This case started when two Black students from the Georgia Southern University were stopped for speeding while driving in Georgia. They were brought to a police station in the City of Zebulon, where police officer Denis Stephens proceeded to stip-search them, jab their bare buttocks with a flashlight or a ...

Here, reversing a prior ruling reported at 326 F.3d 651 (5th Cir. 2003), as well as established Fifth Circuit precedent dating back to 1993, and reinterpreting its analysis of the Supreme Court’s holding in Maryland v. Buie, 494 U.S. 325 (1990), a divided en banc court held that a protective ...

Defendant appealed the decision of the District Court revoking his supervised release and imposing a sentence of imprisonment. Defendant alleged that he was denied the right of allocution at his release revocation hearing before sentence was imposed.

The appellate court held that defendant's right of allocution extended to the release ...

In this case the Second Circuit overturned a heroin conviction because a drug agent had been allowed to testify both as a fact witness and as an expert witness, ultimately testifying as to the meaning of the phrase: “I was there to watch someone’s back.” Concluding that the district court’s ...

Here the Second Circuit held that the Feeney Amendment to the Protect Act applies to cases pending on appeal when the Act was enacted, because the Act’s change in the standard of review on appeal is procedural rather than substantive. However, the Court also held that the Act’s limitation on ...

Joining with the Sixth Circuit, the Eleventh Circuit held that the United States Sentencing Commission exceeded its authority in providing an enhancement for crimes involving semi-automatic weapons legally possessed under the "grandfather" provision of the 1994 assault weapons ban; for an enhancement to apply under U.S.S.G. § 2K2.1(a)(5), the prosecution ...

In this case the First Circuit overturned the money laundering convictions of a Boston realtor, who sold several parcels of real estate to the notorious gangster Stephen Flemmi, on the grounds that the evidence against the defendant was “simply too thin” to support a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 1957. ...

Here the Court upheld a huge restitution order against a juvenile offender, after summarily dismissing his concerns that such an order was so burdensome as to be inimical with the rehabilitative purposes of the Federal Juvenile Delinquency Act.

Before reading this decision, one should read the recent op-ed commentary written ...

In this case the Sixth Circuit found that a group of furniture makers had failed to demonstrate that they were significantly harmed when federal prison furniture factories increased their production, in violation of the governing statutes. Federal Prison Industries, Inc., known as UNICOR, operates under 18 U.S.C. §§ 4121-4129. It ...

Stating that, based on the trial record, “only rank conjecture supports a conclusion that [the defendant] knew or should have known” that the bar he robbed was within 1,000 feet of a school zone, the Third Circuit vacated his conviction on the 18 U.S.C. § 922(q)(2)(A) conviction and remanded with ...

This case is noted both as a rare example of a dismissal (albeit without prejudice) of a Federal prosecution for a violation of the anti-shuttling provisions of the complex Interstate Compact on Detainers (IAD), and for its detailed and informative analysis of that law, which creates uniform procedures for the ...