"LANGUAGE THAT SIMPLY GOES TO FAR" 
The Second Circuit might agree with the District Judge who has twice ruled against a Patriot Act provision. The plank has allowed the FBI to access phone and internet records through so-called National Security Letters (NSLs), but has been found to be overly broad and not always applied in matters of national security. In 2004 and again in 2007, Southern District Judge Victor Marrero voided the NSL provision (the first time, Congress amended the law before an appeal took place). Yesterday, a three-Judge panel at the Second Circuit heard an appeal from Marrero’s latest ruling. “Why isn’t the appropriate thing to say that Congress here used, in a First Amendment sense, language that simply goes too far?” Judge Guido Calabrese asked government attorneys.

NO CONSENSUS ON ALTERNATIVE INCARCERATION 
Tompkins County might have dumped millions of dollars into programs offering alternatives to incarceration, but some local politicos aren’t convinced the programs are working. “We've been pouring money into these programs, and we can't get any effective data that shows that the programs are being successful,” said a Republican County Legislator, Frank Proto. “We're having perhaps individual success on a case-by-case basis, but what we need to do is look at the broad picture as to whether the hundreds of thousands of dollars . . . is getting a value for the investment.”

BRUNO'S BOYS 
The Federal Grand Jury in Albany is investigating former State Senate Majority Leader Frank Bruno, who retired last month, reports The New York Times. The focus is Wright Investors’ Service, a Connecticut investment firm that employed Bruno for much of his 14 years in the Legislature. Investigators are reportedly looking at whether Bruno pressured labor leaders to invest with Wright in return for political favors. “I have never been accused of anything, and don’t ever expect to be accused of anything, because I haven’t done anything wrong,” Bruno said in June.

ATTORNEY-CLIENT NON PRIVILEGE
The Times also reports on the Justice Department’s institution of new guidelines preventing federal prosecutors from indicting companies that pay employees’ legal fees or protect their communications with corporate lawyers. The guidelines stem, in part, from Southern District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s dismissal of criminal charges in 2006 against 13 defendants in a tax-shelter prosecution against KPMG, since prosecutors had violated their Constitutional rights by demanding that KPMG cut off their legal fees. “Penalizing a company for paying the legal fees of its employees is simply outrageous,” said Mercer Bullard, a securities law professor at the University of Mississippi Law School. “In cases where they say ‘we are going to bring down your company unless you waive attorney-client privilege,’ that has to stop.”

THE ANGRY JUDGE DEFENSE 
And the Appellate Division has upheld, barely, former Manhattan Supreme Court Justice and current Appellate Division Judge Rolando Acosta’s decision to dismiss a case after becoming exasperated with the litigants’ “willful” disobeying of his discovery orders. The lengthy dissent referenced Shakespeare and bemoaned the courtroom work squandered by the dismissal. “In [declar]ing a judicial plague on the houses of these contentious Montagues and Capulets ... [the decision wastes] substantial judicial resources that have been devoted to this case,” Justice James McGuire wrote in dissent.