[Outline] Double-jeopardy rules almost certainly prohibit settling a federal case and then prosecuting it again in federal court.
Alex Acosta did a bad job on the Jeffrey Epstein case. This column was nearly finished when news broke Friday that he would resign as labor secretary. I was going to argue that his lapses did not justify joining the nakedly political mau-mauing by Democrats who have no interest in exploring the behavior of Democrats who are neck-deep in a monstrous pedophile’s activities. My friend Jennifer Braceras has ably addressed that point in a Washington Examiner column. I was also going to add that I’d shed no tears if President Trump forced Acosta out ‐ easy for me to say, since I think (a) he should never have been nominated in the first place, and (b) his commitment to Trump’s deregulation agenda has never been sufficiently ardent.
Under the circumstances, I’ll spare you a few hundred words of critique on Acosta’s indecorous performance. Instead, to cut to the chase, I do not believe we can yet total up the wages of the sweetheart deal he cut for Epstein while he was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida (SD-Florida). The commentariat is glibly assuming the courts will give the feds a second bite at the apple by allowing the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) to prosecute the charges that Acosta forfeited. I don’t think so.
Double Jeopardy
On Monday, Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that his office has now charged Epstein. While the SDNY indictment may be new, Epstein’s crimes are not. They are the same offenses from which Acosta agreed to spare Epstein from federal prosecution if he pled guilty to state prostitution charges ‐ which Epstein proceeded to do, in reliance on Acosta’s commitment. There is thus a very good chance, based on the Constitution’s guarantee against double jeopardy, that the SDNY case against Epstein will be voided by the SD-Florida non-prosecution agreement (non-pros).
To be sure, the SDNY has a counterargument, and it will be vigorously made. It has two components. First, there is language in the non-pros that appears to limit the agreement to SD-Florida, to wit: "prosecution in this District for these offenses shall be deferred in favor of prosecution by the State of Florida" (emphasis added). Here, "deferred" effectively means forfeited ‐ the same effect for double-jeopardy purposes as a conviction or acquittal ‐ because of Epstein’s compliance with the requirement that he plead guilty in the state case. Second, there is jurisprudence in the Second Circuit (which controls in the SDNY) holding that one federal district’s agreement does not bind another.
Therefore, prosecutors will argue that the 2007 SD-Florida non-pros does not bar a 2019 SDNY indictment arising out of the same conduct and charging the same offenses.
I’m skeptical . . . and I think the SDNY is, too, notwithstanding the brave face prosecutors put on this week. They have carefully drafted an indictment far narrower than the SD-Florida’s contemplated case. If prosecutors really believed that there was no double-jeopardy problem, they’d have no such hesitation: They’d throw everything the FBI ever had at this sociopath. They know they are on thin ice.
I suspect it is too thin. There is a great deal in the non-pros that cuts against the suggestion that it was limited to the SD-Florida. Moreover, unlike Professor Jonathan Turley (among others), I believe the Supreme Court’s recent double-jeopardy ruling ‐ in the Gamble case (addressed in this column), which involved the "dual sovereignty" doctrine ‐ hurts, rather than helps, the SDNY’s position.
Andrew C. McCarthy, July 13, 2019, National Review Lawfare is the using of the legal system to maintain a two-tier system of justice where the person with the most money and the best legal team can make the justice system seem unfair. An example of the use of lawfare is the O.J. Simpson case. Another example is the Epstein plea deal in the Southern District of Florida. The plea deal was designed to prevent another jurisdiction from prosecuting a case under double jeopardy argument. This article presents a pessimistic view for Epstein being prosecuted in New York for the crime of human trafficking of minor girls .
#1
Nobody has any dirt on him after his plea deal? He's been squeaky clean since then?
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/14/2019 10:40 Comments ||
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#2
The double jeopardy off ramp allows a lot of virtue signaling and “if only we could “ comment but it avoids having his tape library see the light of day. The whole thing has a Hoover—Esau’s feel to it. We will wonder who had starring roles ....besides Billy Jeff
#5
Double-jeopardy rules almost certainly prohibit settling a federal case and then prosecuting it again in federal court.
