In this case, a divided panel from the Ninth Circuit held that the Supreme Court’s landmark Confrontation Clause decision in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004) was retroactive for purposes of Federal habeas petitions. In Crawford, the Supreme Court reversed a long line of decisions and set forth a ...

Here the Court held that a state prison policy that temporarily segregates new inmates must be evaluated under a "strict scrutiny" standard rather than the more liberal "rational relationship" standard established for prison cases in Turney v. Safley.

In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that a California state prison ...

Following the Supreme Court's decision in Rumsfeld v. Padilla, 124 S. Ct. 2711 (2004), and the refiling of this habeas petition in the jurisdiction where the petitioner was then being held, District Judge Henry Floyd has ruled that the Government must release Jose Padilla, the American citizen it has been ...

In this case, the Seventh Circuit consolidated several cases in which the district courts had enhanced the defendants’ sentences on the basis of facts not determined by the jury, but where the defendants had failed to raise any Booker objection before the district court. On appeal, the defendants all argued ...

In a decision that is highly fact-specific and that will have extremely limited precedential value, the Supreme Court held that Double Jeopardy principles barred a trial judge, after granting a motion finding insufficient evidence supported a gun count against a defendant when the prosecution rested its case, from changing his ...

In this case the Circuit reversed a district court's finding of a Brady violation concerning two sets of exculpatory documents. In a very fact intensive opinion, the Court ruled that because the first set of exculpatory material consisted of the defendant's own documents, and because defendant had access to them, ...

Here a bitterly divided Supreme Court held, by a vote of 5-to4, that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment bars the death penalty for offenders who committed their capital crimes before the age of 18.

In a case that shows the evolution of judicial thinking about the ...