The Grimm Truth

Jurors Were Hung Up On The Internet

       A long federal jury trial in Fort Lauderdale ended with a thud on March 10, after U.S. District Court Judge William Zloch declared a mistrial. The case had been muddled by jurors meddling in the new media.

The defendants had been charged with peddling prescription drugs over the internet. Without a prescription. But the eight week trial ended when the judge discovered several of the jurors had done of bit of research on their own. Using the internet. One jury had posted remarks on Twitter.

   After a column on the Internet’s threat to the trial system, I received an e-mail myself from one of the jurors on the ill-fated case. Shelli Edwards of Hollywood wrote:

     

      I served on that jury, and it was a tremendously rewarding experience despite the hassles associated with it. As one of four "alternates,” I was dismissed after closing arguments. The jurors who deliberated kept their promise to let us "alternates" know what happened. What you probably don't know is that after 3 days of deliberation, what ended in a mistrial was going to be a hung jury.

       Hopefully your column will help spark the discussions needed to bring our courts into this century.The questions raised by the trial need to be addressed soon, because the societal cost of this re-trial will be astounding.

       One judge, two clerks, one prosecutor and her assistant, two DEA agents, one courtroom reporter, one bailiff, one secretary and 16 jurors were directly involved in this trial every day for almost 2 months. That means taxpayer funded salaries, juror pay of $40 per day plus mileage & parking, the costs of security, and upkeep of the building itself. Add in the costs of expert testimony of doctors ($400 - $500 per hour), pharmacists ($200 per hour), and government employee testimony (regular rate of pay plus plane fare & lodging).  I won't even get into costs of the defendants and their attorneys, many of whom are from other states.

       The silent costs of finding a new jury include about 150 additional residents removed from their lives for 2 to 3 days during the jury selection process alone. Now factor in that 16 more employers of the newly chosen 12 jurors and 4 alternates will be paying for workers who aren't going be there for the next 4-8 weeks.

       That's a lot of money (and stress on many families), only to have to do it all again because we haven't addressed the "internet media issue" in terms of our current legal philosophy.

       People are naturally curious, and as jurors they want to do the right thing -- character traits that are not mutually exclusive. It's just too expensive to assume otherwise.

What Does A Cure For Breast Cancer Elude Us?

The public revelations of the private ordeals suffered by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz were like shock therapy to a public that may have become inured to the brutal struggles of a breast cancer patient. After watching this woman as both a local and national political stage, it stuns the heart to learn that she was simultaneously recovering from devastating surgeries and drug therapies.

Her story cast new relevance on a column written a few years ago by Miami attorney J.B. Harris, known as one of the lead attorneys in the Florida lawsuits brought against Big Tobacco, and as the attorney who sued to stop the sale of Channel 6 (NBC/WTVJ) to a market competitor.  Harris updated the column, originally printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2004, for the Grimm Truth. The article was originally published under the headline: After All This Time, Why Does Cure For Breast Cancer Elude Us?Mother's And A Sister's Diagnoses Spur A Call For Congress To Do What It Must:  

A few years ago, my sister and my mother learned they had breast cancer at the same time. Their annual examinations led to biopsies, and they received the devastating news within days of each other. The diagnosis for each was invasive ductile carcinoma, one of the most common and lethal forms of breast cancer. Because our family had no history of breast cancer, my sister and mother were always vigilant but never truly concerned - until then.

 

My sister, a physician, was 38 with three young children. My mother was 70 with four children and nine grandchildren. They live in Cherry Hill, NJ.  My sister underwent an emergency double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. If anyone thinks a mastectomy is like a tonsillectomy, consider this: The operation lasted eight hours and required two surgeons. The first surgeon removed all the breast and malignant tissue, while the second transferred my sister's latissimus muscles and other tissue forward from her back to help build her a new chest.

 

The surgeons in my sister's case did a phenomenal job. As chilling as the operation sounds, this is the procedure of choice for mastectomy and breast reconstructions in this country, especially in younger women. But it does not stop there. Chemotherapy, radiation and Herceptin treatments awaited my sister's initial recovery, as well as additional surgery to fully rebuild her body. According to the National Cancer Institute, 25 percent of the women who endure this regimen do not survive, and those who do often do not learn they are "cancer free" until years later. My mother is scheduled to undergo a similar, age-appropriate procedure soon.

