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Founder and Top Executive for Fresno-Based Business American Labor Alliance Receive Multi-Year Prison Sentences Following Fraud Trial

homesafetytechpros — Mon, 05 May 2025 20:04:26 +0000

Fresno residents Marcus Asay and Antonio Gastelum were sentenced to five years in prison and two years in prison for committing a pension fraud scheme.

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Trump pauses enforcement of foreign bribery law, cites harm to ‘American economic competitiveness’

homesafetytechpros — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 19:02:46 +0000

White Collar Crime

Trump pauses enforcement of foreign bribery law, cites harm to ‘American economic competitiveness’

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 11, 2025, 3:24 pm CST

President Donald Trump with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, and Vice President JD Vance after being sworn in Jan. 20. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday that that generally pauses enforcement of a law that bars companies operating in the United States from bribing foreign officials.

The Feb. 10 order requires U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to formulate updated guidelines for enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that “prioritize American interests, American economic competitiveness with respect to other nations, and the efficient use of federal law enforcement resources.”

Bondi has 180 days to work on the guidelines and has the option of extending the period for another 180 days, the order said. During that time, Bondi should stop new Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations or enforcement actions, the order said. She is also required to review existing investigations and actions, taking action to restore proper bounds on enforcement. Bondi can determine whether an exception to the pause should be made in individual cases, however.

A White House fact sheet said “unpredictable FCPA enforcement” makes American companies less competitive. Overenforcement of the law also interferes with Trump’s authority to conduct foreign affairs under Article II of the Constitution, the document said.

Bondi issued a memo Feb. 5 that directs Department of Justice lawyers to prioritize Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prosecutions in which foreign bribery facilitated crimes of cartels and transnational criminal organizations, according to an analysis by Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer. The law firm also said the statute of limitations in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases “outruns the Trump administration,” meaning that a prosecution could be fair game after Trump leaves office.

Publications with coverage of Trump’s order include Reuters, CNBC, Fox News and the New York Times.

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Canadian courts are definitely different than American ones

homesafetytechpros — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 23:18:56 +0000

How do Canadian court systems and protocols differ from American ones? Let me count some of the ways.

1. Order in the court

I practiced in the Canadian courts for ages, and I have never seen a judge using a gavel in the courtroom. Yet there is not a caricature of a judge without a gavel in his hand. This must be an American creation.

I don’t know what the purpose of a gavel would be, in any event. The voice from the bench readily gets heard throughout. It’s not as if the courtroom is the size of Yankee Stadium. I believe the reason why the American judges have gavels is protection. They may not be Magnums, but I’ve seen these hammers, and a zealous litigant might think twice before lunging at the bench with his fingers.

2. What is a continuance?

Apparently, when American lawyers want to postpone or reschedule a hearing, they ask for a continuance. (I casually draw this conclusion after recently bingeing on Law & Order).

In Canada, we ask for an adjournment. This makes more sense to me, as you are more specifically asking the court to put the matter over—that is, to adjourn it. It also makes more sense to me because I am more familiar and comfortable with adjournment than continuance. Adjournment for me. Now let me continue.

3. Will counsel approach the bench

Also, no such creature in Canada. People watching from the body of the court might get the idea that the judge is having a private conversation with the lawyers to their respective detriment. In addition, I guess one party might have better ears than the other and thereby pick up the private conversation. He could then wink at his less-endowed opponent and all hell might break loose.

In Canadian courts, if the judge wants a private conversation with counsel, he recesses the court and says, “I want to see counsel in my chambers.” This then really gives the litigants a good reason to feel something secretive is going on behind their backs and their respective lawyers are trying to sell them out.

4. This comment will be stricken from the record

Another all-American feature. And an amusing one at that. We see a lawyer suggesting to a witness charged with attempted murder something improper and irrelevant like, “And I understand, sir, that you have an automatic firearm collection,” and after he cries “yes!” before the opposing lawyer gets a chance to object, he demands and the judge orders: “This testimony will be stricken from the record. The jury will disregard this evidence.”

I like this one the most. Here we have 12 people who are given the responsibility of determining whether a person goes free or possibly goes to jail—or worse. Yet the judge expects them to act like morons and willfully forget some of the juiciest testimony of the trial.

In Canadian courts, nothing ever gets stricken from the record. The judge may merely remind the jurors during his final charge that they should not take this evidence into account. I am sure no Canadian jury would even think of rendering their decision with this tainted evidence when asked to disregard it.

