Fogel has presided over federal criminal cases, including trials for perjury and fraud. In 2010, he presided over the perjury case of
Federal Bureau of Investigation employee Rachelle Thomas-Zuill, who pleaded guilty. On January 8, 2010, Fogel sentenced two people to federal prison for defrauding
24 Hour Fitness; one of the convicted, Susan Powell, served as a vice president of that company. Powell got 15 months, and advertising executive Michael Johnston got 5 months. On July 22, 2010, Fogel sentenced Seth Sundberg, the branch manager of a mortgage and financial business, to 71 months in prison and $2.4 million in restitution for obtaining a $5 million tax refund from the
Internal Revenue Service fraudulently. Sundberg pleaded guilty in January 2010 to
mail fraud. Other cases that Fogel has presided over federally included that of serial bank robber Froilan Alix Roldan, whom he sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment on September 30, 2009. Roldan robbed $90,000 from a
Bank of America branch in
Santa Clara, California over three instances in three years. Judge Fogel also sentenced
NASA Ames Research Center contractor Ernst John Rohde to a five-year term for possessing child pornography on his government computer; two other Ames employees had been convicted of the same offense previously. On October 29, 2009, Fogel awarded the
Palo Alto, California-based social networking website
Facebook $711 million in damages in a civil suit that Facebook filed against online marketer
Sanford Wallace, whom Facebook accused of using the website to send
spam to and steal personal information from website users.
California execution moratorium On December 15, 2006, in the case
Morales v. Tilton, Judge Fogel ruled that California execution procedures violate the
Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution because inexperienced, untrained prison staff do executions in crowded, poorly lit settings; Fogel wrote that "implementation of lethal injection" by California "is broken, but...can be fixed." That moratorium came ten months after Fogel issued a ruling two hours prior to the scheduled February 21, 2006 execution of
Michael Morales with conditions to prevent a painful execution: instead of administering it via intravenous tube, a licensed medical professional would have to inject
sodium thiopental directly into Morales' vein. California then delayed the execution, as it could not comply with Fogel's order. Under the same painful death criteria, Fogel issued a
stay of execution for
Albert Greenwood Brown on September 28, 2010, two days before Brown was scheduled to be executed. In response to Fogel's ruling in
Morales v. Tilton,
The New York Times wrote in a 2011 editorial: "For legislators in state capitols considering whether to abolish the [death] penalty... this case... has documented how lethal injection can be cruel and unusual punishment when unprofessionally administered and how the culture of prisons breeds that shoddy approach. It is one more reason to reject the death penalty as a barbaric punishment." ==Subsequent career==