Class action securities powerhouse Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman has been attempting to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of the Justice Department’s decision to go Arthur Andersen on the firm earlier this year (previous posts here), but this New York Observer article (related NY Times article here) reports that the firm’s demise is imminent, well before the criminal trial of the firm:

A lawyer for a competing firm, who asked to remain anonymous, said that he had interviewed several Milberg Weiss employees seeking a position with his firm.
He said they have the same sense of the mood at the firm.
ìThat itís sad, itís a sinking ship, itís like a funeral home. Itís extremely upsetting,î he said. ìItís like waiting for them to turn out the lights and close the door; theyíre running for the exits.î
Published reports have documented the departure of about two dozen attorneys since the indictments were handed down. Thatís a lot in a firm of 125 lawyers.
And of the offices once listed on the companyís Web siteóLos Angeles; Boca Raton, Fla.; and Manhattanóonly the New York and California branches remain.
The firm once employed close to 500 people, including paralegals, investigators, messengers, secretaries, forensic experts and lawyers. [ . . .]
The ìexperience with Arthur Andersen indicated that partnerships are fragile entities,î said [New York University law professor and Milberg Weiss advisor Samuel] Issacharoff. ìThatís the reality.î

The government’s prosecution of Milberg Weiss out of business will have nowhere near the economic impact that the government’s effective shuttering of Arthur Andersen had. And certainly a plaintiff’s firm is not the type of victim that elicits much sympathy. However, that does not make any less outrageous what the government is doing here — effectively killing the accused after investigating it for over five years and before it is determined whether it has committed a crime. That there is not more of an outcry over this injustice reflects a troubling deference that even the legal community is now giving to the abuse of the criminal justice system by federal prosecutors. As Sir Thomas More reminds us “do you really think you could stand upright in the winds [of abusive prosecutorial power] that would blow” if that power were applied to you?

Doug Berman’s remarkable Sentencing Law and Policy blog notes another key sentencing decision from U.S. District Judge William G. Young of Massachusetts, the jurist who declared the federal sentencing guidelines unconstitutional a few months before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Booker decision. In this well-reasoned 125-page decision, Judge Young concludes that the existing sentencing scheme is unworkable in theory or in reality. “Juries can and should perform” sentencing “as a matter both of practice and of constitutional procedure,” Judge Young reasons. He begins his treatise by hammering home a point that has been made continually on this blog during the Justice Department’s dubious criminalization of business interests in the post-Enron era — i.e., the enormous cost of such criminalization:

For seventeen years federal courts had been sentencing offenders unconstitutionally. Think about that. The human cost is incalculable — thousands of Americans languish in prison under sentences that today are unconstitutional. The institutional costs are equally enormous — for seventeen years the American jury was disparaged and disregarded in derogation of its constitutional function; a generation of federal trial judges has lost track of certain core values of an independent judiciary because they have been brought up in a sentencing system that strips the words “burden of proof”, “evidence”, and “facts” of genuine meaning; and the vulnerability of our fair and impartial federal trial court system to attack from the political branches of our government has been exposed as never before in our history.