A recent fiat by SCOTUS says however, you can be prosecuted in a state court for the same act you were prosecuted by the feds. Then again, it seems SCOTUS has no use for the Constitution as written, so why not try.
#6
But double-jeopardy can only apply if he's prosecuted for the same instances, right ? Epstein continued to pimp girls and produce photos and videos even after the deal with Acosta.
#7
Epstein continued to pimp girls and produce photos and videos even after the deal with Acosta.
Posted by Dron66046
Different victims, different case? BTW, a pox on Acosta, followed closely by an DoJ/IRS investigation. If he is found guilty of breaking the law, bribery, aiding & abetting human trafficking etc., perhaps his decision on Epstein can be tossed.
#8
How ironic that both sides in America's current cold civil war so frequently demonize Russia as a corrupt, evil, oligarchy with no rule of law.
Rule of law in America today is not so weak as in Russia, but it is weak nonetheless.
And rule of law is weak and fraying here precisely because our government, like Russia's government, has effectively become an oligarchy.
Epstein is a lowlife parasite who has wormed his way inside of the American oligarchy, and now the oligarchy is protecting this vile specimen. He's one of their own. They enabled him, and they now will ensure that his and their crimes go unpunished.
#9
Ref #8: Epstein is a lowlife parasite who has wormed his way inside of the American oligarchy, and now the oligarchy is protecting this vile specimen.
#13
Alex Acosta did a bad job on the Jeffrey Epstein case.
At least that's what some might say. I think he did exactly as intended.
AFAIAC, if he did it again after the deal, the feds get to go at him again. And I think the case will need to be overseen by a truly impartial independent prosecutor (or ten) while it's happening, if there is such a thing.
[Jpost] For more than a year, a young Nigerian girl has become a de facto poster child ‐ a lovely human face gracing the story of Nigeria’s persecuted Christians. Her name is Leah Sharibu, and she has been held captive for more than a year by Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... terrorists. It has been widely reported that Leah remains in captivity because she refuses to deny her Christian faith and convert to Islam.
Leah’s mother recently visited Washington, DC, where I had an opportunity to speak to her about her daughter, and about her own tireless efforts to see Leah released.
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Posted by: trailing wife ||
07/14/2019 00:00 ||
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Click through to read this for an in-depth look at what Xi really believes and what he wants. It's dry.
[PalladiumMag] One of the most striking aspects of this speech is the language Xi Jinping invokes: party members must have "faith" (xìnyǎng) in the eventual victory of socialism; proper communists must be "devout" (qiánchéng) in their work; and Party members must be prepared to "sacrifice" (xīshēng) everything, up to their own blood, for revolutionary "ideals that reach higher than heaven" (gémìng lǐxiǎng gāo yú tiān).
Behind this religiously charged language is a man deeply worried that the cadres of his generation are not prepared to make the sort of sacrifices their parents and grandparents did for China’s revolutionary cause. Xi’s verdict is that such people do not have enough faith in the "eventual demise of capitalism and the ultimate victory of socialism." Their "views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism," leading them to doubt that "socialism is bound to win." This has practical consequences. The cadre without communist convictions will act "hedonistically" and "self-interestedly." Worst of all, he might begin to believe "false arguments that we should abandon socialism" altogether.
For Xi, this would be a grave betrayal of the Party’s heritage. The Communist Party of China is tasked with "building a socialism that is superior to capitalism" whose economic and technological prowess will give it "the dominant position" in world affairs. And though Xi asserts that this is inevitable, "the road will be tortuous." Party members must fiercely fend off ideological attacks on socialism with Chinese characteristics. The most pressing ideological problems identified in this speech are two ’false arguments:’ First, that the mass death, cruelty, and poverty of Maoist China undermines the credibility of the Party leadership today, and second, that socialism with Chinese characteristics is not really socialism at all.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
07/14/2019 00:00 ||
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#1
Party members must be prepared to "sacrifice" (xīshēng) everything, up to their own blood
#2
Interesting. I always saw Xi's State-Corporate machine as a kind of Taoist fascism. A come-what-may, pig-headed policy of expansion of capital and resources to the ends of the earth, in search of some abstruse idea of perfection.
