Florida – Attorney Legal Counsel

Florida HOA accused of targeting Orthodox Jewish family

attorneylegalcounsel99 — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:41:10 +0000

By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter Tuesday, December 19, 2023People participate in a Jewish solidarity march on January 5, 2020, in New York City. The march was held in response to a recent rise in anti-Semitic crimes in the greater New York metropolitan area. | Jeenah Moon/Getty Images

A Florida homeowners association campaigned to prevent an Orthodox Jewish family from building a synagogue within the community, with one board member saying that they didn’t want Jews in the area, according to a letter written by the family’s legal representation.

Rabbi Naftaly Hertzel and his wife, Henya, have been residents of the Loggers’ Run Homeowners Association for 14 years, and the couple has five children. Hertzel is a rabbi at the Chabad Israeli Center, the only religious service for Orthodox Jews within a six-mile radius in West Boca Raton, Florida.

In a Thursday statement provided to The Christian Post, Jeremy Dys, senior counsel for First Liberty Institute, a Christian conservative legal group, accused the HOA’s leadership of antisemitism.

“This disparate treatment against the Hertzels and their family because of religion is unlawful and enjoys no support from any legitimate, non-discriminatory justification,” he stated. “This treatment not only violates basic decency but clearly violates the HOA’s obligations under federal law.”

The Christian Post reached out to the Loggers’ Run Homeowners Association for comment on the claims. A response was not received by press time.

According to a Thursday letter to the HOA from the Jones Day law firm and First Liberty Institute, the family’s relationship with the HOA changed in 2015. Hertzel approached the HOA board about building a synagogue to provide the local Jewish community with a larger venue for worship.

As the letter noted, the HOA gifted Christian churches or allowed them to purchase land in the past, so Hertzel expected a similar response.

In 2017, the Hertzels submitted a proposal to build a synagogue near several churches within the community, but board members did not bring the proposal up for a vote. The letter also accused the HOA of trying to prevent Jewish candidates from being elected to its board. In 2018, HOA president Ron Harp sent a message through the HOA email, encouraging residents not to vote for Jewish candidates.

In addition, the attorneys accused the HOA of singling out the Hertzels by selectively enforcing the rules against them but not other houses. The Hertzels maintain that they had never received notices of enforcement from the HOA until they had asked for a synagogue.

At one point, during a meeting with an attorney, a HOA board member reportedly said that they “didn’t want Jews” in Loggers’ Run. During the same meeting, a HOA president allegedly said that the Nazis should have ended the Jews.

“We demand that the Loggers’ Run HOA and its individual leaders cease and desist from discriminating against the Hertzels and their family,” the letter stated. “To protect the Hertzels from this unlawful harassment and discrimination, we are reaching out in hopes of finding an amicable course correction in lieu of seeking court intervention.”

The legal organizations warned that they intend to file a lawsuit on behalf of the Hertzels if the HOA does not comply with making the desired changes.

Following Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack against Israel that resulted in the deaths of at least 1,200 people, a majority of them civilians, the Hertzels allege that the HOA is aware of antisemitism in the community but has done nothing to stop it.

“Over the past few years, and again in the past months since the October 7th attack in Israel, Loggers’ Run residents have yelled ‘heil Hitler’ at the Hertzels in the neighborhood near their Home and at the Chabad,” the letter stated. “The Chabad has been vandalized multiple times. A Hannukah menorah and a mezuzah at the Chabad have been broken.”

The attorneys concluded the letter by offering to arrange a mediation meeting with the Hertzels before taking any legal action, requesting that the HOA respond before Jan. 19, 2024. In addition, the attorneys requested that the HOA take steps to preserve all documents relevant to the issues raised in the letter.

According to a November report from the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group, following Hamas’ attack, antisemitic incidents in the United States have increased by 316% compared to last year.

