The defendant in this case, Gerald Whitmore, was convicted at trial of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), and simple possession of a controlled substance, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 844(a). He appealed the firearm conviction on the ground that ...

Here the Court held that the Federal Juvenile Delinquency Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 5031, et seq.) assumes that a juvenile will be sentenced based on his or her age at the time of the dispositional hearing, rather than at the time the crime was committed; and those sentencing provisions do ...

The long saga of Gary Cone’s efforts to escape the death penalty are nearly legendary by now. A Vietnam veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, Cone was sentenced to death by a Tennessee court in 1982 for the brutal murders of an elderly couple. At both the trial and ...

Here the en banc court upheld the validity of appeal waiver provisions in general, and rejected the defendant's claim that such waivers can never be knowing and voluntary; but the Court did establish a series of criteria for examining such waivers.

By now, virtually every Circuit has accepted the premise ...

Joining with six other Circuits (the First, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Eighth and Eleventh), the Ninth Circuit agreed that handwriting expert testimony satisfies the reliability threshholds established under the Daubert and Kumho Tire cases. Accordingly, the Court affirmed Judge Lasnik’s lengthy decision reported at 220 F.Supp.2d 1203 (W.D.Wash. 2002), and held ...

Here the Court upheld the release of a “three strikes” defendant from prison, after concluding that his nonviolent robbery of a $199 VCR was one of those “exceedingly rare” cases where a sentence of 25 years to life did not fit the crime.

Last year, a sharply divided Supreme Court ...

Here the Fourth Circuit overturned a series of sanctions that Judge Brinkema had imposed in this case, due to the Government's refusal, on national security gounds, to give the defedant access to other persons being held as suspected terrorists.

Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen, was arrested in August 2001 after ...

Here, citing the First Amendment, the Ninth Circuit struck down a California state prison rule that barred inmates from receiving mail that contained downloads from the Internet. The Court concluded that the restriction was too broad to constitutionally serve the stated purpose of maintaining security; and thus granted an injunction ...

Petitioner inmate appealed a judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, which denied his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Two years after the inmate pleaded guilty to kidnapping, assault and battery, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and armed robbery, the Commonwealth ...