Plaintiffs, prisoners, sued defendants, a correctional facility and individuals, alleging that the conditions of their confinement violated the Eighth Amendment. The parties entered into a consent decree. The prisoner later moved to enforce the consent decree. The United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin issued an enforcement ...
Petitioner, the next friend and brother of a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, sought review of a judgment from the United States District Court for the Central District of California, which dismissed for lack of jurisdiction petitioner's action against respondents, the President of the United States and the ...
In its earlier decision in this case (Shaw v. Terhune, 353 F.3d 697 (9th Cir. 2003) (P&J, 12/08/03) (Shaw I)), a divided panel from the Ninth Circuit held that, while it might be "stunningly dishonorable and outright deplorable" for prosecutors to convict two people for the same crime when they ...
In its prior decision reported at 314 F.Supp.2d 834, the Court had concluded that the Federal Bureau of Prisons was acting contrary to 18 U.S.C.S. § 3624(b) by calculating habeas petitioner's good conduct time on the basis of the actual time he had served rather than his imposed sentence. The ...
In this case Judge Johnson granted the Government’s motion for an anonymous and partially sequestered jury in the forthcoming murder trial of the defendant, an alleged member and acting boss of the Colombo crime family. Specifically, the Government requested that (a) the names, addresses and places of employment of the ...
Just before Christmas in 2002, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) faxed a letter to all Federal judges, announcing that it was changing its long-standing policy regarding the placement of inmates in community confinement centers or halfway houses (which are officially referred to as “CCCs,” after their official name, “community ...
On a separate issue, the Court also upheld the constitutional validity of a key provision of the antiterrorism laws - namely, 18 U.S.C. § 1189(a)(1). Under 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, it is unlawful to "knowingly provide[ ] material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or [to] attempt[ ] ...
In this case, a former inmate brought a sexual discrimination case under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against Texas prison officials alleging that they deliberately placed him in the general population knowing that he was a homosexual; and then ignored his frequent requests for protection or a transfer to safekeeping to ...
Here the D.C. Circuit held that the district court had abused its discretion by ordering the production of medical records to opposing counsel in a civil suit, without determining whether those records were subject to the federal psychotherapist privilege recognized in Jaffee v. Redmond, 518 U.S. 1 (1996), and without ...
Here, stretching the boundaries of pretextual - but legal - automobile searches to new limits, the Eighth Circuit held that a police officer’s observation of an “air freshener” hanging from the rearview mirror of the defendant’s automobile provided probable cause to stop the car under a Nebraska statute that prohibits ...
In this 145-page long en banc decision, the majority held, by a vote of 9 to 3, that Blakely does not apply to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines among other reasons because they are not statutes.
The Fourth Circuit has finally released its en banc review and analysis of Blakely v. ...
The defendant in this case, Peter Gotti, the alleged acting boss of an organized crime family, was tried and convicted on various charges. Prior to his sentencing, and as is customary, various people submitted letters directly to the Court expressing their views regarding the appropriate sentence for Gotti. One of ...