“In the one-month period between Oct. 7 and Nov. 7, 2023, the ADL Center on Extremism documented 832 antisemitic incidents of assault, vandalism and harassment across the U.S., an average of nearly 28 incidents a day,” the ADL reported. “This represents a 316 percent increase from the 200 incidents reported during the same period in 2022.”

Samantha Kamman is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: samantha.kamman@christianpost.com. Follow her on Twitter: @Samantha_Kamman

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3 Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach lawyers suspended, disbarred

attorneylegalcounsel99 — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 15:08:46 +0000

The monthly Florida Bar list of attorneys disciplined by the state Supreme Court numbered only seven, but South Florida accounted for three of that small amount.

In alphabetical order…

Mariano Gonzalez, Sunrise

South Miami-Dade resident Anthony Diaz hired Mariano Gonzalez (admitted to the Florida Bar in 1993) to handle a civil matter that was filed in Oct. 2020. In July 2022, Diaz wrote the Bar, “Mr. Gonzalez had my case dismissed, and never followed up with me. Had I not done due diligence, my case would be dismissed with prejudice on Sept. 10, 2022, giving me no chance at recuperating my money.”

A July 20, 2022 letter from the Bar gave Gonzalez until Aug. 4, 2022 to respond to Diaz’s complaint. Receiving no response, the Bar tried with an Aug. 25, 2022 email, asking for an answer by Sept. 6. On Sept. 6, Gonzalez emailed, “ Because of my recent, hectic trial schedule, I am requesting an extension until tomorrow and will contact you tomorrow morning to discuss this matter in further detail.”

Bar attorney Keri Joseph gave Gonzalez the day, but reminded Gonzalez that there needed to be an answer in writing.

Joseph gave Gonzalez a day and he took several. Joseph emailed him on Sept. 14 to say, we can talk, but you need to have something to me in writing by Sept. 20 and that’s the last gift of time.

Mariano Gonzalez The Florida Bar

As of June 8, Gonzalez hadn’t answered the Bar. A 54-year-old Mariano Ramon Gonzalez answered Broward County court on July 14 with a no contest plea after getting caught pushing his Tesla to 90 mph in an Interstate 595 express lane. Online court records say Gonzalez still owes $208 from that.

No place has listed Gonzalez among the dead. So, as of Thursday, Gonzalez is suspended until he responds to the complaint.

Brandon Labiner, Boca Raton

When an attorney files for disciplinary revocation with leave for readmission and that petition is accepted, the Florida Bar discipline cases against the attorney disappear. Criminal and civil cases aren’t affected. In exchange, the attorney accepts what the state Supreme Court says is “tantamount to disbarment” for five years. The attorney can then apply for readmission to the Bar.

Brandon Labiner (admitted 2016) first filed for disciplinary revocation with leave for readmission on June 30. Labiner was under emergency suspension after being accused of stealing from his mother’s trust account. Another discipline matter concerned a 2022 arrest in Broward on a DUI charge.

Labiner modified his disciplinary revocation petition in August, while in Palm Beach County Jail, where he’ll lay his head until his trial on a first degree murder charge. He was arrested after the July 1 deadly shooting of the former business partner who brought the trust account accusation to the Florida Bar: his father, Paul Labiner.

READ MORE: Florida lawyer filed for disbarment. He’s accused of murdering his father the next day

Now, the petition is for revocation without leave for readmission.

This means Labiner, 35, is accepting, in effect, permanent disbarment. The Florida Bar discipline cases against him concerning the trust account, DUI arrest and, now, murder charge disappear. But the criminal matters from the DUI and murder arrests remain.

Ronald Lubetsky, Deerfield Beach

Dr. Ronald Lubetsky was admitted to the Florida Bar in 2002, four years after he became a licensed medical doctor in the state. Lubetsky remains a medical doctor and an attorney, albeit a doctor and an attorney with suspended licenses, while also being a federal prisoner after being convicted of unlawfully dispensing oxycodone (five counts) and unlawfully dispensing oxycodone and morphine (two counts).

