The incident, like many before it, prompted lawyers and notables to start pointing fingers at the Bowl Championship Series, college football’s system for crowning a national champion. The BCS offers six premier conferences automatic bids to the bowl games that determine the national champion, but the system leaves many conferences out in the cold.

After the Utah team was shunned, the state’s attorney general argued that college football’s system for crowning a national champ might run afoul of antitrust laws by excluding smaller schools and conferences. Utah’s senior U.S. senator, Orrin Hatch, sounded the same note Wednesday at a subcommittee hearing, which is investigating whether a college football playoff system would be better than the current system.

The BCS allows the six major conferences to earn much larger revenues than other conferences. That, Hatch said, is the stuff of antitrust concerns. “If the government were to ignore a similar business arrangement of this magnitude in any other industry, it would be condemned for shirking its responsibility,” Hatch wrote in a recent Op-Ed in Sports Illustrated.

Of course, Hatch might not feel so strongly about it if he, by chance, represented the great state of Alabama, or Texas, or Tennessee, right? As if to make Hatch’s point, the Mountain West, the conference to which Utah belongs, signed a deal late Wednesday that will largely keep its schools on the fringes of the BCS power structure. Here’s a story from the Salt Lake Tribune about the deal, which explains that Mountain West schools will not receive an automatic bid to a BCS bowl game this coming year but could, if they have a bang up season like Utah did last year, still be eligible to receive an invitation to a major bowl.

The Mountain West conference seemed to strike this deal with a gun at its head, which only seems to underscore the influence wielded by the BCS. “The Mountain West believes it has no choice at this time but to sign the agreements,” it said in a statement. “If a conference wishes to compete at the highest levels of college football, and the only postseason system in place for that is the BCS, no one conference can afford to drop out and penalize its football programs and student-athletes.”

We ask you, oh LB faithful, is the Bowl Championship Series exercising monopoly power?

Now we return to the government’s response, also filed yesterday, in which asks New York federal judge Jed Rakoff to sentence Dreier to 145 years, in line with the federal sentencing guidelines.

The most interesting thing about the government’s filing was its inclusion of what we’ll call, for a lack of a better term, wealth porn: glossy photos of Dreier’s lavish lifestyle, including images of his yacht, beach front house in the Hamptons, and his $207,043.29 Aston Martin DB-9 convertible.

The photo montage can be sampled here, here, here, here and here. Our personal favorite is the image of the bedroom in his yacht, which features replete with wood and leather that appears mighty soft to the touch.

Obviously, the government is using the power of the image to try to claim Dreier was consumed by greed ─ a point Dreier virtually conceded in yesterday’s court filing ─ and deserving of no leniency in sentencing.

“Dreier committed this crime in order to elevate his stature to that of the rich and famous, thereby avoiding the ‘mediocrity’ of merely running his own law firm and earning ‘only’ hundreds of thousands per year,” prosecutor argued in their brief.

We have no idea whether former Mayer Brown partner Joe Collins will be found guilty or not following an eight-week criminal trial. But we do know this: don’t mess with his jury.

Our fearless newswires reporter Chad Bray is out with a story (link unavailable) saying that the judge in the case received a rather alarming note from a juror earlier today. The male juror told the judge that a female juror had issued threats of physical harm against him on Wednesday:

”…[T]he threat of bodily harm brings this abuse to a whole new level,” the male juror wrote. In a loud and belligerent manner, the female juror “threatened to ‘cut off your (my) finger.’ She made that statement twice. In the same tirade she stated, ‘I will have my husband take care of you.”’

The presiding judge, Robert P. Patterson, responded this afternoon by sending a note to the jury “to get them back into rational thinking and not to let anger prevail.”

Yesterday the jury indicated to Patterson that they had been unable to reach a verdict on all 14 counts against Collins, who was an outside lawyer for commodity broker Refco Inc. Patterson urged them to continue deliberations, and today marks the sixth day.

Collins is accused of helping former Refco Chief Executive Phillip R. Bennett and others hide the firm’s dismal financial picture, namely more than $400 million of undisclosed debt. Bennett pleaded guilty to charges last year and was sentenced to 16 years. For prior LB coverage of the Collins case, click here, here and here.

In a separate note Thursday, the jury foreperson said the altercation between the two jurors “could be traced to both parties involved.”

“There has also been conversations on numerous occasions regarding respectfulness” by the juror who was threatened, the foreperson wrote. ”I do not intend this note to reflect the opinion of the jurors on a whole, but thought it important to voice my personal opinion on yesterday’s altercation.”

Also on Thursday, Patterson denied a motion for a mistrial by lawyers for Collins — who made the unusual step of taking the witness stand in his own defense — following the two juror notes.

“…[A]lthough no one knows how quickly the disease will progress, I want to leave the court while I still have my faculties and know that I have made all my decisions with a sound mind,” Williams wrote, saying that she was announcing her step down from the bench “with great sadness and a heavy heart.” To read the letter to her colleagues, click here.

