Assistant Statewide Prosecutor Sasha Lohn-McDermott (JD 09) discusses Feb. 22 recent cases prosecuted under Florida's RICO statute. (Photo by Nicole Safker)

By Francie Weinberg

Sasha Lohn-McDermott (JD 09) and Daniel Weisman (JD 07) are facing one of Florida’s most under-acknowledged yet prevalent problems head on.

“When I started this job, I had no idea we had a gang problem in Florida,” said Lohn-McDermott. “The state is facing a mounting crisis. We are in a battle for the safety of our streets.”

As assistant statewide prosecutors, UF Law alumni Lohn-McDermott and Weisman work to abolish growing gang violence.

In a presentation Tuesday at the Martin H. Levin Advocacy Center called “A Battle for our Streets: Using RICO to Prosecute Criminal Gangs in Florida,” presented by the Criminal Justice Center, Lohn-McDermott and Weisman discussed how they have worked relentlessly to use the racketeering law to bring gangs to justice.

“Racketeering is society’s way of telling us what you can do individually is impressive but limited,” said Weisman. “But what you guys do when you treat crime like a team sport goes far beyond what someone can do on their own and it scares the hell out of us.”

In order for RICO, the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, to be effective, the crimes committed must be targeting the same or similar groups and there must be continuity between the crimes, according to Weisman and Lohn-McDermott.

“RICO cases are about ongoing patterns of crime, crimes over years and years and years,” said Weisman. “It’s about bad stuff people do that tends to prove they really are together in an enterprise.”

Lohn-McDermott went on to explain how gang life has changed since the enactment of RICO in 1970. No longer is it the white-suited mafia men looking for money but rather a group of people inflicting violence and terror on a community. Many times, the actual amount of gang violence is downplayed by local government because it’s bad for business.

“We don’t hear about gang violence because it’s not creeping around the law school,” she said. “Instead, it’s terrorizing our communities.”

Lohn-McDermott further explained that as statewide prosecutors, she, Weisman and other associates finally have the tools necessary to at least quell, if not stop altogether, much of the gang violence that goes on in cities around the state.

Weisman, who will try a homicide case in two weeks against a west Florida gang called Sur 13, discussed the many ways in which gangs identify themselves. Common methods are through tattoos, styles of dress and rap songs.

“Don’t feel guilty, when the song gets going, if you find yourself tapping your feet a little bit,” he said. “They’ve got some good production values.” He then played a rap song by one of Sur 13′s rival gangs, Third Shift, who was tried by Weisman in 2009.

Weisman and Lohn-McDermott use these types of identification as evidence when they try racketeering cases. It is through these identifying factors that they have been so successful in convicting gangs.

Weisman, who was hired into the Statewide Prosecution Office immediately out of law school, has tried four gang-related RICO cases in the past 2 ½ years. Lohn-McDermott, hired to be an assistant statewide prosecutor after working as a law clerk, has tried several cases since graduating in 2009. They both graduated from what used to be the criminal law program.

The presentation was sponsored by UF Law’s new Criminal Justice Center, which serves as a platform to bring criminal law faculty together with interested students, enhancing the students’ law school experience by providing them with mentorship, area-specific education, and criminal practice training. The CJC houses the Criminal Justice Certificate Program, which is a way for students who are interested in criminal law and procedure, either as an area of academic study or as one of practice, or both, to demonstrate special competency in the area. More information can be found here:http://www.law.ufl.edu/centers/cjc/.

Weisman and Lohn-McDermott gave information regarding a summer externship program in which students can gain up to six credits. Applications are available in the career services department and must be turned in with a resume and transcript by April 14, 2012.

The presentation ended with Lohn-McDermott and Weisman encouraging students to apply for the externship. They added a few parting words about the benefits of the RICO Act and working as a statewide prosecutor.

“A lot of (community officials) completely disavow that gangs exist, while their citizens and their police officers will tell you something completely different,” said Weisman. “Statewide prosecutors have the courage to tackle this problem head on.”

Dean Robert Jerry addresses concerns of market placement with his presentation on the current state. (Photo by Joey Springer)

Dean Robert Jerry addressed concerns about the difficult placement market with 2L and 3L students on Wednesday, Sept. 29.

