Ricky Lee Holly, a Federal inmate serving his sentence at a private prison under contract with the Bureau of Prisons, sued the prison medical staff, under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971) for deliberate indifference to his medical needs in violation ...

In this 51-page opinion, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the convictions and sentences of three members of an elite INS squad known as the San Antonio Fugitive Unit, a group that specialized in tracking down and deporting illegal aliens with criminal records. The defendants, Richard Gonzales, Louis Gomez, Carlos Reyna, were ...

The defendant, Edward Coker, was convicted by a jury of one count of attempted arson in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 844(I). He appealed, arguing that the district court had erred in denying his motion to suppress a confession he made to federal agents because the agents violated his Sixth ...

The Hobbs Act (18 U.S.C. § 1951(a)) turns robberies into Federal offenses if the prosecutor can show any connection to interstate commerce. In the annals of interstate commerce jurisprudence, many strange, strained, and even comical rulings have upheld Federal jurisdiction on the basis of some minute connection to interstate commerce. ...

In this case, the defendant Charles Booker (no relation to the defendant in the Supreme Court’s Booker case) was convicted and sentenced for distribution of crack and constructive possession of a gun. At his pre-Booker sentencing hearing, the district could imposed a mandatory Guidelines sentence of 420 months (35 years); ...

More than a dozen years ago, Joni Goldyn was convicted by a jury in a Nevada state court of five counts of drawing and passing checks with insufficient funds on deposit, in violation of a state statute. Because she had previously been convicted of three felonies and one gross misdemeanor ...