Her office issued an official statement that says while Judge Williams “is presently able to perform her judicial duties, because of the nature of the disease she has elected to retire so any future decisions would not be called into question.”

The Washington Post moved this story on her resignation today and its possible impact on the appellate court that was once considered the country’s most conservative. Williams was appointed to the 4th Circuit in 1992 by George H.W. Bush. Click here for an assessment by Slate of her possibility as a U.S. Supreme Court nominee in the 2005 vacancy created by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Williams’s name is no longer on the 4th Circuit website. William Traxler Jr., a fellow South Carolinian, is now listed as chief judge.

That decision is hardly surprising, considering that the sentence Madoff got was within the federal sentencing guidelines calculated by the judge. (150 years = the total maximum prison penalties for 11 felony counts to which Madoff pleaded guilty.) In other words, Sorkin couldn’t argue that Chin had unfairly departed from the advisory guidelines. See prior LB coverage of Chin’s decision here.

Speaking of Chin, the unlikely star of last week’s Madoff hearing left the federal courthouse this morning and mosied across Foley Square to the U.S. Court of International Trade, where the U.S. Sentencing Commission set up shop for a public hearing on all things sentencing-related.

According to Chin’s prepared remarks before the commission, the judge set the audience up for a titillating discussion on Madoff:

In the days since, the sentence has been dissected and debated, both in the popular press and the academic media. The discussion has been healthy: What are the goals of punishment? Did the sentence further those goals? Should helping victims heal be a goal of punishment? Is a financial crime such as securities fraud really “evil?” Is there any point to a sentence of years far longer than a defendant is expected to live? Is such a sentence merely pandering to the public?

By the last question, we were holding our breath. But just as quickly, we exhaled in disappointment.

Continued Chin: “We are here today, of course, not to take on these questions, but to discuss the Sentencing Guidelines. But the Madoff case underscores how difficult sentencing can be.”

Chin would utter the name “Madoff” only two more times.

From June 30 to July 2, no fewer than 12 documents were filed under seal on the Petters (pictured) docket, with no description whatsoever.

Turns out attorneys for Petters had filed motions seeking to dismiss the case and sanctions against federal prosecutors for some sort of misconduct. But the government convinced the judge, Richard Kyle, to seal them. One of the documents is apparently the defense’s objection to Kyle’s sealing order. Here’s the Star Trib article and click here, here and here for prior LB posts on Petters, who is accused of running a $3.5 billion Ponzi scheme.

We thought the sealing of such motions was a bit unusual. So did the Star Trib, which on Wednesday enlisted the help of Faegre & Benson to file a motion seeking to unseal them and to at least obtain a further description of the documents that were filed.

We checked in with our old Law Blog friend, Wayne State’s Peter Henning, who said “it’s hard to think of a reason for the sealing unless the documents revealed something about an ongoing investigation” stemming from the alleged fraud. The motions could also have references to grand jury material, Henning says, “which normally isn’t disclosed until it has to be, at trial.”

If the defense made allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, it could be a claim that prosecutors presented false evidence or perjured testimony before the grand jury, he said.

“They might be setting the stage for their case,” Henning said. “This is one way to set up a defense of putting the government on trial,” similar to the public corruption case against former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.

Yesterday, the Michigan Supreme Court said it would allow a gunshot victim to sue a former 911 operator from the Detroit Police Department for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Here’s an AP account of the divided Supreme Court ruling.

In the first call, Lorraine Hayes, the gunshot victim, calmly asked for an ambulance, giving her address and saying she had been shot in the head. The operator asked if she was male or female and Hayes stumbled, first saying she was male and then correcting herself.

After some more questions, the AP reported, the operator asked, “Are you a mental patient?”

“My body is numb. I’m getting ready to die,” Hayes said at one point.

The operator said she did not believe Hayes would be able to call if she was shot in the head and told her she would get in trouble for making a false report. Despite her doubts, the operator sent police to the address.

The Court was critical of the operator’s remark yesterday, saying it was insulting, and not particularly well-timed.

The Detroit Police declined to comment, saying the operator was no longer an employee with the department.

Detroit is battling another 911 response case, stemming from a 2005 call that was written off by the operator as a prank because the call came from a 5-year-old.

The child’s mother ended up dying and an attorney representing the family believes the woman could have been saved had the operator sent someone right away. Here’s a CBS News article about the ongoing lawsuit, which was filed in 2006 and seeks more than $1 million in damages.

The Michigan Supreme Court ruling Wednesday, meanwhile, comes just months after another 911 response in Michigan raised questions.

A young woman, whose father collapsed, called 911. Frustrated with how long it took someone to pick up during an emergency, she uttered a four-letter-word. That irritated the operator, who in turn told her to watch her mouth. The operator then hung up on her a number of times before finally directing her call to someone else.