After outlining the general state of the U.S. economy to “put things in perspective,” Jerry shared a little bit of good news: There were recently 1,000 new jobs in legal markets. While this is a very small uptake, the legal economy and national economy have always closely tracked each other in history, he said.

Jerry expects that the legal market won’t be totally back until 2013. Many things have shaken up the legal world, and he anticipates some of the changes will stick around. As clients are scrambling to make ends meet, they are demanding that firms change billing practices to fit their budget. Dual associate tracts will likely to become a permanent part of the landscape, making it harder than ever to achieve partner status.

He advised students to think about their career rather than their job. Sometimes it is smart to take a job that will help you in the long run, such as a state attorney position in a less desirable, more rural area, because you will gain experience that will help you later, he said.

“It is a difficult market, but not an impossible market,” he concluded.

Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Professor Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colordblindness" addresses the crowd Wednesday, Sept. 22. (Photo by Joey Springer)

“We have not ended the racial caste system in America, we have merely redesigned it,” said Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Professor Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” at her discussion Sept. 22.

Students, faculty and community members gathered to hear the lecture and ask the first-time author questions. Alexander intended her book to be “a wake-up call.”

“It was my greatest hope in writing The New Jim Crow that it would help to stimulate public dialogue and debate about a phenomenon that has been ignored for far too long in this country – the mass incarceration of poor people of color,” Alexander said. “I’m thrilled that I’ve been invited to share my work and research, and that the university community is eager to have a serious conversation about our nation’s undercaste.”

She recognized that the idea may seem absurd, even admitting that 10 years ago, she thought a bright orange sign in Oakland, Calif., that said “the drug war is the new Jim Crow” was ridiculous. However, after spending 10 years working on issues of racial profiling, drug law enforcement, police brutality and attempting to assist individuals “attempting to ‘re-enter’ a society that never seemed to have much use for them in the first place”, she finds the claim irrefutable.

“With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, people of all colors are more reluctant than ever to acknowledge that an enormous percentage of the African American community remains locked in a permanent, second-class status. Our nation’s prison population has quintupled for reasons rooted more in politics than crime, and the racial dimension of this tragedy is undeniable. In major American cities today, the majority of young African American men are behind bars or branded felons for life. And once branded a felon, you’re trapped. You’re ushered into a parallel social universe in which you can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind, are suddenly legal again once you’ve been labeled a felon.”

When asked the best way to take a stand on the issue, Alexander responded that it is “not easy.” Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., she continued, “You have to be willing to stand alone if you are going to stand for justice. This is as true today, as it was back then.”

She said the most important thing anyone can do is to raise awareness and break the silence about how mass incarceration works and how it has devastated communities. She hopes The New Jim Crow will provide the information people need to start discussing “the devastating impact of the War on Drugs and the ‘get tough’ movement on poor communities of color in the U.S.”

“Nothing short of a major social movement has any hope of ending the mass incarceration in the U.S.,” she concluded.

The Center on Children and Families and the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations sponsored Alexander’s lecture.

Former IRS Associate Chief Counsel, Jasper L. Cummings, Jr.,

“Fun stuff” may not be the first words to come to a law student’s mind when considering the topic of tax law. But former IRS Associate Chief Counsel, Jasper L. Cummings, Jr., assured students in the Graduate Tax Program that “fun stuff” may in fact become a part of their future careers.

Cummings, the most recent contributor to UF Law’s Enrichment Speaker Series, addressed a full house with his presentation, “Doing Tax Law, Learning Tax Law, and What to Do When It Doesn’t Make Sense.”

As the title suggests, students should anticipate that tax law is something they will actively be doing, and not merely acting as a passive participant. “Doing tax law is the reason you are here,” Cummings said.

Cummings emphasized that doing tax law follows an economic perspective, from the ground up, beginning with demand. At the source of that demand are the clients. Cummings analogized that doing tax law without a client is like being a violinist without a violin. Because clients often view taxes as a barely necessary nuisance, like going to the dentist, the expectations of clients are result oriented. A lawyer’s success will depend on his or her ability to meet the client’s demand for a substantial tax reduction. Unlike other areas of practice in which a lawyer may need to provide an elaborate explanation of how he or she arrived at a legal conclusion to a law partner or judge, tax clients are result-oriented. “They’re not going to want to know how you figure this out,” Cummings said.