 

News that a loved one has cancer is bad enough. Learning that your mother and sister have cancer at the same time is overwhelming. Upon hearing the news, I was struck with utter, paralytic fear, unlike anything I had ever encountered. I saw my sister's kids without a mom, my siblings and me without a sister or a mother, and my kids without their grandmother or their aunt. Making my way home, I told my wife, who grabbed me and would not let go.

 

As the news and shock spread among our family and friends, condolences and prayers began pouring in. Everyone knew someone who had died from or survived this dreadful disease. Whispering the names of those who had been afflicted was like being initiated into a secret society of sufferers that I had not known existed. It opened my eyes to the sheer multitude of victims among us. We were now members of this group.

 

Because breast cancer is at once such a private disease and a public scourge, I felt oddly embarrassed by the sympathy of others, uneasy with their knowledge of my sister's and mother's conditions, yet buoyed by their concerns and the news that others had survived. Equally strange was the response of some who now view breast cancer as a rite of passage, like a man's first heart attack, rather than a killer. Sadly, this disturbing and fatalistic view foretells a certain complacency about the disease that saps our initiative and shapes our national policies toward combating it.

 

According to breastcancer.org, a nonprofit organization for breast-cancer education, in 2008 doctors expected to diagnose an estimated 182,460 new cases of invasive breast cancer in women in the U.S., along with 67,770 new cases of non-invasive breast cancer.  About 40,480 women in the U.S. were expected to die in 2008 from the disease, though death rates have been decreasing since 1990. These decreases are thought to be the result of treatment advances, earlier detection through screening, and increased awareness.

 

Even women who are not genetically predisposed to the disease remain at risk. The BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are culprits, can surface in women whose families, like ours, have no history of breast cancer. Women who have these genes, which can be detected through genetic screening, are also more likely to contract ovarian cancer, according to my sister's oncologist. Moreover, the National Cancer Institute reports that breast cancer kills more women than the men and women combined who die from all other types of cancer except lung and respiratory cancer. As a result, the institute allocated $572 million for research in 2007 to help find a cure – about 12 percent of its annual research budget.  But that is not nearly enough.  The federal government needs to do much more.

 

Compared with overall expenditures in the federal budget, breast-cancer research ranks up there with foot fungus in terms of our national priorities. Is there some cunning force beneath our social fabric preventing us from finding a cure? Perhaps a cultural misogyny infects our male-dominated Congress, preventing politicians from allocating the resources necessary to finding a cure. Or do our good-old-boy legislators simply choose to subordinate women's health issues to those of others?

 

Whatever the case, I am left thinking that while we idolize women's breasts in this country, and place them on display in almost every conceivable medium as a form of seduction, we nevertheless tolerate breast amputations as an acceptable means of combating cancer rather than finding a cure or, better yet, identifying a cause that we can hold accountable and rectify. That speaks poorly of us as a nation.

 

At the end of the day, I want my sister and mother to continuing living -- both are now  survivors -- as well as the 40,000 other women in this country slated to die unnecessarily from a disease that has gotten far too little attention. I also do not want my daughter to suffer the same fate as my mother and sister and do not want another family in this country to undergo the pain my family endured. As a society, we owe these women - our women - nothing less than a cure. Until that day, every woman in America is at risk.

Medicare Criminals And Their Enablers

      After reading The Herald’s stories about the rampant Medicare fraud in South Florida, Miami psychiatrist Dr. Mario S. Cuervo wrote me to suggest that the problem has as much to do with the program’s shoddy administration as the criminals who cheat the system out of millions. Mind you, this is his opinion, not necessarily mine. And it may be colored by his own personal frustrations dealing with Medicare’s infamous bureaucracy. But he says it with such wonderful fervor:

“Having read the latest blitz of articles in our local newspaper about the abundance of  “Medicare fraud” in South Florida, two things come to mind:

1) What company would allow their CEO to report another billion dollar loss year after year?

2) Provider numbers are obtained by these criminals who are defrauding medicare. Do you know who is responsible of approving these provider numbers?