Lubetsky, 64, is scheduled to feel free again on Jan. 19, 2027. He’s appealing his convictions.

Ronald Lubetsky The Florida Bar

Court documents say Lubetsky slung pills out of ProCare Health Center, which state records place at 1380 NE 183rd St. in North Miami-Dade.

“There were approximately 30 visits by the confidential source and the undercover officer during which the defendant dispensed narcotics without a lawful basis,” federal prosecutors said in sentencing documents. “There were repeated entries of false data in legally required medical records kept on the premises. There was an enormous number of dangerously high dosage levels of narcotics dispensed by the defendant, and the defendant knew about a number of his patients getting arrested or being sent to prison.”

Lubetsky’s suspended pending further disciplinary action.

Since 1989, David J. Neal’s domain at the Miami Herald has expanded to include writing about Panthers (NHL and FIU), Dolphins, old school animation, food safety, fraud, naughty lawyers, bad doctors and all manner of breaking news. He drinks coladas whole. He does not work Indianapolis 500 Race Day.

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Florida urges Supreme Court to allow execution of death row inmate – NBC 6 South Florida

attorneylegalcounsel99 — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 22:31:26 +0000

attorney General Ashley Moody’s office urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to reject a request to block next week’s scheduled execution of Death Row inmate Michael Duane Zack.

Lawyers for Zack on Tuesday filed a request for a stay of execution and an accompanying petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the issues in the case. The move came after the Florida Supreme Court last week refused to halt Zack’s execution for the 1996 murder of a woman in Escambia County.

Zack’s attorneys contend he should be shielded from execution because of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome that he suffered because his mother drank alcohol while pregnant.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 2002 case known as Atkins v. Virginia that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But in urging rejection of a stay Thursday, lawyers in Moody’s office disputed the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome argument.

“There is no real possibility of this (Supreme) Court expanding Atkins to include a diagnosis of FAS (Fetal Alcohol Syndrome),” the state lawyers wrote. “Zack would not succeed in having this court wholesale defer to the views of the psychiatric community on the matter of whether Atkins should be expanded to include other types of diagnoses. While he asserts that the psychiatric community now views FAS as functionally identical to intellectual disability, courts determine Eighth Amendment law, not unelected and unrepresentative experts.”

Zack is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Florida State Prison for the murder of Ravonne Smith. His attorneys on Thursday also filed a separate petition at the U.S. Supreme Court after the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down arguments that he had not received a proper clemency process.

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Federal prosecutor offered Tampa cops his DOJ card during DUI crash arrest, video shows – NBC Los Angeles

attorneylegalcounsel99 — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 19:27:47 +0000

When police arrived at his house to investigate a hit-and-run, Joseph Ruddy, one of the nation’s most prolific federal narcotics prosecutors, looked so drunk he could barely stand up straight, leaning on the tailgate of his pickup to keep his balance.

But he apparently was under control enough to be waiting with his U.S. Justice Department business card in hand.

“What are you trying to hand me?” an officer asked. “You realize when they pull my body-worn camera footage and they see this, this is going to go really bad.”

That footage obtained by The Associated Press showed Ruddy apparently attempting to leverage his position to blunt the fallout from a Fourth of July crash in which he is accused of drunkenly striking another vehicle and leaving the scene.

But despite being charged, the 59-year-old Ruddy remained on the job for two months, representing the United States in court as recently as last week to notch another win for the sprawling task force he helped create two decades ago targeting cocaine smuggling at sea.

On Wednesday, a day after the AP asked the Justice Department about Ruddy’s status, the veteran prosecutor was pulled off three pending criminal cases. A Justice Department spokesman would not say whether he had been suspended but said that Ruddy, while still employed, was removed July 11 from his supervisory role at the U.S. attorney’s Office in Tampa. The case also has been referred to the Office of the Inspector General.

“The Department of Justice holds all personnel, including its assistant U.S. attorneys, to the highest standards of personal and professional conduct,” the spokesman said.

