It's difficult to make me feel sympathy for convicted sex offenders, but Broward County Florida is doing its best.

Following the lead of other cities and counties, Broward County Click here for restaurant inspection reports commissioners last week enacted tougher restrictions for unincorporated areas. Sex offenders won't be able to live within 2,500 feet of schools, parks, playgrounds or school bus stops.

It's difficult to find a location in Broward County that isn't within 2,500 feet (almost half a mile) of some school, park, playground, or bus stop.  So difficult that newly released offenders are now forced to live "beneath a roadway overpass, overlooking a canal, surrounded by broken glass and forced to sleep with a stick to beat back rats."

It seems Broward is attempting to duplicate the feat of Miami-Dade County, which has so restrictively "zoned" its population of offenders that all are forced to live beneath the Julia Tuttle Causeway Bridge: current population fifty-two men and one woman.

Of course the unstated purpose of these laws is to force newly released sex offenders to move to other parts of the state, where they will become Someone Else's Problem.  Since the Supreme Court has held in cases like Smith v. Doe that even the most draconian living restrictions on sex offenders can be classified as non-punitive, public safety measures, we have the odd situation where a de facto sentence of exile (the only alternative being to live underneath a bridge) is held to be entirely legal, even though a de jure sentence of exile, if imposed by a court, would be reversed as unconstitutional.

Bridget Lee came within metaphorical inches to being convicted of murdering her baby.  A baby that was not, in fact, murdered.  It was stillborn.

Alabama authorities plan to review as many as 100 past forensic cases by a medical examiner whose botched autopsy of a baby led a judge to throw out a murder charge against the mother.

Circuit Judge James Moore on Thursday dismissed the case against Bridget Lee, a 34-year-old church pianist who spent nine months in jail after being charged with her child's death in 2006. An initial autopsy found that the baby was suffocated.

And on that basis Lee, a mentally ill woman who appears to have panicked on giving birth to a dead baby under less than ideal circumstances, was charged with murder.  Lee's decision to hide her stillborn baby, rather than taking it to a hospital or the police, was foolish indeed.

But worse than foolish was the handling of forensic investigation by medical examiner Corinne Stern.  Dr. Stern turned a case of prenatal pneumonia into strangulation and suffocation.

Evidence during the hearing showed six different forensics experts found the baby died of pneumonia caused by an infection and was stillborn. What Stern thought were bruises were actually signs of decomposition.

I don't even play a doctor on tv, but I have enough passing familiarity with the science to venture that, perhaps, the doctor didn't perform a proper autopsy at all.  The judge seems to agree.

The judge said in 30 years of law practice he had never seen an expert make a mistake so bad. He praised District Attorney Chris McCool for listening to a defense expert who raised the first red flags about the flawed autopsy.

"What has happened in this courtroom today is absolutely unprecedented," said [Alabama Circuit Judge James] Moore.

One hopes that Judge Moore is referring to the autopsy, rather than the prosecutor's decision to to re-examine the evidence and drop the charges, but in either case, it was commendable on the part of McCool.

Now, will prosecutors in the other Alabama cases on which Dr. Stern worked be so open-minded, or will they treat them as do their neighbors in Mississippi?

Step 1: Commit securities fraud.

Step 2: Lie to court and the SEC to avoid trial, claiming terminal colorectal cancer.

Step 3: ???.

Step 4: Profit.

The problem with lying to a court is that you may have to keep living the lie.  For instance, if a defendant seeks to avoid trial on the false ground that he suffers from metastatic colon cancer, eventually the defendant will have to get around to dying of cancer.

Evidently Howard Richman couldn't bring himself to take that step.

Howard P. Richman, the former senior vice president of regulatory affairs at Biopure Corp., pleaded guilty in US District Court in Boston to a count of obstruction of justice, averting a criminal trial.

He admitted he forged a letter and an affidavit from a doctor saying he had cancer and went so far as to pretend to be his treating physician in a phone conversation with his attorneys.