3) How is it that the fraud in South Florida stops like a miracle when patients join an HMO?

 Answers:

1) There isn’t a company that would keep the same CEO who fails to control losing money to fraud, except the US government. First things first -- start by firing people who don’t do their job. And unfortunately Medicare is full of them, and you can start from the top down (CMS), then move down to Regional in Atlanta and work yourself down to all the worthless people who work for Medicare in Tallahassee who are incapable of answering a simple question correctly if any provider needs one answered.

They should be ashamed having to inform every week that another fraud had been committed and $100 million were paid by Medicare to criminals. Criminals always look for easy targets and, boy, Medicare  is one.

2) Medicare Provider numbers should only be given after a person who is applying is fully investigated and for the first couple of years should also be monitored closely for any irregularities instead of waiting until $100 million disappear.

3) The reason you don’t see fraud in an HMO as you see it in Medicare is because an HMO is a private institution that must report to owners, who make their workers and bosses responsible. Fraud , though possible, is unacceptable. If a mistake is made it has to be fixed or “heads will roll.” I am a physician and do not promote HMOs as the cure (far from it), but I point this out because HMOs  have taken control of this problem and the government has not. Maybe is time they learn.

The only way Medicare knows how to deal with the losses they are having from fraud is by trying to cut down payments to physicians and hospitals until they can no longer sustain a private practice, not losing money to Medicare because of under payments or lack of payments. This problem is leading to an exodus of physicians from Medicare and will reflect on quality of health care in this country in the near future. And Medicare will still be telling us how some criminal stole another $100 million dollars from them.

Osama Bin Laden Supports Higher Tobacco Taxes

Anti-tax campaigns usually rely on the stuff of conservative economists, arguing that higher taxes stifle business investment, expansion and vigor. Pro-tax, goes the mantra, is anti-business.

     But the anti-expansion argument doesn’t work quite so well on behalf of the tobacco industry, given that the more the customers the cigarette business attracts, the more it kills.

If a higher cigarette tax, like the $1-a-pack foundering amid the no-new-taxes fanatics who control the Florida legislatures, fails to deliver the promised $900 million in state revenue, that could be seen as a good thing. If higher prices discourage smokers, particularly young smokers, they also save lives.

The prospect of a higher tax has brought out owners of convenience stores and smoke shops who complain that another $1 a pack will hurt their business and cost jobs at a time of great economic travails.  But health advocates can roll out coughing, wheezing smokers dying of tobacco-related lung disease. Death trumps economic hardship.

     So the tobacco companies have countered with an even scarier death threat.  They’ve rolled out a 2007 report prepared by the Republican staff members of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee that links high cigarette taxes to smugglers. The smugglers, the report intimates, are terrorists. Or at least they’re of mid-eastern origins, which surely must be the same thing.

      The industry also found reports that warn higher priced cigarettes in Florida will encourage criminal gangs to succumb to the temptation and smuggle cigarettes from cheaper states. Or from tax exempt Indian smoke shops.

      Perhaps the Crisp, the Bloods, the Latin Kings or M-13, riled and anxious protect their newfound cigarette smuggling enterprises, could provide the perfect antidote to Islamic terrorists here in the homeland.

None of those aforementioned organizations, it might be noted, feel bound to observe the Geneva conventions.      

The Internet Could Prove Fatal To Skinny Americans

       One of those angry letters-to-the-editors was published in the March 16 edition of The Herald attributing the “slow demise of newspapers” to folly born out of liberal bias.

The Miami Shores writer said, “Anything that does not hew to the liberal politics or challenges the conventional wisdom doesn’t get printed.”

He wrote that as a newspaper reader for 45 years he had long taken “as gospel most everything I read.” But along came the Internet. “I found out how slanted some of the news is.”

He then cited three examples as evidence for his thesis. First, he accused newspapers of printing news that supported the notion of global warming. “Opposing views are not aired even though there is a large body of evidence refuting this fraud.”  He intimates that newspapers are behind the movement toward organic food “while the Department of Agriculture can find no additional nutritional value in it.”

And finally, and most puzzling, he charges newspaper with spreading around the idea that obesity is not healthy. “The ills of obesity get lots ink while skinny people, too, die from heart attacks and diabetes.”

