Ira Glass,  a reporter at the Chicago-based public radio show, “This American Life,” has been awarded the George Polk Award for Radio Reporting for an hour-long report on the Brunswick Circuit’s former chief Superior Court Judge Amanda F. Williams.  The report, called, “Very Tough Love,” unveiled severe punishments that Williams was meting out as the presiding judge in the circuit’s drug courts. Although the drug courts are intended to rehabilitate, not incarcerate, Glass’s report examined  Williams’ practice of sentencing drug court participants who relapsed and resumed their illegal drug use to an “indefinite sentence” that often included extended isolation from family, friends, counselors and attorneys until further order of the judge.  He also described her as “a judge many people truly fear.”

When Glass’ broadcast aired in March 2011, Georgia’s Judicial Qualifications Commission had already opened an investigation of Williams based on complaints that the judge had engaged in improper ex parte communications and, in an apparent conflict of interest, had appointed her daughter as a guardian ad litem in a child custody case. But ethics charges the JQC issued last November included Williams’ treatment of four drug court defendants whose experiences Glass reported in his broadcast.

Both Glass’ report and the JQC charges cite the case of Lindsey Dills, a 24-year-old drug court participant whom Williams jailed for an indefinite term. By last spring, Dills had spent five and a half years in Williams’ drug court, including more than a year in jail for cashing two forged checks totaling $100 on her father’s checking account, according to the JQC.

The JQC closed its investigation when Williams announced in December that she was retiring from the bench and agreed never to seek or hold judicial office again.

The Polk Awards, sponsored by Long Island University since their inception in 1949, honor the late CBS News correspondent George W. Polk, who was slain while covering the civil war in Greece in 1948.

Journalist Paul M. Barrett, an assistant managing editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, will speak about and sign his book, Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, at Peerless Book Store in Alpharetta tonight beginning at 7 p.m.  Barrett signs his book – which tells the story of how a gun constructed largely of hardened plastic became the firearm of choice for the majority of the nation’s law enforcement agencies – on the eve of the trial of former Glock CEO and general counsel Paul F. Jannuzzo in Cobb County Superior Court in Marietta.  During the 90s, Jannuzzo became the face of America’s gun industry.  He is facing trial on theft and
racketeering charges.

An excerpt:  “Across the United States, the preferences of local cops and county deputies have broad commercial consequences. The American civilian gun-buying population tends to gravitate toward what the professionals carry. For Glock, that translated into a bonanza.  The Glock 17 gained profit-making momentum in the fashion of a classic American consumer fad – one that, rather than fade away, kept expanding year after year. Venerable rivals, chiefly Smith & Wesson, ignored Glock at first and then scoffed at him. Eventually, they began imitating the Austrian invader, flooding the market with knockoffs. The Americans, to this day, haven’t caught up.”

The Southern Center for Human Rights has settled a lawsuit filed against state corrections officers at Hays State Prison. The suit stemmed from what SCHR lawyers had said were retaliatory beatings of four handcuffed inmates after they witnessed prison guards beating and punching unresisting inmates in one of the prison dorms.  Several inmates in the dorm in which the plaintiffs in the civil rights suit were housed yelled and banged on the window in an effort to stop the guards’ violent attack, according to the original complaint. As a result, a number of guard then descended on that dormitory and began attacking inmates, including the plaintiffs.

The Southern Center has more information on its website, http://www.schr.org/hayssettlement.

A former candidate for Cartersville mayor was sentenced in federal court in today for bank fraud in a $1.25  million mortgage fraud scheme, federal prosecutors in Atlanta said.

U.S. District Court Judge Charles A. Pannell Jr. sentenced H. Gregory Cordell, 46, of Cartersville to two years and three months in federal prison and ordered him to pay $1,005,804 in restitution,  federal prosecutors said.

A federal grand jury indicted Cordell, a Cartersville real estate agent and developer, in February 2009 in connection with a Cartersville home and six acres of land that Cordell had bought for $1.25 million in 2003, prosecutors said.
Cordell ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign against the incumbent mayor in 2006.

Although the seller had listed the property for sale at approximately $950,000, Cordell and the seller agreed to inflate the sales price by $307,000, prosecutors said. Cordell then secured an inflated mortgage from Washington Mutual and the additional funds were kicked back to him, without the bank’s knowledge, after the sale, prosecutors said.

In his loan application, Cordell also overstated his annual income, claiming that his portfolio of assets included several properties that he no longer owned, and also understated his financial liabilities, prosecutors said.