The misrepresentations prompted a judge in July 2007 to end a suit by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Richman's codefendants settled without trial, paying the SEC fines in the neighborhood of $100,000.  Now Richman is facing a sentence of up to ten years, for the equivalent of, "Please excuse Mr. Richman from court.  He has the flu."

I suppose it's a good thing for Richman's lawyers that he didn't seek to avoid trial on grounds that the dog had eaten his defense team.

The phrase generally conjures up associations with Nazi Germany (where doctors euthanized the undesirable) and the Soviet Union, where politicians too popular for direct assault by Stalin were scheduled for operations, at the insistence of the Party, from which the victims never woke up.

The phrase "medical murder" is not generally associated with Louisiana.   But Radley Balko, at Reason, makes a compelling case that perhaps it should be.  Specifically, he examines the work of two medical examiners whose work was instrumental in placing Jimmie Duncan on death row for the murder of a child named Haley Oliveaux.  Duncan remains on death row today.  The only physical evidence linking Duncan to murder: bite marks found by medical examiners Steven Hayne and Michael West, which matched up with Duncan's teeth.  Hayne testified concerning the bite marks, using West's work to match them to Duncan, at Duncan's criminal trial.

Why might this be attempted medical murder?  Tape has surfaced of West jamming a plaster cast of Duncan's teeth, repeatedly, into the victim's face at the autopsy.  If the tape is accurate, West manufactured the bite marks that prosecutors used to send Jimmie Duncan to death row.

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Oh for a Stanley Sporkin.  Now a retired federal judge, the former head of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission was legendary for his tenacity in finding suspects who'd fled the country to escape prosecution.  About the only prominent figure to escape Sporkin was Robert Vesco, who wound up dying under house arrest in Cuba.

Surely the SEC, back in Sporkin's day, wouldn't have lost track of a fish as big as R. Allen Stanford, the head of Houston and Antigua-based Stanford Financial, which has set off bank runs overseas amid allegations it's nothing but a Ponzi scheme.

But it appears they have.

It's hard to get lost in America.  Oh it may be easy enough for a Ted Kaczynski to vanish for a while, living as a hermit, but billionaires leave big footprints, and leave cell phones, trophy wives, email accounts, and money trails in their wake.  Billionaires generally aren't willing to live in walled compounds in the failed state wilds of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At the very least, Stanford leaves more than a few anxious senators behind, pining for his return.

Stanford's business is headquartered on the Caribbean island of Antigua. In the last decade, Stanford and his companies have spent more than $7 million on lobbyists and campaign contributions in efforts to loosen regulation of offshore banks.

Among the top recipients: Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Congressman Pete Sessions (R-Texas), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of the members who took a trip to Antigua where he was entertained by Stanford.

Sen Cornyn's office has said the trip "was strictly a fact-finding trip," and at the time, "there was nothing untoward or unseemly" about Stanford Financial.

A fact-finding trip?  In Antigua?

Arthur Nadel, the manager of the Sarasota Florida based Viking, Valhalla, and Scoop hedge funds, went missing a couple of weeks ago amid allegations that his funds were nothing but ponzi schemes.  Nadel left only a suicide note, and frozen assets of about a million remaining from funds that once totalled 350 million.  At the time, we wrote about how trivial, even quaint, Nadel's alleged crimes seemed amid the bigger scandals, criminal and non-criminal, of Bernard Madoff, Lehman, GM, and the like.

It appears that Nadel read our thoughts.  In an effort to boost his public profile, Nadel turned himself in to the FBI this morning, ending a two week manhunt.  Like stunt pilot and alleged fraud artist Markus Schrenker, even Nadel's suicide note was a lie.  Yet here, again, Nadel disappoints.  Rather than engaging in DB Cooper style avionics and subterfuge with hidden motorcycles, as Schrenker did, Nadel just hid in a swamp.  Or a hotel room in Tampa, as the case may be.