Such an inspector general’s probe would likely focus on whether Ruddy was trying to use his public office for private gain, said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics professor at Washington University in St. Louis who reviewed the footage.

“It’s hard to see what this could be other than an attempt to improperly influence the police officer to go easy on him,” Clark said. “What could possibly be his purpose in handing over his U.S. attorney’s Office business card?”

Ruddy, whose blood-alcohol level tested at 0.17%, twice the legal limit, was charged with driving under the influence with property damage — a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison. Despite his own admissions and witness testimony, he was not charged with leaving the scene of an accident.

Neither Ruddy nor his attorney returned messages seeking comment.

Ruddy is known in law enforcement circles as one of the architects of Operation Panama Express, or PANEX — a task force launched in 2000 to target cocaine smuggling at sea, combining resources from the U.S. Coast Guard, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Historically, PANEX-generated intelligence contributes to more than 90% of U.S. Coast Guard drug interdictions at sea. Between 2018 and 2022, the Coast Guard removed or destroyed 888 metric tons of cocaine worth an estimated $26 billion and detained 2,776 suspected smugglers, a senior Coast Guard official said in congressional testimony in March. The bulk of those cases were handled by Ruddy and his colleagues in Tampa, where PANEX is headquartered.

A former Ironman triathlete, Ruddy enjoys a reputation among attorneys for hard work and toughness in the courtroom. Among his biggest cases were some of the early extraditions from Colombia of top smugglers for the feared Cali cartel.

But the majority of cases handled out of his office involve mostly poor fishermen from Central and South America who make up the drug trade’s lowest rungs. Often, the drugs aren’t even bound for American shores and the constitutional guarantees of due process that normally apply in criminal cases inside the U.S. are only loosely observed.

“Ruddy is at the heart of a costly and aggressive prosecutor-led dragnet that every year pulls hundreds of low-level cocaine traffickers off the oceans and incarcerates them in the U.S.,” said Kendra McSweeney, an Ohio State University geographer who is part of a team studying maritime interdiction policies.

Research by Ohio State’s Interdiction Lab found that between 2014 and 2020, the median sentence for smugglers picked up at sea and prosecuted in Tampa was 10 years — longer than any other court in the country and compared to seven years, six months in Miami, which handles the second-largest amount of such cases.

Last Friday, nearly two months after his arrest, Ruddy was in court to ratify a plea deal in the case of a Brazilian man, Flavio Fontes Pereira, who in February was found by the U.S. Coast Guard with more than 3.3 tons of cocaine aboard a sailboat off Guinea, in West Africa.

After two weeks aboard the U.S. Coast Guard vessel, Pereira made his initial court appearance in Tampa in March, charged under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, which gives the U.S. unique arrest powers anywhere on the high seas whenever it determines a vessel is “without nationality.”

Ruddy is next due to appear in court in his own case Sept. 27. He’s accused of sideswiping an SUV whose driver had been waiting to turn at a red light, clipping a side mirror and tearing off another piece of the vehicle that lodged in the fender of Ruddy’s pickup.

“He never even hit brakes,” a witness told police. “He just kept going and he was swerving all the way up the road. I’m like, ‘No, he’s going to hurt somebody.’ So I just followed him until I got the tag number and just called and reported it.”

When officers arrived at Ruddy’s home in the suburb of Temple Terrace, they found him hunched over his pickup, holding his keys and using the vehicle for support, the report said. Officers noted that he had urinated on himself, was unable to walk without help and failed a field sobriety test.

“I understand we might be having a better night,” Tampa police patrolman Taylor Grant said before looking at the business card.

“Why didn’t you stop?” the officer asked.

“I didn’t realize it was that serious,” Ruddy said in a slurred response.

“You hit a vehicle and you ran,” the officer said. “You ran because you’re drunk. You probably didn’t realize you hit the vehicle.”

___

Goodman reported from Miami.

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