Search Results for: John Yates
Fight Back!!! Fisherman John Yates v. United States
On February 25, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that John Yates, a commercial fisherman, could not be prosecuted under a financial-fraud law [18 USC §1519] for catching undersized red grouper. 16:41
Did government go overboard in prosecuting fisherman? Justices hear case of John Yates and the missing grouper + 3 other articles
The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared sympathetic to a Florida fisherman who says the government went overboard in prosecuting him for throwing undersized grouper off his boat. “What kind of a mad prosecutor would try to send this guy up for 20 years,” Scalia asked Justice Department attorney Roman Martinez. “You make him sound like a mob boss or something,” Chief Justice John Roberts said as laughter erupted in the court. Read the rest here 14:08 – Enron Meets Red Grouper as High Court Mulls Evidence Case Read the rest here – Justices seeing red over case of missing grouper Read the rest here – U.S. justices leaning toward letting fisherman off the hook Read the rest here
John Yates in a TV interview about his Supreme Court Case. “I’m hoping they rule in my favor. Who knows?”
“Sarbanes-Oxley Act…which is basically a while collar crime. Fishing is not a while collar job, I guarantee you that.” Yates was later convicted and sentenced to 30 days in jail and three years probation — a situation he calls a nightmare. “I’m raising two grandkids. Lost a time share at Disney, no vacay in seven years, can’t leave the state. It took an act of Congress to go bury her sister four months ago; had to get permission. It has been ridiculous.” Video, and Read the rest here 12:32
Florida Fisherman John L. Yates Wins Supreme Court Case, is off the hook in grouper-tossing case
A Florida fisherman convicted of tossing undersized grouper off his boat is off the hook after a divided Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that he should not have been prosecuted under a law targeting accounting fraud. In a 5-4 opinion, the justices threw out the conviction of commercial fishing boat captain John Yates, who was prosecuted under a law passed in the wake of the Enron scandal. Read the rest here 11:02
Fisherman John L. Yates convicted of violating Sarbanes-Oxley will be heard by the Supreme Court
When Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, in the wake of the Enron scandal, a key provision was aimed at making a federal crime the type of conduct committed by the energy company’s auditors: rampant destruction of documents, computer drives and email that detailed Enron’s fraud on its investors. Read the rest here 15:11
Like Enron, But With Fish – The Supreme Court Appeal of Fisherman John L. Yates
Consider this one of the fishiest Sarbanes-Oxley suits in the history of the law: an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is urging the justices to weigh in on whether shredding fish is comparable to shredding documents, as both were used to hide violations of federal law, according to Forbes. Read more here One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish — Equals A Sarbox Felony? Read the Forbes article here 08:29
The One Weird Trick Trump Could Use to Get Away with January 6th
Far from shore after a week at sea, a Florida fisherman named John Yates was buste
d by wildlife officials for catching grouper that were too small. But before returning to the dock a day later, Yates chucked the contraband fish overboard rather than hand them over to authorities. So, the federal government charged Yates with destroying evidence under a law passed in response to the energy giant Enron and its shady financial practices. Called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the law was intended to crack down on financial fraud and evidence destruction. Yates argued that the law governed document shredding and fish aren’t documents. Eight years later, the Supreme Court sided with the fisherman in a precedent-setting 2015 decision that limited prosecutions. Today, that dump of grouper could wind up getting Donald Trump off the hook for January 6th. more, >>click to read<< 10:47
Cause of Action Institute will be at the Seafood Expo North America in Boston. Share your story with us!
Have you been negatively impacted by the government regulations that plague the commercial fishing industry?