“Showing up is 80 percent of success,” Cummings said, quoting Woody Allen. “If you don’t read to the end of the section [of the applicable law], you did not show up.” When learning tax law, students should be prepared to start at the bottom and tackle the law starting with the codes and regulations. Students also should become familiar with the available research tools, and always be sure to have a comprehensive understanding of the facts in a given case.

“Nine times out of 10, you will need to understand the fundamentals of the issue and not just find the case law on point,” Cummings said.

Full immersion is the best way to learn tax law, and students should avoid taking the kinds of shortcuts that might be more common among undergraduate students. The facts in a tax case are just as important as they were in a law student’s first-year cases, and both students and lawyers alike must have a complete understanding of the facts in their respective cases.

“If you mess something up, it is never going to be anybody else’s problem but yours,” Cummings warned. Students should also start thinking about the specific areas of tax law in which they want to focus. “Unfortunately, you’re going to have to specialize in the tax world,” Cummings said.

As lawyers specialize, their clients also will grow to include other lawyers. And with experience, lawyers will gain so-called “walking-around knowledge,” which Cummings describes as the kind of knowledge that is principally intuitive. Tax law is a century old, and students ought to come out of school with a familiarity of the standard “vocabulary cases,” with the ultimate goal being the development of walking-around knowledge.

Because of the well-established history of tax law, there is more of a logical explanation for the rules and conclusions in tax law than there are in any other area of the law. Because many students perhaps “resist being dragged through the history of the code” – where the reason for a given rule is often buried – Cummings advised that students avoid this resistance.

“Understanding the reason for a rule makes it much easier to remember and apply,” he said.

The Supreme Court has decided more than 1,000 federal tax cases interpreting the code, and these cases should not be overlooked. Even if a case was decided in 1942, a lawyer who cites Supreme Court case as precedent places the burden on the opposing party to come up with a good enough reason for why the court hearing the case at hand should not follow the Supreme Court – a rather heavy burden to meet.

Although applying standard solutions for a client can be very satisfying work, Cummings considers the “fun stuff” to be the difficult cases that go beyond the standard solutions and solve the unique problems of the client.

Cummings also considers tax law to be the most intellectually challenging type of law. He said it took him seven years of experience that included teaching tax law to really gain an understanding of the law. “When you get your degree, you have not arrived,” Cummings said.

On April 30, sponsored by the Journal of Law and Public Policy, Jourdan discussed her upcoming article that will appear in the JLPP titled, “Valuing Grief: A Proposal to Compensate Relocated Public housing Residents for Intangibles.”

Much of the difficulty in compensating dislocated residents of a public housing unit, Jourdan said, comes in calculating damages.

While not all dislocated residents experience negative effects — some are happy to leave — for many, the move is devastating. Relocated residents are faced with the loss of social relationships and the sudden loss of all that is familiar.

“When you get displaced from where you live, it actually has emotional, social, and psychological impact,” Jourdan said, emphasizing that these factors are magnified for the poor because they are limited in technology and transportation to maintain strong social ties with friends and former neighbors who live miles away.

Jourdan focused on the treatment of the residents of Kennedy Homes, a public housing development in Gainesville, whose residents were displaced after a 2003 fire resulted in city investigators discovering that the buildings were woefully dilapidated. Jourdan explained that the residents of Kennedy Homes were among Gainesville’s poorest.

“You could live at Kennedy Homes for fifteen dollars a week,” Jourdan said, calling the state of the buildings themselves “horrible,” but noting that Kennedy Homes was the least expensive public housing unit and “the place of last resort.” The walls of Kennedy Homes were often only a paper-thin shield between residents and the harshness of homelessness, Jourdan said.

Jourdan also noted that, despite the ill repair that Kennedy Homes was in, all of the residents indicated that they would happily return since Kennedy Homes had been their home.

To provide temporary housing for the displaced residents, a condemned downtown hotel was made available, which carried its own issues, such as no kitchens in the rooms and a broken elevator.