What does Marx have to do with Zhongnanhai?
Very little. One must understand that all 'isms' are ultimately semantic excuses. Justifications and banners to unite the gullible masses behind some historic ideal or icon. What worked for a sick and beaten down China after Britain and Japan were through with her, was the 'revolutionary' theme.
Today, there's no revolution. It's a police state, like most other large states. They, like China claim to be based on true liberal socialist ideals, but are they ? In fact, there can be no such thing as a liberal state without the idea of 'res publica' as the substratum of Government.
Anything like China leads to heavy handedness and near fascist coercion. Ping's calls for faith and sacrifice are more attempts to reinforce the resolves of both the 'in-on-it' oligarchs and the loyal fascist gendarmerie towards a bitter time that has come their way. The circumlocution around marxist themes and merging Chinese ethos with communist ideal is just filibuster. It doesn't mean anything anymore, except a public relations exercise. I doubt Xinping ponders the specifics of the communist ideal himself, he seems to only care about "One nation under heaven". Now that's a typical, crude Chinese ideal.
All the domestic and external policies of China so far have been extremely materialist, with no care for the environment or even their own future generations, which the party sees as more fodder for the machine. It has spread and prospered unchecked, only thanks to the self obsessed, navel gazing democracies of the post-war world. It went on in its path to greatness because it said "Fuck Democracy" and thundered ahead at the cost of it's people, who by now must be quite expectant of the returns in their investment.
But thanks to a disruptive force growing called majoritarian government (that seeks to reverse pacifist, pansy policies of earlier regimes) in the world And it's everywhere, from the US to Italy and India , leaders are making changes to secure the continuity of resources and capital for their own people, and China sees it's momentum built on imaginary achievements and bullying others challenged.
In short, time has come for China to put their money where their bullshit spewing mouth is.
[Genesius Times] After being horrified by the ICE detention facility parking lot last year, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been stricken with PTSD as ICE facilities have popped up everywhere across the country.
"At the grocery store; at the hardware store. Trump is putting these ICE detention centers everywhere and it’s horrifying!" Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview.
Genesius Times investigators have found that the living conditions of these new ICE detention centers are atrocious with freezing temperatures and very little room.
"It’s inhumane. We need to release these immigrants into the general population!" Ocasio-Cortez added.
It is estimated that there are 1 million of these new ICE detention centers across the country.
"What kind of world do we live in that allows this type of thing?" Ocasio-Cortez added. "It’s like a big national concentration camp!"’
One immigrant was asked how he felt of the detention facility. He answered, "It’s a little run down, but it’s nice to be able to get ice on a hot day like today."
[Washington Examiner] A federal appeals court allowed a Trump administration rule that would cut Planned Parenthood funding to go forward while it considers the rule at greater length.
A panel of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday denied a motion to restore a lower court injunction of the administration's Title X rule, allowing it to take effect until the full panel of judges decides whether to stop or allow the full implementation of the rule.
"We are greatly encouraged to see the Ninth Circuit rule in favor of allowing President Trump’s Protect Life Rule to take effect while it continues to be litigated," said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group the Susan B. Anthony List.
Trump's rule, which would prevent Title X family planning funding from going to abortion providers or to clinics that refer patients to abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood facilities, has been in litigation since its March introduction.
Thursday's decision comes after abortion rights groups won a temporary halt to the rule on July 3 after a panel of three Republican judges in late June allowed the rule to go into effect, overruling a federal judge in Washington who, in April, blocked the Title X rule.
[American Thinker] This summer, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four turns 70 years old, and that anniversary has prompted a surfeit of articles analyzing the book and its continuing relevance to our age.
There is no doubt that the book is one of the most consequential political novels ever written and ought to be on the reading list of every conservative -- not because Orwell was himself a conservative (he remained a man of the Left until his death), nor because the dystopian world that Orwell described turned out to be prophetic.