Gracious sakes. The science supporting global warming is overwhelming and urgent and so frightening, particularly for low-lying islands or nations with arid climates, that it would be nearly criminal not to report the unhappy consensus. Just this week, a scientific exhibition in the arctic reported an alarming retreat of the great glaciers. There remains a diminished minority among climate scientists who are not convinced that global warming has been caused by human activity. But not the fact of global warming. I don’t know how newspapers could dodge global warming.

Nor do I think newspapers can take credit, or take the blame for the organic food movement. I think the fellow from Miami Shores can pin the blame for folks growing concerns about food additives and livestock hormones and pesticides as much on the Internet as the “liberal” news media. Does he imply that conservatives like the idea of filling their children with preservatives and pesticides?

But fatties? Now that takes the (800 calorie) cake. A not so very liberal outfit, the American Medical Association, has worried itself sick over the obesity epidemic. Skinny people occasionally die of heart disease and diabetes, sure, but doctors, liberal and conservative and the utterly apolitical, claim that excess fat increases the likelihood of premature morbidity.  I would say that Al Gore and Rush Limbaugh are at equal risk.

But the writer did illuminate, however unwittingly, the vagaries of the Internet, where myth and fact and paranoid conspiracies and scientific findings get equal treatment. It’s where George Bush masterminded 9-11 and where Barack Obama is a secret Muslim.

And the Internet, apparently, is where skinny people go to die an early death.    

ACLU Takes On "The Bridge Issue"

After my most recent column on the outcasts consigned to the Julia Tuttle Causeway, Richard Rosichan, a board member of the Greater Miami Chapter of the ACLU writes:

“We have been fighting these ridiculous residency restrictions, and the "bridge issue," tooth and nail. While I can't speak for the local or state boards, I can assure you that the fight will go on. We are not about to back down.

“Residency restrictions affect few if any offenders. Most sex related offenses involve on-line solicitation, family members and friends, baby sitters, consensual relationships of people usually fairly close in age (including the so-called "Romeo and Juliet" cases), young teenagers who look and act much older, and work or school related relationships. The "Megan's Law" type of thing involving someone who assaults a neighbor and in which proximity is a factor are very unusual. As for on-line solicitations, these people almost always prefer to select their targets in relatively distant locations to avoid detection by people who know them.

“A sex offender type crime can involve anything from a vicious murder to an 18 year old getting it on with his 16 year old girlfriend.

“I'm not familiar with any specific cases in this area, but here are two that I do know about that demonstrate the absurdity of these laws. One was the case of Mel Reynolds, a one time congressman (D-IL) who had sex with his 17 year old female page. He was arrested, convicted and served a year in prison. Ten years later, he received a letter ordering him to move out of his apartment. I would say the chance of "recidivism" in his case was a clear zero.

“Think that's absurd? I visit one of my daughters in Atlanta a lot. The Georgia laws make ours look positively lax. There was national publicity about the prison sentence of a black teenage boy there who had consensual oral sex with a teenage girl. Think that's bad? Recently, a 29 year old woman was ordered to leave her house within two weeks because it was within 1000 feet, yards, or whatever, of a bus stop. . I don't recall her name, but I do recall the name of the federal judge who turned down her appeal - Clarence Cooper. Her crime? Twelve years earlier - at age 17 - she had been arrested for having consensual oral sex with a 15 year old boy. Yep, she was still a minor herself. And she never saw it coming until she got a letter from the county sheriff - 12 years later.

Now, about the relationship of this to the homeless issue. The real problem here is a well known and very rich lobbyist - Ron Book, head of the Homeless Trust. He has been a fanatic on this issue ever since his child was allegedly molested - touched inappropriately - by a female babysitter. Because of the tie-in between these residency restrictions and the problem of homelessness, he has no more business being head of the Homeless Trust than he would have being on a jury trying a sex offender case. As the Herald reported, he is doing everything he possibly can to obstruct resolution of the ‘bridge case.’ ”

Under The Bridge, It's Science Versus Politics

   The politicians love sex offender residency laws and over the past few years South Florida communities have outdone one another passing restrictions that bar sex offenders from living from within 2,000 or 2,500 feet of day care centers, schools, parks, even bus stops. The effect has been to stir up great public support with the notion that these laws protect children. Meanwhile, the laws are so restrictive that offenders have been forced into homelessness. In Miami, of course, sex offenders have famously been forced into a squalid camp beneath the Julia Tuttle Causeway.

