ISBA Bar News

February 2008

Attributions

It's been said. . .

"5. Some sentencing judges used to take the Supreme Court seriously, but that got harder and harder beginning with and following Apprendi …"
From U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf's  (Neb.) top ten list of problems created by U.S. Supreme Court criminal ­ decisions this decade, posted at http://osjcl.blogspot.com/

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"9. You don't need experience in actually sentencing people in order to totally screw up the law of sentencing. It is telling and painfully obvious that not a single Justice ever had to look a federal defendant in the eye while not knowing what law to apply."
Another entry from Judge Kopf's Letterman-style Top Ten list, which Kopf describes as "with tongue partly in cheek"

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"It's astonishing, absolutely astonishing. No one had given her a chance."
Political consultant Don Rose on the primary election victory of Anita Alvarez, defeating five other candidates to become Democratic nominee for Cook County State's Attorney; if elected in November, she would be first woman  and first Hispanic to hold the office

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"As the company's lawyers began turning over rocks closer to home, however, they discovered what could be called A Nightmare on E-mail Street."
The New York Times, describing how Eli Lilly Co. discovered that one of its own attorneys, not the ­government, ­mistakenly leaked confidential information in a $1 billion suit over the drug Zyprexa; the attorney's email address book had two people with the same last name – her co-counsel and a Times reporter