5. The king v. the people

In the United States, the prosecution side of a criminal case is apparently dealt with by the state’s inhabitants. In other words, the case will be designated something like People v. Brown or Texas v. Brown. (Once again, I casually draw this conclusion after recently bingeing on Law & Order).

In Canada, the people are replaced collectively and substituted by “the king.” The Latin designation is usually used, and so the court docket will read Rex v. Brown. Our prosecutors are even referred to as crown attorneys or simply as crowns.

South of the border, they’re district attorneys or DAs. I prefer the American system, as the Canadian one puts too much pressure on His Majesty the King. For example, if the culprit Mr. Brown decides to shoplift a tumbler of shampoo from a Walmart in Dallas, then it is the people of Texas who will prosecute him. When the knave Brown sees the docket reading The People of Texas v. Brown, he’ll no doubt get overwhelmed and think twice before committing another larceny.

All the people of Texas are certainly a massive force to face, more massive than even Walmart. But if he were to do the same thing in Edmonton, it would be Brown against the king. One-on-one. If he’s any sort of a hardened criminal, I doubt he’ll be put off by a septuagenarian gentleman across the ocean waiving his finger at him and saying, “Shame, shame.”

Furthermore, prosecuting thousands of charges a year must put a tremendous strain on the king. Imagine the busy schedule he has performing his monarchical duties, like traveling to New Guinea to watch tribal dances or attending state dinners from Ottawa to San Francisco. The last thing he needs is to get a call on his cellphone from some police officer in Edmonton asking, “Your Majesty, what do you want us to do with Mr. Brown?”

Even if Walmart might want the charges dropped, it is the king himself who is the aggrieved party, the victim so to speak. When that rogue snatched the shampoo from Walmart, little did he know His Majesty King Charles III might have to go next door to his wife, Queen Camilla, and say, “Excuse me, dear. Can I borrow your Head & Shoulders?” It would, therefore, only be fair for the loss to be spread among all the people as it is in the United States.

6. Garb

In the U.S., only the judges wear those black robes. Lawyers do not wear any specific outfit that would identify them as attorneys. In Canada, however, in the higher-court lawyers all don robes, white shirts with pointed ends and white tabs.

We also have our own entrance into the courtroom. Wearing the outfit allows us unconditionally to go through that door that says “Barristers entrance” on it. Thrilling actually. You Americans don’t know what you’re missing.

And our confrères in England also wear wigs, traditionally made of horses’ hair. The theory is that barristers still wear wigs because it represents the history of the common law, allowing for a visual separation of the law from those before it. Sounds convincing. Then again, I always thought the British were eccentric. I’d pass on that horses’ hair. I think we lawyers can still enjoy this visual separation by going through those aforementioned doors.

As I think about our respective court systems, they both have pluses and minuses. But what does bother me a bit is the burden on the shoulders of His Majesty. All I can say is, “God save the king.”

Marcel Strigberger, after 40-plus years of practicing civil litigation in the Toronto area, closed his law office and decided to continue his humor writing and speaking passions. His latest book is First, Let’s Kill the Lawyer Jokes: An Attorney’s Irreverent Serious Look at the Legal Universe. Visit MarcelsHumour.com and follow him at @MarcelsHumour on X, formerly known as Twitter.

This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

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Saving American democracy will require constitutional reforms and Supreme Court term limits

homesafetytechpros — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 22:09:28 +0000

U.S. Supreme Court

There is a widespread sense that American democracy is in danger. No form of government lasts forever, and it is foolhardy to believe that the United States cannot fall prey to the forces that have ended democracies in many other countries. The problems, to a large extent, stem from the choices made long ago in drafting the Constitution. But the situation has gotten much worse in recent years, in part because of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court.

I discuss this threat to democracy and ideas for constitutional reforms in my new book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, from which this column has drawn.

Confidence in the institutions of American government is at an all-time low. The Pew Research Center has been tracking public trust in government since 1958. It has gone from a high of 77% in 1964 to our contemporary 20%. In a poll in September 2023, only 4% of those surveyed said that the American political system “works well.” Especially individuals in their 20s and 30s are losing faith in democracy. A Brookings Institution study found that “29% of … young Americans say that democracy is not always preferable to other political forms.” Both Congress and the Supreme Court have unprecedented low levels of approval. At the same time, the country is more deeply polarized than it has been since Reconstruction. Few have the sense that the government can deal effectively with crucial issues, such as climate change or income inequality.

