Three Felonies A Day Notes - p1-25

Book Title: Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey A. Silverglate.

Praises for "Three Felonies a Day":

• Exposes serious abuses and convictions of innocent people in federal cases.
• Reveals the expansion of federal statutes that criminalize practices no rational citizen would view as illegal.
• Everyone is vulnerable to out-of-control prosecutors.
• Shows how federal prosecutors have conceived of punishment without crime.
• Lays out the terrifying threat to human rights posed by vindictive federal prosecutions.
• Chronicles federal prosecutors’ vindictive enlistment of opaque criminal prohibitions to snare the unwary and to stunt civil society.
• Argues that federal criminal law is so comprehensive and vague that all Americans violate it every day, meaning prosecutors can indict anyone at all.

Siobhan Reynolds and the Pain Relief Network (PRN):

• Reynolds' husband suffered chronic pain and found a doctor, William Hurwitz, willing to provide relief.
• Hurwitz was indicted, and Greenwood, unable to find another specialist, died as a result of the federal government’s crackdown.
• Reynolds founded PRN to raise awareness of ill-defined laws restricting physicians from administering adequate pain medicine.
• A prosecutor sought to gag Reynolds from making “extrajudicial statements” about the Schneider prosecution but was denied by the district court.
• Reynolds was issued a grand jury subpoena demanding a wide array of documents, financial records, and communications.
• After Reynolds refused to comply with the court order, she was fined $200$ each day. Then she had to turn over thousands of documents the government demanded.
• The Supreme Court refused to intervene. Reynolds decided to disband the organization because pressure from the US Department of Justice made it impossible to function.

Dr. Peter Gleason:

• A psychiatrist specializing in pain and sleep-related disorders.
• Indicted for recommending the drug Xyrem to other physicians for uses not officially approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
• He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to a $25$ fine and one year of probation. Deprived of the total vindication for which he yearned and which he deserved, Gleason buckled under the accumulating burden and hanged himself.

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks:

• WikiLeaks made 2010 a landmark year for the exposure of government secrets.
• American authorities searched for a criminal law arguably violated by Assange.
• The Department of Justice homed in on the 1917 Espionage Act to find him guilty.

Humanitarian Law Project:

• The criminal ban against providing “material support” to organizations listed by the government as “terrorist” groups is an often-used tool in the post-9/11 “war on terror.”
• The Humanitarian Law Project, a human rights group, challenged the government’s extraordinarily broad and vague definition of the phrase “material support.”
• The Supreme Court ruled that pure speech might qualify as “material support.”
• The wide-sweeping statute could be inadvertently violated, even by those who laid the groundwork for the current “war on terror.”
• Even former President Jimmy Carter’s election monitoring team could be prosecuted for meeting with and advising Hezbollah during the 2009 Lebanese elections.

“Honest services” Fraud:

• The 28-word statute had enabled federal prosecutors to go after all kinds of public officials and private businessmen for depriving those who elected or hired them of their “honest services.”
• All nine justices agreed that the statute was unconstitutional as it was being enforced, because it failed to define the central term “honest services,” and what conduct the statute required or prohibited was hardly intuitive.
• The majority was prepared to effectively rewrite the statute by limiting prosecutions to cases involving bribery and kickbacks.

Massachusetts Political Corruption:

• Dianne Wilkerson, a Massachusetts state senator, accepted a cash payment from an FBI informant and received a three-and-a-half-year sentence.
• Salvatore F. DiMasi, former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, was under indictment for honest services fraud, conspiracy, and extortion.
• DiMasi’s predecessor, Thomas M. Finneran, had also been federally indicted, for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Options Backdating:

• Erik Lie, a University of Iowa finance professor, published a paper demonstrating that it was extraordinarily common for public companies to grant stock options to their executives very shortly before marked increases in the stock price.
• James J. Treacy, the former chief operating officer of Monster Worldwide, was sentenced to two years in prison for improperly accounting for backdated options on his company’s books.

The Case of Prabhat Goyal:

• Alex Kozinski, the libertarian-inclined chief judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reverse the convictions on all fifteen counts, and declared Goyal innocent, thus prohibiting the government from trying again.

Report "Without Intent":

• In May 2010 an “odd couple” alliance of the conservative Heritage Foundation and the liberal National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) published “Without Intent."
• The report found that of the 446 nonviolent, nondrug-related criminal laws presented in the 109th Congress, more than half lacked a requirement that a defendant act with criminal intent.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

• Convicted and sentenced to a prison term of six years after the expiration of an earlier eight-year sentence.
• Khodorkovsky was charged with embezzling all of the oil—some 350 million metric tons—produced by their company, Yukos Oil, over a six-year period (1998–2003), despite the fact that no oil was found to be missing.
• There is, to be sure, a vast difference between the Russian and American systems: the organizations within American civil society have been able to operate here without fear of imprisonment, and occasionally American courts or presiding judges point out that the Justice Department emperor too often wears no clothes.