Legal News

Casey to Mayer Brown; Goodbye Judge Sprizzo; and More . . .

By Dan Slater

One move. One goodbye. And one acquittal. Several lawyers in the news this week. Here’s a round-up.

Mayer Brown scores Casey: Sean Patrick Casey, a top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, N.Y., will join Mayer Brown in February. Casey, 36, currently the deputy chief of the business- and securities-fraud section in the Eastern District of New York, helped to bring the criminal case against former Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who have pleaded not guilty. Casey (Loyola College of Maryland ‘94, U. of Baltimore Law ‘99) was also involved in the stock-options-backdating prosecution of former Comverse CEO Kobi Alexander, who’s on the lam in Namibia. Casey clerked on the Maryland court of appeals after law school, then joined the SEC, and then worked at Skadden before heading to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Legal community loses Judge Sprizzo: John E. Sprizzo, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 73. The cause was organ failure. Here’s the NYT obit.

Sprizzo, nominated for the federal bench by Democratic senator Daniel P. Moynihan and appointed in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan, famously defied the Reagan DOJ when he refused to allow the extradition to Britain of Joseph Doherty, an Irish Republican Army member who had killed a British soldier and fled to the U.S. Sprizzo (St. Johns U., St. Johns U. Law) reasoned that the killing was a political act, not a criminal one, thus making the killer exempt from extradition. A top Justice official called the ruling “outrageous,” saying the judge had made the United States legal system complicit in terrorism. The ruling and its subsequent contretemps led to a rewriting of the nation’s extradition laws and Doherty’s eventual deportation.

As a practicing lawyer Sprizzo helped establish the litigation department at the New York firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle.

Breathe easy, in-house guys: A story in the Recorder begins: “In-house lawyers and tax managers should be breathing a lot easier this Christmas, thanks to jurors in a rare white-collar prosecution.” A Northern California jury has acquitted former Bechtel Corp. global tax manager Mark Muntean — who’s also an attorney — on charges that he caused the company to file a false tax return.

Prosecutors argued: Muntean knew a research and development credit claimed by Bechtel was improper, but pushed for it anyway.

Muntean argued that he trusted subordinates to give him all the information, and they didn’t.

Sideman & Bancroft partner Jay Weill, who was the longtime tax chief in the Northern District U.S. Attorney’s Office, said he had never seen a similar prosecution.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 19, 2008 (boomark / email).