Although the causes of the threats to American democracy are complex, many of the problems can be traced back to aspects of the Constitution which are increasingly haunting us. The framers of the Constitution, out a distrust for democracy, wanted elites to choose the president and created the Electoral College. Never in the 20th century did the loser of the popular vote become president because of the Electoral College. But population shifts and partisan realignment have made this a regular occurrence in this century. It happened in 2000 and 2016, and it almost happened in 2004 and 2020. In the last election, if just 42,921 votes had changed in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, Donald Trump would have been reelected president, despite losing the popular election by almost 7 million votes.

To secure approval and ratification of the Constitution, the framers agreed on a compromise where each state would have two senators. When the Constitution was written, the most populous state (Virginia) had 12 times more people than the least populous state (Delaware). According to the 2020 census, the most populous state (California) has 68 times more people than the least populous state (Wyoming). In the last session of Congress, the 50 Democratic senators represented 42 million more people than the 50 Republican senators.

Changes in the rules of the Senate in the 1970s have made filibusters much easier and legislation much more difficult. Now it takes 60 votes to pass any bill other than for the budget. The result is that a minority of senators representing a small fraction of the population can block any legislation. This plays a key role in why it is so difficult to enact federal legislation.

Supreme Court rulings have deflated democracy

And the Supreme Court has made the problems of democracy much worse. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the court held that corporations can spend unlimited money from their corporate treasuries to get candidates elected or defeated. This has distorted our electoral system and bred cynicism.

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the high court declared unconstitutional a crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required jurisdictions with a history of race discrimination in voting to get preapproval before significant changes in their election systems. This was a very effective mechanism to prevent discrimination in voting. After it was struck down, some states, such as Texas and North Carolina, immediately implemented voting restrictions that had previously been denied approval.

In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Supreme Court said that federal courts cannot hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering. The House of Representatives was intended to be the one body created by the Constitution that was representative of the people. But partisan gerrymandering—where the political party that controls the legislature draws election districts—has become vastly more effective because of sophisticated computer programs and voter data. For example, in Pennsylvania, over several elections, the congressional elections in districts drawn by the Republican legislature resulted in Democrats receiving between 45 percent and 51 percent of the statewide vote, yet only winning 5 of 18 House seats.

All of this combines to create a serious threat to democracy. And these threats will remain regardless of who is elected president in November 2024.

But although the problems are grave, I believe that the situation is not hopeless. It is both possible and essential to cure the defects and save American democracy. There are many meaningful changes that can be done without constitutional amendments. The Senate can change its rules to eliminate the filibuster. Congress, by legislation, can end partisan gerrymandering for seats in the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court can end partisan gerrymandering altogether. The size of the House of Representatives can be increased to make it more democratic. New legislation can be passed to protect voting rights.

Constitutional amendments won’t come easy

Amending the Constitution is enormously difficult, but it’s not impossible. Virtually every flaw in the document can be fixed by constitutional amendment if there is the will to do so. Although amendments have been rare in recent decades, there have been times in American history when they have been more common.

As an example, I believe that a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on Supreme Court justices is possible. When the Constitution was written, average life expectancy was 36 years. From 1787 until 1970, the average tenure of a Supreme Court justice was 15 years. For those appointed since 1970 who have left the bench, the average tenure has been 26 years. Many of the current justices are likely to serve more than 30 years. That is too much power in one person’s hands for too long a period of time.

But I believe that term limits for Supreme Court justices, and certainly ones that would apply to the current justices, would require a constitutional amendment. It always has been understood that a Supreme Court justice has the position for life, unless the justice resigns or is impeached and removed. That is what Article III, Section 1 says: “The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour.”

There are some theories to the contrary. One is that Congress, by statute, could keep them as “justices” in the sense that they would retain their title and salary and could sit on courts of appeals and fill in when a justice is recused. But then they are not functioning as a justice in the way it always has been understood. They are a Supreme Court justice in name only.

A constitutional amendment to impose term limits is plausible because it has had bipartisan support. In the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, three candidates—Ben Carson, Rick Perry, and Mike Huckabee—supported term limits for justices. In opinion polls, a significant majority of the American people favor this.

