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The FCA's Amended Public Disclosure Bar Does Not Apply to Claims That Arose Before March 2010
Congress added the “public disclosure bar” to the False Claims Act in 1986. 31 U.S.C. 3730(e)(4). As originally enacted, the public disclosure bar provided that if a relator based their qui tam claims on information that previously had been “publicly disclosed” through designated channels, such as in the press, in an audit, or in a previous lawsuit, then the court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction over the qui tam claims unless the relator could establish his or herself as an "original source" of the information underlying the qui tam complaint. Congress amended the public disclosure bar, effective March 23, 2010, and while it remained a basis for dismissing a relator’s qui tam claims, Congress omitted any explicit reference to the bar being jurisdictional. As a result, courts have increasingly found that the 2010 amended version of the public disclosure bar is not jurisdictional. See, e.g., U.S. ex rel. Osheroff v. Humana, Inc.,…
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Will Houston PD, DPS begin getting warrants for Stingray use now that feds require one?
Now that the US Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have begun requiring agents to obtain search warrants to use "Stingray" surveillance devices (fake-cell phone towers operated by police which trick your phone into routing calls through it), will Houston PD, Fort Worth PD, Texas DPS, and other Texas agencies we don't know about who own those devices start getting warrants, too?Houston PD doesn't even tell local prosecutors when they use the device, much less seek warrants from a judge. But that approach now diverges significantly from federal practice. Can it be sustained?The Texas Legislature this year failed to pass legislation by Rep. Duane Bohac and Sen. Craig Estes which would have installed a warrant requirement in state law. But there's an argument the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution requires a warrant, anyway. So, with the feds backpedaling on the question in the face of numerous court challenges, Texas agencies…
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7 Year Sentence in Investor Ponzi Scheme
James Hurst Miller Jr., 67, Paso Robles, California, the former president of the Atascadero-based Hurst Financial Corporation, to 84 months in federal prison for misappropriating millions of dollars that victims invested in Central Coast real estate projects and for helping a real estate developer defraud a bank. Miller’s case is related to that of Kelly […]
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Government Pursuit of Newman and Chiasson Comes to an End
Judge Shira Scheindlin granted summary judgment in favor of Todd Newman and Anthony Chiasson yesterday, closing the final door on the government’s unsuccessful pursuit of criminal and civil insider trading charges against the two hedge fund managers. Since we reported on Newman and Chiasson’s motion for summary judgment last week, the SEC wrote to Judge Scheindlin and said the Commission did not oppose the motion “[i]n light of the particular circumstance of this matter” although the SEC also stated that it did not agree with “all of the arguments contained in the Defendants’ memorandum of law.” Our earlier reporting on the cases...
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Looking closer at (unexpected?) states investing more in incarceration than higher education
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$4.3 Million Settlement in Wrongful Death Lawsuit
A Chicago woman was struck and killed by a city bus in 2009 as she was crossing the street in the crosswalk. Now, her Estate has settled with the city bus authority for $4.3 million. The woman, a mother of …The post $4.3 Million Settlement in Wrongful Death Lawsuit appeared first on Colorado Springs Accident Attorney | Quality Legal.
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Obama Says US Will Tackle Prescription Drug Abuse
The New York Times reporting on President Obama’s visit on Wednesday October 21, 2015 to West Virginia is in this article entitled “US Will Tackle PrescriptionDrug Abuse.” In the article, it notes that: “Experts say few prescription drug health care providers are properly trained to safely prescribe painkillers, while access to medication-assisted treatment for addicts is too difficult.”President Obama's visit to West Virginia comes as politicians are grasping for a policy response, including presidential candidates in both parties. Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has laid out a $10 billion plan that promotes treatment over incarceration. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has visited drug rehabilitation centers and talked up his work to create drug courts at home that mandate treatment over jail time for non-violent offenders.Before leaving the White House, Obama ordered federal agencies that employ health care providers to offer…
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Are a lot more Americans smoking pot or are just a lot more now comfortable admitting they are?
The question in the title of this post is my reaction to this CNN report on new marijuana use research released yesterday. Here are the basics: A heck of a lot more Americans were toking up in 2012-13 than 10 years before -- and not for medical reasons, either --...<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/MarijuanaLaw/~4/5cxNfAWugCk" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
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This Is Not About You Or Me
The prosecutor is mad at me. So I send her a quick email to apologize. It is true: I am sorry. I am sorry that she has been sick. I am sorry that her daughter has been sick.... Read More
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Roundup: Debating de-incarceration, deterrence, DNA, dogma, and death
Here are a few items which merit Grits readers' attention even if I don't have time at the moment to blog on each of them:Police chiefs for de-incarceration?Including in Houston and San Antonio ... this is an interesting development.More coverage of DNA mixture debacleNothing new here for Grits readers, but the Austin Statesman has picked up the story. One notices they linked to all the prior MSM coverage on the issue but not the Grits posts which broke the story and provided more detail than mainstream news sources.Few police officers feloniously killed, assaults on cops downReported the Houston Chronicle, "Officer deaths have fluctuated significantly but generally have trended downward during the past century." Further, " assaults against officers have dropped significantly, from 57,000 incidents in 2005 to the roughly 48,000 in 2014, even as the population has grown substantially." According to a national foundation which tracks police officer…
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EuGH C-362/14 ("Safe Harbor Urteil"): EDÖB veröffentlicht Hinweise zur Datenübermittlung in die USA
Als Folge des EuGH-Entscheids C-362/14 ("Safe Harbor Urteil") veröffentlichte der Eidgenössische Datenschutz- und Öffentlichkeitsbeauftragte (EDÖB) am 22. Oktober 2015 seine "Hinweise zur Datenübermittlung in die USA".Der EDÖB hält darin u.a. folgendes fest:Das aktuelle (US-Swiss) Safe Harbor Abkommen bilde "auch in der Schweiz keine genügende Rechtsgrundlage mehr für die datenschutzkonforme Übermittlung von Personendaten in die USA".Für die Datenübermittlung in die USA sollen vertragliche Garantien im Sinne von Art. 6 Abs. 2 lit. a DSG vereinbart werden. "Auch wenn damit das Problem unverhältnismässiger Behördenzugriffe nicht gelöst ist, kann auf diesem Weg das Datenschutzniveau verbessert werden".Personen, die von einer Datenübermittlung in die USA betroffen sind, "müssen [im Vertrag zum Austausch von Personendaten] klar und umfassend…
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Investigating the international drug dealer working with some death penalty states
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How Do Prostitution Stings Work?
What exactly constitutes prostitution in Minnesota, and how do prostitution stings work? Attorney Avery Appelman takes to the whiteboard to answer those questions in the second installment of Attorney Whiteboard Talk.
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Cop-killer suspect and "career criminal" was "perfect candidate" for drug diversion
Tyrone Howard, arrested for the murder of NYPD officer Randolph Holder, is described as a "career criminal" in this report by the NY CBS affiliate and Associated Press.Police said Howard's arrest record goes back to when he was 13. In sum, the allegations included assault, robbery and a total of nine for the criminal sale of a controlled substance. Howard also had a record of two arrests for the criminal possession of marijuana, and others for public lewdness, criminal trespass and conspiracy.Last year, Howard was placed in a drug diversion program meant to spare jail time for drug offenders to ease jail overcrowding. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said that move was an incredibly bad idea."If ever there was a candidate for someone not to be diverted, it's this guy," Bratton said. "He's the poster boy for not being diverted."Howard never showed up for the program anyway, WCBS 880's Rich Lamb reported.Easy enough to say after…
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