Share your story with us! From March 17th – 19th, Cause of Action Institute will be at the Seafood Expo North America in Boston, Massachusetts. Come visit us in Booth 2667 to learn more about our work defending the rights and economic freedoms of commercial fishermen. Can’t come see us? Contact us at [email protected], or share your story with us here. Our Work, John Yates v. United States, Goethel v. Pritzker, United States v. Black, Omnibus Amendment , >click to read<10:53
The Age of Petty Tyrannies
“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves.,,,” We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the name of the national good by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions. We, the middling classes, are not so fortunate.,,, This is the mindset that tried to penalize a fisherman with 20 years’ jail time for throwing fish that were too small back into the water. John Yates, a commercial fisherman,,, >click to read<
Off the Hook: Florida fisherman lands in U.S. Supreme Court case weighing government overreach
John Yates doesn’t make his living as a commercial fisherman anymore. The federal conviction he is fighting all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court took care of that. Instead, he scraped together everything he had, opened a boutique furniture store and called it Off the Hook. Read the rest here 19:32
Lyons: Cortez fish-tossing case a whopper of a tale
There are “Gilligan’s Island” plots less far-fetched than the twists and turns it took to navigate a local commercial fishing boat skipper’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Judging by their questions, some of the high court’s justices think it fishy that federal prosecutors went after a fishing boat Captain John Yates of Cortez as if he had been hijacking ships like a Somali pirate. Read the rest here 08:37
Pacific Legal Foundation making news on the east coast by fulfilling its mandate
Meanwhile, just across the Potomac River from Alexandria, the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, D.C., heard oral argument today in the case of John Yates v. United States. PLF filed its amicus brief on behalf of several commercial fishing associations earlier this year. “Sort of inexplicably, the federal government decided to turn a regulatory minor fine into a federal prosecution involving a law for white-collar criminals.” Read the rest here 11:40
Former Cortez fisherman shares his side of case that has reached U.S. Supreme Court
John Yates remembers the day his life as a commercial fisherman was forever changed. The 62-year-old sat inside his Cortez furnishing store Off the Hook on Wednesday and recalled that day in October 2007. As he shared his story, Yates’ wife Sandy — who has a background in law — and their daughter Jennifer Miller were more than 900 miles away in Washington, D.C. for his case in front of the United States Supreme Court. Read the rest here 11:16
Yates v. United States to question over-criminalization Make a comment here
The personalities behind this week’s Supreme Court cases
There’s almost always a real human at the bottom of a Supreme Court case, but the justices’ work this week is notable for the number of easy-to-identify-with personalities whose names will be forever inscribed in law books. will be making his second trip, Florida fisherman John Yates is becoming the face of overzealous prosecution, And former air marshal and whistleblower Robert MacLean would rather be somewhere else altogether, Read the rest here 08:07
Cortez fisherman’s case to Supreme Court next month
Sandy Yates was walking past her front door with a laundry basket that day in 2010 when she noticed something a little peculiar: Federal agents in bulletproof vests were standing on her porch. “Is your husband home, Ma’am?” one of them asked. “No,” she said. “He’s on a crab boat.” So the agents drove down to the docks of Cortez and waited for John Yates, an amiable grandfather in his late 50s with the same craggy face that all fishing captains seem to have. Read the rest here 23:45
How Destroying Fish Is Not Like Destroying Financial Records – Click Here
Overcriminalization is a significant problem in the United States, particularly federal overcriminalization. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one is that federal prosecutors consistently stretch laws to encompass conduct that the law was never meant to cover. Normal people who committed minor infractions will often find themselves facing long prison sentences that are entirely disproportionate to the wrongness of the act. Such is the case in an upcoming Supreme Court case, Yates v. United States. While commercial fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, John Yates Read more here 20:25
The Supreme Court’s Fish Tale
Holy mackerel! The biggest Supreme Court shredding case since the justices overturned Arthur Andersen’s conviction for destroying Enron-related records in 2005 turns out to be a fish story. Former Florida commercial fisherman John L. Yates was convicted in federal court in 2012 for violating the document-destruction provisions of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law by dumping overboard three undersized groupers netted in federal waters five years earlier in an effort to avoid a $500 penalty. Read more here 13:40:23 I’m sorry to inform, there is now a pay-wall up.
Cortez’s fishy case makes its way to Supreme Court
The entire investigation is based on the testimony of a single Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission officer. Yates was acquitted of a third charge of lying to a federal investigator. A.P. Bell Fish Co. owner Karen Bell remembers the day Yates returned from grouper fishing. “John was very argumentative with the investigators,” said Bell. “The last thing you want to do is be argumentative with federal investigators.” ,,”They raided this place, and I mean full-blown SWAT teams on the roof and everything,” Bradenton.com Read more here 11:19
