Free Republic

For a version with better formatting and working links, see http://www.atlassociety.org/brc/blog/2011/12/29/waiting-gershon “The law’s delay” is proverbial; there are snails sculpted on the flagpoles at the Supreme Court. But how long should a person sit in prison waiting for the court that convicted him to decide whether what he was convicted of doing was actually a crime? Bradley J. Stinn’s lawyers think he’s been waiting too long—and they’ve asked an appellate court to order Judge Nina Gershon to make a decision. On March 24, 2008, Stinn was convicted—after Judge Gershon removed a dissenting juror—of fraudulently inflating the financial data of the...

For version with links, see Source URLIf you’re one of the many Americans—including both Tea Partiers and Occupiers—angry at privileged people who seem to make private profits on socialized risks, you may feel a certain schadenfreude at the news that Rajat Gupta has been charged with a felony: Gupta is being prosecuted for his alleged conduct during the period when Goldman Sachs, of whose board he was a member, received a massive bailout from the United States Treasury, whose secretary, one of the leading advocates of bailing out financial businesses like Goldman, was a former CEO of Goldman. No doubt...

Should a lawyer be able to represent both a corporation and its employees? If a corporation’s executives and other employees can’t trust the company’s lawyer not to cooperate in their prosecution, how can anyone speak openly to that lawyer on behalf of the corporation? These, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers argued, were among the questions raised by the Third Circuit’s decision in United States v. Norris, which the Supreme Court this week declined to review. Morgan Crucible Co. had waived its attorney-client privilege as part of its cooperation with an antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice, and...