“They stayed here for six months because nobody knew what to do with them,” Jourdan said.

It was at this point that Three Rivers Legal Services and Southern Legal Services intervened to begin the daunting task of bringing suit against the Kennedy Homes developers on behalf of hundreds of plaintiffs.

A settlement was reached, but its details have been kept confidential, Jourdan said.

Jourdan also referenced a book penned by attorney Pierce Kelly that detailed the saga surrounding Kennedy Homes and the plight of its residents titled, Kennedy Homes: An American Tragedy. She explained that Kelly had been working at Three Rivers Legal Services during the time that the Kennedy Homes case was being litigated.

For Jourdan, the Kennedy Homes represents both a tragedy and a lesson.

“This is going to keep continuing to happen so we need to figure out what’s it worth so we can get out our checkbook and pay people what they deserve,” she said.

Jourdan advocates a compensation scheme for dislocated residents by working “directly with the residents [to] ask what they want and what they need to help stabilize the transition from one place to another.

“People are not by their nature extraordinarily greedy,” she suggested.

Jourdan finished her lecture by encouraging her audience, largely composed of future attorneys, to pursue pro-bono work and help give a voice and offer aid to those who are both voiceless and helpless.

“I’m here today because of John Travolta, not because of me,” McDermott said. “I’m here because of karma.”

McDermott stumbled upon Travolta as a client by chance, he said. He helped some friends through law school and it later paid off well for him.

“I had a couple of buddies that I carried the bulk of the work for. I graduated in the top of the class, these guys didn’t fare as well,” McDermott said. “We were best friends; I made it a point to help them because they are good guys. We all managed getting through law school, some of us with better grades than others.”

Then, about 12 years ago McDermott was travelling through Jacksonville where they practiced. He had not seen his old friends in a while, so he called to meet up with them. They invited him to his office and what he saw surprised him. There were pictures of Hollywood stars plastered all over their walls.

One of them met rockstar Alice Cooper golfing. He was unhappy with his representation, so he hired McDermott’s old friend. Eventually, Cooper led to more clients, including Travolta.

When they were involved with some tough litigation involving the runway at Travolta’s Ocala estate, they turned to someone they knew they could rely on.

“Just like the old days in law school, these guys called me to bail them out. I got John Travolta because of karma because I helped these guys through law school and then it came back to me 20 years later when they had a problem.”

They told McDermott they could meet Travolta at a barbecue at his house they were invited to.

“That’s pretty cool, I’m like you guys, I’ve watched the movies and all that stuff,” McDermott said. “All of the sudden, this guy just comes running up to me yelling ‘Are we going to win?! Are we going to win?!’ ‘Of course we’re going to win!’ You’re not allowed to do that – guaranteeing victory, but there was no way I was saying no in that situation.”

McDermott won that case and has represented Travolta ever since. Although he was brought to speak by the ESLS, McDermott never saw entertainment law that as part of his practice coming out of law school.

“I never envisioned it, I never thought it’d be possible, I never pursued entertainment law,” he said.

McDermott originally pursued law school to work in real estate, but the market dried up when he graduated. He decided to start his own practice right out of law school. He did not have an office at the time and would pay a friend to use his office to meet with clients and then would go home to do the work.

“They would laugh at me and they called it the traveling law office, because for nine months I operated like that,” McDermott said.

Along with treating people well, McDermott offered one more peace of parting advice to the law students attending.

It’s not the cases that you take that make you, it’s the cases that you don’t take,” McDermott said. “If you take the wrong cases, it’s like swimming with an anchor around your neck; you will eventually drown.”

The Youth Summit is designed to engage high school students in discussion about matters concerning law and policy and how each of these affects them. This year the summit focused on youth involvement in the juvenile justice system. The program addressed topics ranging from what activities could be illegal or result in suspension or expulsion from school, to the consequences of involvement in the juvenile justice system.