There also is an alternative to a spate of separate amendments: After 200 years, it is time to begin thinking of drafting a new Constitution to create a more effective, more democratic government. It does not take much reflection to see the absurdity of using a document written for a small, poor and relatively inconsequential nation in the late 18th century to govern a large country of immense wealth in the technological world of the 21st century.

It may seem strange and frightening to suggest thinking of a new Constitution at a time of great partisan division. But that existed in 1787; the Constitution was just barely ratified in many of the states. The hope would be that those involved in the process would again rise to the occasion and in any event, their product would still need to be ratified.

I do not minimize the difficulty of significant change in any of these ways. But we must face the frightening reality of the country’s future if there are not major reforms. My hope is that looking at that abyss will be the impetus for beginning to realize the need for action and start the long-term process of making it happen.

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. He is an expert in constitutional law, federal practice, civil rights and civil liberties, and appellate litigation. He’s also the author of many books, including the forthcoming No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States (August 2024) and A Court Divided: October Term 2023 (October 2024).

This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

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Refuting the culture war on American libraries

homesafetytechpros — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 17:39:54 +0000

By Eldon L. Ham

My hometown Toulon, Illinois, is a small farm community of 1,200 souls about three hours southwest of the Chicago sprawl. During my youth, it featured five gas stations; four churches; three grocery stores and two doctors, which said something about gas, God and medicine in my 1960s rural America.

We also had one community library, and that made a great difference. There were two lawyers in town too and one courthouse on Main Street guarded by a genuine Civil War cannon in addition to our Toulon Public Library. The cannon is fired one time each year to start the Old Settlers Day parade, and in 2019, it even blasted the ashes of a beloved neighbor, Shirley, down Main Street and into eternity, just as she had wished.

I admired the lawyers and was determined to be one someday, but it was our library that first altered my life. I was born with an oft-misunderstood blood-clotting disorder called hemophilia. Its propensity to cause internal bleeding is life threatening, and it commonly damages joints, especially when not treated. There was no treatment in those old days, and there still is no cure. But long ago, my dad found something remarkable at our public library: hope.

Ours was an original Carnegie library, a local treasure built by the prescient steel magnate in 1914. My father discovered it in 1960 when I was 8 years old, and he was a factory worker at our local Kraft cheese plant.

He had missed out on college but loved reading. He found solace at that library, devouring books that featured Tom Sawyer, Scarlett O’Hara, history and world geography. He took many distant journeys through the writings of Emerson, Kipling, Churchill and Barbara Tuchman—one of his favorites. He was especially impressed by Tuchman’s take on the “shot heard round the world” beginning to Emerson’s Concord Hymn, which she called the best four lines in American literature. I memorized them years ago, just because.

Our Carnegie was a dignified brick edifice built for $6,000. It was an oasis for knowledge, not some bogus den of “literary filth” that today’s short-sighted cynics might pretend. I grew up two blocks north of that library in a two-bedroom house with one magical front porch swing. My dad often occupied that swing—always with a book.

The basic library was one giant room introduced by the massive desk of our town librarian and holistic health nut, Ella. It had a nostalgic aroma of wood and books, and every sound of footsteps or scooting chairs echoed off its high ceilings. Somehow the whole place managed to be quiet and loud at the same time.

Decades later I too found comfort not only in reading books but in writing them—largely inspired by my father and our library maven Ella. After many failed attempts, my first book was eventually published in 1997. It was researched almost entirely at the public library in Highland Park, Illinois, a congenial Chicago suburb that recently suffered through a widely reported 2022 Independence Day mass shooting.

There were virtually no public libraries in America before steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie built 1,689 of them from 1889 to 1923, many in rural communities. Carnegie, the wealthy industrialist immigrant known for U.S. Steel, Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Hall, had envisioned public libraries as an accessible portal to knowledge and distant places long before the internet.

Americans visit libraries more than we attend the movies, yet libraries have become recent targets for culture war politics. Nonetheless, most of us go because modern libraries are dynamic centers for learning, discourse and access to research and the internet. My own Carnegie library, planted in a vast sea of Midwestern corn surrounding the plaintive Spoon River, probably saved my life.

As a little boy with what doctors call hemophilia B, I had many bouts with unchecked swellings in my knees and other joints that kept me awake for days, suffering and often screaming into my pillow each night.