      “It’s hard to imagine any other circumstance in which we, as a society, force people to become homeless,”  Lynn University’s Jill Levenson told me. Yet studies by Levenson and other social scientists have found little scientific rationale for these laws. She and two colleagues completed an analysis in December that echoed the findings of several other studies of the residency law phenomenon that has swept the country.  To read her study, click on Download Levenson study

Levenson’s partners in the recidivism study, Paul A. Zandbergen and Timothy C. Hart, partnered up two years ago to look at the impact on available housing for offenders affected by the residency laws. There study in the Orlando area reveals what has become painfully obvious in Miami. Download Zandbergen and Hart 2006

 

If You Grew Up in Miami . . . .

Ray Fisher, a former Miami Herald editor, writes to say:

YOU KNOW YOU GREW UP IN OLD MIAMI IF YOU REMEMBER.....

When the Courthouse was the tallest building
When US1 was only two lanes
Pier 5 where you could buy fresh fish right off the boat
When the people on South Beach were older than the buildings
WCIX channel 6, or WAXY radio and Rick Shaw, or Zeta 4 Big Wilson
Ralph Renick
Howard Johnson's fried clams and ice cream
The Jackie Gleason show with the June Taylor dancers
Riddle Airlines
Medley Speedway
A & P grocery stores
Planes spraying for fruit flies
Bayfront Bandshell
The Miami News
When there was a grocery store in Dadeland Mall
Grand Union, Kwik Check, Ann Margeret grocery stores
When the Rusty Pelican burned down
The Tropicaire Drive-In and swap meet
The Ferris wheel atop Burdines downtown
Jordan Marsh
Riviera Theater and the Miracle Mile Theater
National Airlines, Air Florida and Eastern Airlines
Pan Am's airport at Dinner Key
When the Rickenbacker was a drawbridge (only 25 cents)
The Skipper Chuck Show and the Sunday Funnies
Lindsley Lumber
Zayres
JByrons
Hot Shoppes Paileys Big Wheel
Crandon Park Zoo
Johnny and Mack by the railroad track
Sheehan Buick on 8th Street ... when it was called 8th Street
Gretners Restaurant, The Flame, Dixie Bell Inn, The Depot
Black Angus Restaurant at 104 street
Holsum Bakery's wonderful smell of bread baking on US1
When Dadeland was an open-air mall
When there was only a Gulf station on US 1 cross from Shorty's
When Tamiami airport was on the Tamiami Trail
A&W Drive in restaurants
Lums and their frozen schooners and wieners in beer
The Village Inn
The Playboy Clubs
Big Daddy's Lounges
Auto Inspections
Roberts Western Wear and OK Feed Store
The English Pub and Jamaican Inn on Key Biscayne
Claude Pepper's picnics at Tropical Park
Tropical Park when it was a racetrack
South Miami Hospital when it was only one building.
When they built Baptist hospital
When everyone thought the turnpike extension was built too far out
When Coconut Grove was a hippie hangout
Sam and Carl's Deli in S Miami
Rock concerts at Miami Jai Alai stadium
Sunniland Pony Rides
Land Crabs on Old Cutler
The diving board and dock at Matheson Hammock pond
Barefoot Mailman at Dadeland
Bill Haas and the Serpentarium
Concerts at the Miami Marine Stadium
Sunday country dancing at Alabama Jack's
Tyler's Restaurant
Live & Let Live drug store
Engel's Drug Store in Grove
When S Beach was just below 5th Street
Food Fair
Pantry Pride
Piggly Wiggly
Fla. License with Letters depicting size of car
The Miami Springs Villas
Miami Seahawks pro football team
Red Cross Drugs in downtown Miami
King Arthur's Court in Miami Springs
Men's Grill at Burdines
Richard's Bargain Basement
The Round Table restaurant on US1 near UM
Royal Castle hamburgers @ 15 cents, root beer 5 cents
Jimmy's Hurricane drive-in on Bird
Black Caesar's Forge in South Dade
"Yes, We Have No Bananas"
Bus riding all over the county with paper transfers getting punched
The black beach on Virginia Key
Greynolds Park hill...the highest point in Dade County
Only two highways north: US 1 and 27
Warning signs about roasting marshmallows with oleander sticks
Cuban crisis; missile silos in ground all over south Dade
All rental cars had E license tags
Tags had number for county size: Dade 1, Liberty 67
Chalk Airlines and Goodyear Blimp base on Watson Island
Seasonal arrival of buzzard colonies atop Courthouse
Burdines installing the state's first escalator
The caves at Venetian Pool
Absolutely nothing west of the airport until Doral
Orange Bowl: HS football Thursday nights, UM Friday nights
The par-54 night-lighted golf course on South Dixie Highway
The paper man downtown who had no legs and rolled around on a piece of board and skate wheels.
The shoeshine boys downtown near Richards Dept Store
The huge Christmas display at the Holsum Baker on US1