The case has also drawn a great deal of attention, in part because it was featured on a Detroit TV station. It’s unclear whether a lawsuit will be filed as a result, but the episode caused the Lincoln Park Police Department plenty of grief. People wrote into local newspapers calling for the operator’s firing and one YouTube video debated whether he should keep his job.

Tom Carnes, Lincoln Park’s police chief quickly acknowledged his employee acted wrongly. “It’s not the station’s finest moment. My guy screwed up on this. He never once asked her, ‘What’s wrong?’ ” The operator was suspended for two weeks without pay.

Today, the Washington Post has a detailed piece with an interesting and novel premise: Sotomayor possibly is too detail oriented.

The paper studied all 46 of her Second Circuit cases that resulted in a divided ruling ─the sort of close-call cases, in other words, she likely would face on the Supreme Court.

Her votes qualified as “liberal” in 59% of the cases ─ within the mainstream for Democratic-appointed judges, the WaPo’s reporting found.

But the striking detail, according to WaPo, is that Sotomayor’s opinions “often offered a granular analysis of every piece of evidence in criminal trials, and sometimes read as if she were retrying cases from her chambers.”

Given the Second Circuit’s heavy caseload, Arthur Hellman, an expert on federal judging said, “it seems an odd use of judicial time . . . to spend endless hours delving into the minutiae of the record.”

Did Sotomayor ever invade juries or judges’ fact-finding prerogative? On occasion, WaPo suggests.

Last year, in a dissenting opinion, she cited government reports and newspaper articles to argue that a trial judge had handed down too severe of a criminal sentence. A Republican judge, who disagreed, wrote that “appellate courts are not factfinders . . . I do not understand it to be our role.”

In a 2004 case, Sotomayor dissented from a majority opinion partially striking down claims that teenage girls had been illegally strip-searched at a Connecticut juvenile detention facility. Citing documents from pretrial discovery, according to the Post, Sotomayor analyzed some strip searches in Connecticut that were not part of the lawsuit. She concluded that there was “no evidence that suspicionless strip searches were necessary.”

Hellman said Sotomayor engages in a “relentless mustering of facts. She goes well beyond what is necessary for the case and is determined not to just defeat the other side, but to annihilate it.”

The piece, however, quotes Dan Himmelfarb, a former Clarence Thomas clerk, who said Sotomayor is “extraordinarily thorough, and a judge would ordinarily be praised for writing thorough opinions.”

Sotomayor’s eye for detail, however, may have little bearing on her chances of ascending to the high judicial throne.

WSJ has a story today noting that the GOP has thrown in the towel, concluding “they have almost no chance of defeating” Sotomayor’s nomination. Instead, Republicans plan to use the confirmation hearings “to promote conservative legal ideas they hope will pay off in future political battles,” including any additional Supreme Court vacancies Obama might fill.

Finally, the Brennan Center for Justice released a study of more than 1,100 constitutional cases, which finds that Sotomayor is neither an activist nor an outlier among her peers on the Second Circuit. (Click here to get a copy of the report.)

To recap, the former governor has been accused of trying to auction off President Barack Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat. Blago, who was impeached in January, has said he did nothing wrong and would fight any changes

John Harris, Blago’s former chief of staff, pleaded guilty to corruption charges yesterday and formally agreed to testify against his former boss.

The Chicago Tribune reports that the plea agreement goes into detail on how Blagojevich and his advisers allegedly strategized to parlay the vacant senate seat to Blago’s benefit.

The plea alleges that Blagojevich sent Harris to the Illinois legislature to see if one Senate candidate would be willing to exchange all the money in his campaign fund for the U.S. Senate seat, although Harris did not explicitly deliver that message, the Trib reports.

“I have never met a person who is going to be a better witness than John Harris,” his attorney, Terry Ekl said.

The former governor, according to the plea, also talked to an officer at the Service Employees International Union about Blago’s chances of landing a position in the Obama administration if he appointed the president’s close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, to the senate.

In other Blago news, the Trib offers some new details on the allegations that the former governor pressured the University of Illinois law school to admit an unqualified applicant with financial ties to the former governor. (Here’s a Law Blog backgrounder on the scandal.)

Gov. Pat Quinn has convened a commission to investigate the situation, and has tapped retired judge Abner Mikva to chair it.

Yesterday, Heidi Hurd, the former dean of the law school, testified to the commission that she felt “enraged” when Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman ordered her to accept a student backed by the governor and then tried to appease her by offering to secure five jobs for law school graduates, the Trib reports.

“I was incensed because we had just been steamrolled by what I felt to be an abuse of an official office,” Hurd said. “I took it to be the case that there had been a top-down gubernatorial fiat.”

Previously, Herman has declined to comment. “In the future, I expect to be talking to the Mikva commission and I believe I owe them my first public statement on these matters,” he has said.