Mike at Crime and Federalism, who originally alerted us to the Nadel story, writes often of psychopaths in business.  Not Norman Bates-style serial killers, mind you, but people utterly devoid of empathy and conscience just the same.  People wonder, on reading of psychopaths and the harm they wreak on their clients and co-workers, how the psychopath went down that path, or what went wrong?  What people should wonder is how to detect other psychopaths, and avoid doing business with them.

If anything about a psychopath in a suit (as Nadel and Schrenker may well have been) could be predicted, it's that he would run, leaving a suicide note to the remorse of his family and friends.  It's equally predictable that the psychopath would fail to follow through.

January 27, 2009, Update: Despite his suicide letter, it appears that Arthur Nadel is alive and well, and in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Funny how times change.  A google news search for Arthur Nadel, who disappeared on Thursday amid allegations his Valhalla Investment Partners LP hedge fund blew $350 million of its investors' money, reveals only 55 stories.  A year ago, this would have been on the front page of the Times of London.  The Sarasota Herald Tribune, the paper of record in the locality where Nadel's funds were based, reports on the story in its sports section.

Fund principal Arthur G. Nadel, a prominent player in Sarasota social and philanthropic circles, disappeared this week. His wife, Peg, filed a missing person report with law enforcement after finding a suicide note.

Investors — from individuals to the Sarasota YMCA Foundation — in the funds branded Viking, Valhalla and Scoop were stunned this week to learn they may be victims in what could become the largest investment swindle in Southwest Florida history.

Despite the carnage on Wall Street last year, investors were told that their investments had earned more than 8 percent as of November.

Some are already calling the case a "mini-Madoff," after Bernard Madoff of New York, who has been accused of creating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme that promised similarly large percentage returns.

Some might call placement of this story, which a year ago would have been one of the biggest investment swindles in history, not just southwest Florida history, in the sports section a mistake.  I consider it clever irony.  Considering the rides given to the public by CitiGroup, Fannie and Freddie, Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros, GM, Bank of America, and Bernard Madoff, Arthur Nadel's alleged misdeeds seem about as significant as the outcome of a big basketball game between high school rivals in southwest Florida.

Even the "missing" angle isn't that interesting.  After all, Arthur Nadel isn't a young, pretty white girl.  So how can this be news?

On reflection, just to make this post interesting even to me, I'm going to have to insert an image of a pretty girl.  I give you: a pretty girl on a bicycle.

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In the roughly six years I worked as a federal prosecutor, I never had a grand jury refuse my request to indict. Moreover, in that entire time — in which the feds sought between 5 and 10 thousand indictments in Los Angeles — I know of only one occasion on which a grand jury no-billed a case. (In that case, the INS — as it was still called — was trying to arrest a young man for deportation, and his mother released the family dog on the agents. The agents shot the dog. The grand jury concluded this chain of events did not merit prosecution for the mother, apparently.) My experience is not uncommon. It is notoriously easy to persuade grand juries that there is probable cause to indict. Hence the cliche referenced in the title of my post.

When a grand jury does no-bill a prosecutor, it's often dreadfully inconvenient. Usually one has to get approval from some officious higher-up (a Deputy Attorney General, in the case of the feds, I think) to re-present the case.

Wouldn't it be much more convenient to simply pretend that the grand jury had properly grasped the urgency of the government's case, and proceed as if the grand jury had returned a true bill?

Why, yes. Yes, it would. Take it away, Jefferson County, Oregon District Attorney's Office.

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Bernard Madoff apparently stole huge amounts of money in a Ponzi scheme that will have dramatic impact on many individuals and entities, and may even be of sufficient scope to have a perceptible impact on the economy at large. Today United States District Court Judge Gabriel Gorenstein reversed a magistrate judge's order detaining him before trial without bail, and set bail:

Federal District Judge Gabriel Gorenstein said Madoff, 70, must wear electronic monitoring, observe a 7 p.m-to-9 a.m. curfew and restrict his travel as conditions of his $10 million bail. He and wife Ruth were told to surrender their passports, and they put up their apartment, as well as homes in Montauk, Long Island, and Palm Beach, Fla., to guarantee the bail.