When Cordell refinanced the property in 2004, he included some of the same fraudulent claims on the refinance application, according to prosecutors. A month later, the house was destroyed by arson. Cordell’s insurer paid off the mortgage while the fire was under investigation. Cordell eventually sold the property but spent the $900,000 sale proceeds without reimbursing his insurer, prosecutors said.   Instead, Cordell spent the money on a private airplane, a Porsche, two Suburbans, two Mercedes Benz SUVs and other vehicles.

Cordell, “through his fraudulent actions and later, his extravagant purchases of airplanes and luxury vehicles, exhibited a self greed that he will now have to answer for,” said Brian D. Lamkin, special agent in charge of the FBI’s
Atlanta office.

Cordell’s insurance company secured more than a $1 million judgment against Cordell in connection with the fire.  In August 2008, he was indicted by a Bartow County grand jury on charges of arson, insurance fraud and loan fraud. Those charges are pending.

“Mortgage fraud involving fraudulently inflated sales prices contributed to the housing bubble that, when it burst, caused so much damage to the economy in Georgia and across the nation,” U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates of the Northern District of Georgia said after Cordell was sentenced.  “This defendant not only lied on mortgage applications to get over $1 million in loans, he fraudulently inflated the purchase price to get a bigger mortgage and then was paid a kickback under the table from the proceeds.”

U.S. District Senior Judge Hugh Lawson on Friday officially tossed out the guilty pleas of Brooks E. Blitch III, the former chief judge of the Alapaha Circuit, and Berrien L. Sutton, the circuit’s former state and juvenile court judge.

Brooks Blitch

In 2007, the two resigned their posts to end an ethics investigation by the state Judicial Qualifications Commission. They were subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury – Blitch on charges of conspiracy, honest services fraud, extortion, and making false statements, and Sutton on charges of conspiracy and honest services fraud. In 2009, Sutton pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit honest services fraud in return for a prison sentence of a year and a day. Three months later, Blitch entered a guilty plea to a single count of honest services fraud in return for a probated sentence.

Blitch’s sentence prompted Lawson to scold federal prosecutors, given that Blitch had been the target of a three-year federal investigation. Lawson later probated Sutton’s sentence and that of the circuit’s former Superior Court clerk, at prosecutors’ request.

In 2010, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of former Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling that honest services fraud was applicable only when defendants were proven to have participated in a bribery or kickback scheme, Blitch and Sutton sought to have their convictions and their pleas overturned.  Federal prosecutors in Macon did not contest Blitch’s motion, although they did contest Sutton’s.  Last fall, U.S. Magistrate Judge Charles Weigle recommended that both the pleas and sentences be set aside.

Lawson’s order in Blitch’s case did not specify his reasons. But in dismissing Sutton’s case, the judge wrote that the indictment and stipulated facts set forth in Sutton’s plea agreement “do not describe a bribery or kickback scheme, and in Skilling v. United States 130 S.Ct. 2896, 2931 (2010), the Supreme Court held that honest services fraud theories other than bribery and kickback schemes are invalid. Further, the Court agrees that the mail and wire fraud charges in Count 1 [of the indictment] cannot stand on their own.”

Ed.’s note: Related article, Feds let former judge’s fraud conviction slide. Also from Daily Report’s Robin McDonald.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals  has affirmed a lower court ruling that a former Wall Street Journal reporter cannot be deposed by plaintiffs in a civil case against Goldman Sachs & Co. and compelled to reveal information that was not published in two articles he wrote and published in 2000 because his work is protected by New York’s journalist shield law.

The underlying case, Baker v. Goldman Sachs & Co., was filed by Janet and James Baker, who sought damages for financial advice Goldman provided during the 2000 sale of their company, Dragon Systems to Lernout & Hauspie in exchange for L&H stock that subsequently lost all its value.

Lawyers for the couple sought to depose former WSJ  reporter Jesse  Eisinger about two articles he wrote in 2000 about the then-pending deal. “We’re going to ask him to confirm what he says was done in the articles,” the Bakers’ counsel told U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones during a hearing on a motion to quash the subpoena, adding that Eisinger’s reporting  “proves or helps prove” some of the Bakers’ claims.

But Jones granted Eisinger’s motion to quash the subpoena, holding that Eisinger could claim the protection of New York’s journalist shield law and the Bakers had failed to overcome that privilege through “clear and convincing evidence” that the reporter’s testimony “would be critical and relevant” to sustaining their claim.

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The mother of a former seventh grader at a Clayton County charter school has sued the school district, two school officials  and a county deputy chief for what the suit describes as a “degrading strip search” of her son without either probable cause or “individualized suspicion.”

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, stems from improper strip searches last year by a Clayton County school resource officer of five students who were falsely accused by other students of having marijuana on school property.