Students rotated through three classes during the day, each with a different presentation. The first presentation dealt with delinquent acts, sentencing, probation, and other forms of punishment. The second presentation discussed what happens if a person is arrested, their rights during an arrest, and how a juvenile could be charged as an adult. The third presentation dealt with consequences of an arrest and conviction in the juvenile and adult justice systems, and statutory rape. At the end of the presentations, the volunteers and students played games and quizzes to test the students’ new knowledge.

Law student volunteers went through training before the Youth Summit in order to give the presentations. Several local attorneys, including attorneys from the Public Defender’s and State Attorney’s office, attended the Youth Summit to assist the law students during the presentations. Lunch for participants was provided by the Florida Bar Foundation Public Interest Law Fellows.

The Youth Summit makes an impact on teens in the Gainesville community and is an annual event. If you would like to volunteer for the 2011 Youth Summit please contact the Center on Children and Families.

In 2007-2008, 261 Vietnamese workers were sent to Jordan to work for W&D Apparel. W&D confiscated their passports and injured one woman so badly that she later died from her injuries. The W&D case is just one example of the growing worldwide human trafficking problem.

“When you talk about trafficking, this is modern day slavery; it’s slavery,” said Thang Nguyen, the executive director of Boat People S.O.S., a national Vietnamese-American community-based organization that helps Vietnamese people. “We thought that we had abolished slavery many years ago, but no, it’s on the rise now.”

Nguyen spoke at UF Law on Tuesday about the W&D case and the growth of human trafficking. UF Law Professors Berta Hernandez and Winston Nagan also spoke after Nguyen.

W&D once provided uniforms for Aramark, which provides the food services for UF and is the largest company on college campuses in the country. The UF student senate pressured Aramark to stop working with W&D, and eventually Aramark ended ties with the apparel company.

Nguyen said there are 12.3 million people in forced labor worldwide and 1.39 million in sexual servitude. To be considered human trafficking, an act requires three elements, Nguyen said.

“One: there must be a victim. People who are smuggled are not necessarily victims of trafficking if they intentionally agree to that,” he said. “Non-voluntary participation and inability to escape – they cannot escape, just like in the case in Jordan. They got beaten up, locked up and forced back to work for the traffickers by their own government.”

In Vietnam, exporting labor has become commonplace. Since 2001, over 700,000 workers have been exported to 30 countries, although many of them were not trafficked. Each year, another 80,000 people leave Vietnam for work.

“Vietnam doesn’t have a law against trafficking, so there’s no way to prosecute the traffickers and there’s no way for anyone to help the trafficking victims because we cannot have access to victims of labor trafficking for two reasons,” Nguyen said. “One – there’s no law, two – the government is involved in trafficking.”

In 2000, the U.S. passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Under it, the Department of Justice went after Kil Soo Lee, the owner of Daewoosa in American Samoa that had trafficked over 200 Vietnamese and Chinese workers. This was the largest human trafficking case prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Lee is serving a 40 year sentence in Honolulu. The High Court of American Samoa ruled that Vietnam must pay the victims $3.5 million in compensation, but the country still hasn’t paid anything nine years later.

Over half of the countries in the world have enacted human trafficking laws, but enforcing them remains a problem.

“Why? Because labor trafficking involves governments, government officials, big corporations, organized crime syndicates and traffickers,” Nguyen said. “Anyone involved in any step in this process would be considered a trafficker – either recruitment, transportation, transferring, harboring or receiving the victims.”

Also, the attention on sex trafficking takes much of the attention away from labor trafficking. Even though 10 times more people are captive in labor trafficking than sex trafficking, sex trafficking cases are prosecuted 10 times more commonly, Nguyen said.

“It’s a tough problem to deal with. There are so many influential factors that we have to confront and people don’t want to confront them,” Nguyen said. “That’s why there’s a bias toward working on sex trafficking. It’s more compelling and easier because government is usually not involved in sex trafficking and they are involved in labor trafficking.”

Solomon is currently the director of Ernst & Young’s National Tax Department, a post he took up in 2009. For a decade before then, Solomon worked for the Treasury Department, most recently serving as the assistant secretary for tax policy.

The first subject of Solomon’s presentation, global trends in taxation, may seem puzzling to some. Why should one country care how others tax their citizens? Solomon answered that question at the outset, saying, “I submit that we have to recognize, now, that we are inextricably interconnected to the rest of the world.”