At The Corner, from which outrage occasionally emerges, I saw this:

A Despicable Decision [Larry Kudlow]

It was Federal District Judge Gabriel Gorenstein who released big-time, $50 billion scam-artist/fraud/crook Bernard Madoff. He is the one who did it. This ruling allows Madoff to stay out of jail, even though he couldn’t meet the original bail conditions that he provide four co-signers to his $10 million bond.

Write Judge Gorenstein. E-mail him. Call his office. (Contact info here.) Let him know what a terrible injustice he has done to every law-abiding citizen in this country, not to speak of the victims of this incredible fraud.

It is an outrage to me that Madoff is sitting back home in his $7 million Park Avenue pad after what he did to this country. What a joke. It is a complete and utter outrage.

Absent from Mr. Kudlow's outrage is any analysis of whether Judge Gorenstein's bail order comported with the rule of law.

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I wrestled for hours over a funny, witty, or at least acerbic opening to this post.  The best I could do is the headline above.  But there's nothing funny to say here.  Francisco Castaneda underwent months of torture.  His penis was amputated, and he died soon thereafter.  The Federal government is directly responsible.

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If you were going to commit armed robbery, despite the high risk of capture and usually low return, wouldn't you at least rob something better than the Dollar Tree. the selling point of which is that everything there is a dollar? What, did the robbers think that the Dollar Tree had an unusually good day?

Next time, print out robbery instructions from a more reliable site, ladies.

From the web page of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC.

From the Daily Telegraph:

Mr Madoff told senior employees of his firm on Wednesday that "it's all just one big lie" and that he was "finished", according to a criminal complaint filed on Thursday night by the US Attorney's office and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).

He allegedly went on to say that the business was "a giant Ponzi scheme" – a reference to Charles Ponzi, one of the greatest swindlers in US history – and estimated that the scheme had lost investors $50bn over many years – which would make the hedge fund one of the biggest frauds in history. When former energy trading giant Enron filed for bankruptcy in 2001, one of the largest at the time, it had $63.4 billion in assets.

"There is no innocent explanation," Mr Madoff said, according to the criminal complaint. He told the agents that it was all his fault, and that he "paid investors with money that wasn't there", according to the complaint.

Reportedly that's 50 billion dollars that weren't there.  I'll note that unlike other criminals we've recently discussed, Mr. Madoff was a law school dropout.

Two interesting, and timely, stories from the world of crime.

Value of items stolen by a gang of thieves in the greatest jewel heist in French history? $108 million.

Amount allegedly stolen from clients by New York attorney Marc Dreier? $380 million.

There is no word on whether the French thieves were able to lift the Pink Panther.  In any case, the French were clearly in the wrong line of work.

Via Overlawyered in part.

Via Washington Monthly I read this interesting Washington Post article on a flurry of pardon-related activity, and this amusing pardon scorecard. My office has received a few inquiries about applying for pardons; we've suggested that at this very late date, unless the applicants are vastly more influential than circumstances would suggest, they are out of luck.

Clinton's end-of-term pardons were appalling. Will Bush's be as bad? It's a bad moment to further tarnish the Republican party, and I'm hoping that will deter him from handing out lollypops to criminous fund-raisers and politicians. I'm also hoping he will avoid further commutations of federal sentences, which are unprincipled on several levels — especially from an administration that has argued vigorously that the federal courts should hew to the United States Sentencing Guidelines even after Booker rendered them advisory. Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence on the grounds that it was "too harsh" is disingenuous horseshit; Libby's sentence was a straightforward guidelines calculation of the sort that the administration has repeatedly pushed over the objections of touchy-feely "too harsh" objections from defense attorneys. If Bush meant that the conviction was invalid as a political prosecution — a debatable proposition — he should have said so.

The feds have elected not to charge Elliot Spitzer and will close the money-laundering investigation that led to revelations that he was frequenting expensive prostitutes while serving as Governor of New York.

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