UPDATED: Judge Marc Gold just issued a directed verdict in the former baseball star's favor on the DUI manslaughter charge, a reliable courthouse source tells me. But Leyritz may still be convicted of a second manslaughter charge, however, along with DUI. Still, the case against the former New York Yankee is in tatters. The dropped count is a victory for Leyritz attorney David Bogenschutz. Not so much for the Broward assistant state attorneys, who have failed to impress.
I'm working on a couple of leads that are just slow-going, so here's another one of those comment cleaners. Some things that have caught my eye:
-- Poor Ken Keechl. The voters boot him out of office, somebody leaves a bag of dog poop on a makeshift mocking memorial to his time in office, and now he doesn't even get the traditional bag of gifts that outgoing mayors receive. Because the new ethics laws forbid gifts of more than $50, he had to settle for a stupid old plaque.-- Have you ever tried to get public records from your government? Florida's Sunshine Law dictates that your wonderful and dedicated public servants should be reasonable and timely in supplying you the information. But that's not the way it works. The awful and terrible School Board, for instance, almost always tries to hit the public up with several hundred dollars in costs, especially stuff that people don't want to let out. It's just another sign of arrogance. But few compare to a recent case involving a Miami blog. The Straw Buyer requested from the Miami-Dade Police Department emails between a prosecutor and a detective in a well-publicized mortgage fraud case. Simple enough, it would seem, with one sender and one recipient. I could find that information on my email account in about 12 seconds.
Well, I'm not a governmental entity. After the jump, see how much the PD said it would cost to retrieve those emails.
Answer: $484,218.46.
That's right, nearly half a million dollars to find emails between one prosecutor and one detective involving one criminal case.
So how did they break that incredible cost down?
Using who knows what algorithym, Lt. Kathi Miller of the Economic Crimes Bureau determined that it would take 194 days to find the emails. The cost per day to "retrieve mailbox data": $2,495.97.
Multiply those two numbers and it comes to $484,218.46.
See, it all makes sense after all.