"The image of a boot stamping across the human face," in Orwell's memorable phrase, is an accurate depiction of present-day North Korea or China, but is not really an apt description of the U.S. or Western Europe, societies that have fallen into the kind of soft despotism described by Alexis de Tocqueville, but well short of the dystopian nightmare foreseen in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
However, the novel remains prescient in its depiction of two key elements of modern-day political correctness conceived of and promoted by the Progressive Left: the war on language and the war on memory.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell focuses on an individual living in "Oceania," a socialist society comprising the present-day nations of England and the Americas. In the novel, Oceania is abandoning standard English, which is referred to as "Oldspeak," and is adopting "Newspeak," a limited vocabulary designed to restrict thought.
Orwell understood that words enable thought and thought enables action. If there is no word for something, it makes it hard to think about it. This is an ancient insight -- the Bible speaks reverently of "The Word."
#3
Aesop, Orwell, once you get a drift of human behavior, it really doesn't change. Orwell figured out rather early what power and the concentration of power leads to in the modern world. BTW, the founders thought the same thing which is the reason for the separation of powers among the branches of the national government and between the states and national government. That's an arrangement that the Judiciary has been attacking in its assumption of authority and power that was never intended.
#5
Of course Orwell was liberal. Many think of him as an atheist and rebel, like Hitchens, seeking to find common ground with his genius. I believe he was more christian than christians try to be, and never knew it. He did hate the roman catholic creeds anyway, and saw the same bureaucratic bullshit in organized religion as in any other political committee.
Any liberal of Orwell's kind would probably see the 'liberals' of today as bloody fools, anarchy cultists with zero understanding, free time and money on their hands. If Marx met AOC for example, he'd rip his manifesto to shreds and stomp on it. Liberal thinkers have appropriated his legacy to spell out 'Big Brother' and its connotations with national security agencies Poor, desperate bastards and surveillance. But that's the problem with so many supposed 'thinkers', lauded by committees and rulers as visionaries because their enterprise borrows from unreal doctrine to gain acceptance. These thinkers can opine on utopias and possible outcomes of theoretical prescriptions to be inserted in legislation, because it's easy to think in terms of 'the written word.' Scholars and academics, have so very little connect with real life and almost always die adamant, narcissistic old farts.
What the Bible teaches is that it's the spirit behind every word that is more important. Because word is thought expressed and thoughts originate in spirit(or mind, if you're so inclined). An evil spirit expressing seemingly kind, generous words and humanist theories still aims to wreak havoc by supplanting mankind. And you know the spirit by it's fruits. So if it has once produced mayhem and destruction, the result the second time round, with revised theories and new words won't be any different. For example, the first evil spirit that controlled mankind and taught us about 'Big Government' and globalism was in Babylon.
It was Nimrod who united every known tribe into constructing the first self licking ice-cream cone. His administration taught them government - the so called social compact, and the enslavement of man by other men. And every organization, bureaucracy and committee today swears by its efficacy.
America is not yet a dystopia, only because there still have to be people there who believe in the first word, from God. The Bible.
Newspeak is everywhere, and the goal is exactly as Orwell predicted: to restrict thought by declaring certain ways of thinking to be culturally and even legally unacceptable.
We see this in Ontario's ridiculous tranny legislation that compels the use of Newspeak.
We see it in the ubiquitous use of the bullshit, nonsense-on-stilts neologism undocumented that has displaced the clear and universally-understood, standard legal term used in the statutes, illegal alien.
We see it in the complete degradation of the word diversity, to the point where it denotes the absence of diversity.
"Tolerance" means intolerance.
"Progressive" denotes reactionary politics.
"Conservative" describes radicalism and extreme market mania.
"Shareholder value" describes the practice of corporate insiders lining their own pockets.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
[Genesius Times] After being horrified by the ICE detention facility parking lot last year, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been stricken with PTSD as ICE facilities have popped up everywhere across the country.
[Washington Examiner] A federal appeals court allowed a Trump administration rule that would cut Planned Parenthood funding to go forward while it considers the rule at greater length.
[American Thinker] This summer, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four turns 70 years old, and that anniversary has prompted a surfeit of articles analyzing the book and its continuing relevance to our age.