As Solomon presented these trends, such as the globalization of economies and international cooperation, he pointed out that these trends were in response to the problems that countries around the world are facing. As transactions become more complicated, governments must try to keep up, and as revenues shrink, enforcement rises.

Solomon said that in a world where a company can pack up and move its operations overseas, a country must acknowledge the impact that its tax code can have on such decisions. “We have to understand that our tax system is relevant to business decisions made in this country,” he said.

At the same time as countries change their tax codes to create attractive business environments, countries are also working with one another in the enforcement side of the equation. Countries are sharing information with one another, signing treaties, and even joint-auditing. Solomon said that the U.S. and UK are looking for a volunteer to be joint-audited and joked, “If you know a company that wants to be joint-audited by the UK and U.S., let me know.”

While these factors make tax legislation an important subject every year, Solomon pointed out that 2010 will be a particular important year. Solomon explained that there are many code provisions that expire every year, and must be reinserted in order to take effect. However, as Congress has stagnated under the load of the aforementioned controversies, many of these provisions have not been reinserted, with the estate tax being the one that has generated the most attention.

Even with all of this on the horizon, Solomon pointed out that “tax reform is not at the front of everybody’s mind.” With highly controversial subjects like health care, carbon emissions, and unemployment being debated every day, a technical subject like tax reform hasn’t seen a great deal of discussion.

Revenue neutrality has been a focal point for much of the discussion on tax reform that has taken place, but Solomon doubts that it will be much of an issue when tax reform is finally taken up by Congress. The reason, he explained, was that, at that point, the country is almost sure to need more revenue. But still, Solomon only offered one promise on the issue, that there would be individual winners and losers.

“It’s not going to be revenue neutral on an individual basis,” he said,” I can assure you of that.”

It did not take long for Fox-Isicoff to find success. Having started with the Department of Justice as an INS trial attorney, she soon became a special assistant U.S. attorney for immigration. Despite this, she wasn’t completely satisfied with her work. A good deal of that came from seeing first-hand how unpleasant immigration enforcement can be.

“You see things in this field that you can’t make right in your heart or in your head,” she said. “It makes you question humanity, honestly. You’ll see things that’ll make you say, ‘I can’t understand how this can be.’ And that’s a very frustrating part of enforcement.” Fox-Isicoff cited a couple of recent examples that she’s dealt with, adding that the revenue that she generates from her corporate work allows her to take some enforcement cases pro bono.

One such case involved a beauty queen from Colombia who spoke out against the FARC, a powerful guerilla group there. FARC then kidnapped her and her brothers, and used acid to burn the hands off one of them. Despite this treatment, he was not granted asylum in the United States. “There’s something that’s got to tear at your heart if you’re a human being, she said. “How unfair can a law be?”

Fox-Isicoff said that while transitioning to the business side of immigration has spared her from some of these cases, business immigration law is not without its frustrations. She described the laws as being little better.

“On the business side, they may not be cruel and inhumane,” she said. “They’re just idiotic.”

Fox-Isicoff said that a major reason why the business immigration laws are inadequate is because the congressmen who are voting on them usually have very little expertise in the subject.

“It’s like they’re a jack of all trades and a master of none,” she said.

During her presentation, Fox-Isicoff cited many examples of inefficient or inadequate laws, one being how L Visas are treated. L Visas are given to managerial employees who come to the United States to work for a branch in the United States. While that may not seem problematic on its face, how they are handled for companies that seek to set up new U.S. branches causes some issues, Fox-Isicoff said.

While most L Visas are good for three years, if the U.S. branch is new, it becomes only one year. This means that a company has very little time to become successful and obtain an extension. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that L Visa holders must manage employees, forcing these companies to employ workers, even if it is not financially wise, or even financially possible.

“It’s created almost an impenetrable bar for anything but the largest business establishing branches in the U.S.,” Fox-Isicoff said, “in my opinion a bar that we don’t want to create. We want foreign businesses to succeed here, and have the opportunity to employ U.S. workers in due course. We don’t want to create a situation where they’ve got to hire so many people their first year of operation that they can’t keep their doors open.”