When my health deteriorated, my father consulted Ella, our local librarian and health nut, then he consumed every library book on health and nutrition that he could find. He decided to experiment on me with fresh vegetables, food supplements and vitamins. It did not cure me, but my healthier body began to recover a little faster and better. That likely saved me until new clotting factor treatments changed my life in 1972 when I was 20 years old.

Through a patchwork of loans, scholarships and luck, I made it through college at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. A mishap there once landed me in the local hospital, where I discovered a real hematologist for the first time.

Armed with medical science and renewed hope, I tackled law school at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, where I encountered still more libraries. One of them was called “the morgue.” It was located at my weekend part-time job: the Chicago Tribune newsroom. I was hired to run copy among the reporters and editors, a dream position. The quiet morgue was where the Trib stored thousands of clipped articles organized by topic and folded into wooden card catalog-style drawers.

After an economic downturn in the 1970s, much rural manufacturing left downstate Illinois. In 1985, my parents made the quantum leap from country living to Chicago, where I had settled in as a young lawyer.

My dad found work in the internal library of a large law firm (Schiff Hardin) with hundreds of lawyers in the monstrous Sears Tower, where he flourished and was revered by his boss and co-workers. At age 53, my mother courageously became a bank teller across the street, her first outside job. They took the bus to work together, being sure to arrive on “Toulon time,” which meant an hour early, just in case.

I married a suburban Chicago girl, who later worked as a librarian and teacher at our local middle school. She also ran the summer school program and joined our community library board—twice—all in the suburban town where our two children would grow up.

She stresses that modern libraries are not just about books. They are information centers and offer access to the internet for those who need it. After all, public libraries are one of the few places where users don’t have to pay anything or buy something.

Libraries are “uber-local,” a pulse of the community. They are a curator of resources, not some evil distributor of propaganda. Their books are carefully chosen for their worth, content, diverse viewpoints and community interests, not to indoctrinate or manipulate. Those books should be celebrated, debated or criticized but not banned.

My transplanted mom and dad eventually retired, and they died several years later. Toulon’s old Carnegie building still stands. But now, it houses part of the Stark County Historical Society.

The actual library moved to a newly built modern facility near the town’s health center. It offers books, computers, access to the internet and portals to far-away places. Its inviting fireplace and reading lounge are named for my parents: John and Dolores Ham. They are buried not far away.

I have now practiced law in Chicago for nearly 50 years. Once, when I stood at the Piraeus, the historic port of nearby Athens described by Plato and Socrates, I realized that my father, of all people, had already been there. Of course, he had. Thanks to the endless journeys that he had taken from Toulon’s Carnegie library.

Eldon L. Ham is a member of the faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he has taught since 1994. He is also the designated legal analyst for sports radio station WSCR in Chicago and is the author of five books on topics of sports history. For more information, visit his website at EldonHam.com.

ABAJournal.com is accepting queries for original, thoughtful, nonpromotional articles and commentary by unpaid contributors to run in the Your Voice section. Details and submission guidelines are posted at “Your Submissions, Your Voice.”

This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

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Cecilia Altonaga: First Female Cuban American Federal Judge

homesafetytechpros — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:06:47 +0000

Main content

Chief Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga is still humbled by her appointment in 2003, becoming the first female Cuban American federal judge.

“One gets to occupy the position of district court judge because of people who have confidence in you, people who have vouched for you, people who have championed you, and spoken up for you and assisted you along the way,” said Altonaga, who serves in the Southern District of Florida.

Video of 2023 Hispanic Heritage Month Spotlight

In recognition of Hispanic Heritage Month, a new video profile explores Altonaga’s Cuban heritage, her pursuit of a career in law, and her family’s defection from Cuba.

“I was born into a family with two parents who had to leave everything behind and had nothing here, who had to remake their professional and personal lives,” Altonaga said. “My father was a lawyer in Cuba, and for about the first 10 years of my life in the United States, he did not practice law because he couldn’t.”

In her teens, Altonaga’s father was admitted as a U.S. lawyer; she found herself frequently assisting at his law office. She also recalled her father swearing her in as a lawyer at the family’s dining room table.

Altonaga hopes her example encourages others to fully embrace their cultural identity.

“Know about your culture and bring that culture to bear and bring those values to bear in everything you do,” Altonaga said.

Learn about Hispanic and Latino judges in the federal Judiciary and other Hispanic Heritage Month resources.

Related Topics: Judicial History

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