The strip search of the seventh grader subsequently resulted in the firing of Officer Ricky Redding after he told two “totally different” stories about the strip search, and the suspension of the
school’s assistant principal, who approved the search,  according to the suit.  The assistant principal, Tyrus McDowell, subsequently resigned.

The strip search of the seventh grader, a student at Eddie White Academy in Clayton County, took place after three students suspected of having marijuana on school property  were strip searched. When no contraband was found, they falsely accused two other students of having the illegal drug, according to the suit.

School personnel then strip-searched the fourth student and, finding nothing, brought the plaintiff to the vice principal’s office, where his pockets and book bag were searched, according to the suit.

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Gainesville-based U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan S. Cole has announced that she will retire Sept. 1, and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia says it is seeking applicants for her replacement.  Applications must be submitted by the applicant and postmarked no later than March 9.

The minimum qualifications for appointment to the post require that an applicant be younger than 70,  a member in good standing of the highest court of a state for at least five years and have practiced law for at least five years (although substitute experience may include being a state or federal judicial officer, an attorney for a state or federal agency or, for two years only, a law clerk to a judge), and no relation to any judge on the U.S. District Court.

Other criteria are: candidates who are disciplined, hard-working and able to handle simultaneously a multitude of duties that involve firm time deadlines. They are also seeking candidates with “exceptional and demonstrated” writing, research and analytic skills.

A merit selection panel that includes attorneys and other members of the legal community will review all applicants and recommend five candidates to  the judges who sit on the Northern District bench for the final selection.

An FBI and IRS investigation will be conducted prior to any appointment. The post pays $160,080 a year.

For applications (copy here) and further information, contact Linda G. Cooke, Human Resources Manager, U.S. District Court, 75 Spring Street, Room 2013, Atlanta, GA  30303-3309, 404-215-1750.  All applications will remain confidential, unless the applicant consents to disclosure. The merit selection panel’s deliberations also will remain confidential. Applicants are requested not to initiate contact with individual district judges regarding the vacancy during the merit selection process.

The U.S. attorney in Atlanta has announced that federal prosecutors are reviewing a YouTube video of a brutal beating of a 20-year-old Atlanta man to see if prosecution of his attackers is warranted under federal hate crime statutes.

Calling the video – which went viral shortly after it was posted on YouTube Jan. 4 – “appalling  and unacceptable in our community”, Sally Quillian Yates, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said that federal prosecutors, along with the FBI and the Atlanta Police Department “are working to determine if the actions portrayed in the video violate federal law, including the hate crime statute.”

Yates said that the federal inquiry into “possible civil rights violations based on a person’s sexual orientation” is a priority of her office, as is combating violent gang activity in the long crime plagued Pittsburgh community near Turner Field where the beating took place. Yates urged anyone with information about the video and the beating it depicted to contact the FBI or Atlanta police.

Meanwhile, the beating victim has called a noon news conference today to tell his story. He was identified as a “black gay youth” in a news release issued by the H.I.P. HIV Intervention Project in Atlanta.  Calling the recording of the beating a “video of hate,” the intervention project news release stated, “We are in horror of the violent community act against an innocent young black same gender loving youth in the City of Atlanta… .”

The news conference – scheduled for noon at the city community center at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Hill Street, coincides with Tuesday’s National Black HIV/Aids Awareness Day.  National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day was founded by five national organizations more than a decade ago to encourage a national HIV testing and treatment initiative that focused on black communities.

To see video of the beating go to http://www.cbsatlanta.com/story/16690315/video-shows-gang-members-beating-gay-man.

Pictures from the 2/8/12 press conference by Brandon White, person self-identified as being the beating victim in the YouTube video, are on the Daily Report’s Facebook page.

A former police chief of Talbotton in Talbot County has pleaded guilty to a federal charge of making a false statement to a federal agent, federal prosecutors in Georgia’s Middle District in Macon announced today.

Former Talbotton Police Chief Michael Howard, 43, admitted during his plea hearing that last year he lied to a federal agent when he denied knowing that a known drug dealer had transported narcotics through Talbot County, according to Michael J. Moore, U.S. Attorney for Georgia’s Middle District.

According to federal prosecutors, an informant had told Howard that he had $15,000 and that he would be traveling through Talbot County in connection with a planned drug deal. The informant also asked Howard if he would be interested in assisting him by providing the informant with protection until the deal was consummated, prosecutors said.  Howard apparently expressed an interest in the FBI informant’s offer but ultimately turned it down, telling the informant that he was off duty and not wearing his uniform and so could not be of any assistance in running interference for him, federal prosecutors said.

Howard faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine as high as $250,000. He is scheduled to be sentenced April 25.

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