More Vanquished Icons

      Economic turmoil, developer’s bulldozers and changing tastes may have devoured many of the iconic brands long intertwined in our lives. But not the memories.     

      Self-described “old timer” (I wonder what that makes me.) writes:

      “Your column this morning touched a nerve and brought back memories. The disappearing brands of just South Florida. Do you remember The Eagle Army & Navy, the Royal Castle (I think they were related) and the bread bakery in South Miami that moved to the Palmetto and now is gone by the wayside. Richards Department Store, Jeffersons, I helped open the Burdines at
Westland Mall.”

Send me an e-mail (fgrimm@herald.com) describing your favorite of the disappeared. 

On The Remembered Grandeur Of Real Estate’s Purple Hour

       A famous New Yorker essayist offers up some lyrical and comforting thoughts about the empty streets and abandoned homes and half-built structures left by the state’s real estate crisis. His words seem particularly apt in southwest Florida, where entire subdivisions looks as if time stopped dead, when the boom went bust.

The writer finds a kind of beauty as nature reclaims the lost real estate. “Although I am no archaeologist, I love Florida as much for the remains of her unfinished cities as for the bright cabanas on her beaches.  I love to prowl the dead sidewalks that run off into the live jungle, under the broiling sun of noon, where the cabbage palms throw their spiny shade across the stillborn streets and the creepers bind old curbstones in a fierce sensual embrace and the mocking birds dwell in song up the remembered grandeur of real estate’s purple hour.

“A boulevard that has been reclaimed by Nature is an exciting avenue; it breaths a strange prophetic perfume, as of some century still to come, when the birds will remember, and the spiders, and the little quick lizards that toast themselves on the smooth hard surfaces that once held the impossible dreams of men. Here along these bristling walks is a decayed symmetry in a living forest—straight lines softened by a kindly and haphazard Nature, pavements nourishing life with the beginnings of topsoil, the cracks in the walks possessed by root structures, the brilliant blossoms of domesticated fine run wild, and overhead the turkey buzzard in the clear sky, on quiet wings, awaiting new mammalian death among the hibiscus, the yucca, the Spanish bayonet, and the palm.”

That was the E.B. White, writing in 1941, a time when he had temporarily abandoned The New Yorker and was writing a regular column for Harpers Magazine.  It was a different real estate bust but one that was just as devastating to Florida’s long running get-rich development-based Ponzi scheme. And nature’s inclination to reclaim the wreckage left by the inevitable downtown of a real estate economy has hardly changed.

White wrote, “I remember the days and the tall dream of rainbow’s end; the offices with the wall charts, the pins in the charts, the orchestras playing gentle to prepare the soul of the wanderer for the mysteries of the subdivision, the free bus service to the rainbow’s beginning, the luncheon served on the little tables under the trees, the warm sweet air so full of the deadly contagion, the dotted line, the signature, and the premonitory qualms and the shadow of the buzzard in the wild wide Florida sky.”

“I love these rudimentary cities that were conceived in haste and greed and never rose to suffer the scarifying effects of human habitation, cities of not-quite-forgotten hopes, untouched by neon and by filth.’’