U.S. v. [Lonnie] Davis, 458 F.3d 505 (6th Cir. Aug. 15, 2006) (Judge Moore)
U.S. v. Cage, 458 F.3d 537 (6th Cir. Aug. 15, 2006) (Judge Batchelder)

Both of these cases dealt with appeals by defendants from sentences that were within the ranges recommended by the Guidelines. As an initial ...

Congressman William Jefferson filed a motion under Fed. R. Crim. P. 41 for return of property in which he argued that the execution of a search warrant on his congressional office by federal agents was unlawful in violation of the Speech or Debate Clause of U.S. Const., the separation of ...

Previously, in U.S. v. Smith, 402 F.3d 1303 (11th Cir. Mar. 18, 2005) (“Smith I”) (P&J, 03/14/05), the Eleventh Circuit held that the defendant’s purely intrastate, non-commercial production and possession of child pornography was not subject to Commerce Clause regulation. Accordingly, the Court reversed the defendant’s convictions for child pornography ...

In the first judicial assessment of the secret National Security Agency’s super-secret domestic program to wiretap the international communications of some Americans without a warrant or other judicial approval, 73-year old Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the E.D.Mich. sharply took the Bush administration to task. In her sweeping, 43-page decision, ...

The defendant in this case was indicted in 1999 and convicted in 2002 of two counts of bank fraud arising out of a false financial statement that he had submitted to a bank way back in 1990. He was finally sentenced in 2003 to 33-months in prison, but that sentence ...

Here the Court held that noncitizens have a constitutional right to be free from false imprisonment and the use of excessive force by law enforcement personnel. Martinez Aguero, 49, of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, filed the lawsuit claiming that she was abused verbally and physically during a false arrest by a ...

Joining the First, Fourth, Seventh and Eleventh Circuits, the Second Circuit has now held that district courts “do not have the authority to reject unilaterally the 100:1 [crack-cocaine] sentencing ratio on policy grounds.” For two highly critical and astute commentaries about this ruling see “Second Circuit joins group mandating that ...

Prof. Orin S. Kerr alerted us to this child-pornography/computer-search ruling which, he stated, has “created a new constitutional rule for the execution of computer searches. In a recent posting on his Blog at www.OrinKerr.com, Prof. Kerr, who has been described as one of the leading voices in the emerging field ...

U.S. v. [Lonnie] Davis, 458 F.3d 505 (6th Cir. Aug. 15, 2006) (Judge Moore)
U.S. v. Cage, 458 F.3d 537 (6th Cir. Aug. 15, 2006) (Judge Batchelder)

Both of these cases dealt with appeals by defendants from sentences that were within the ranges recommended by the Guidelines. As an initial ...

In his dissent in U.S. v. Davis, No. 05-3784 (6th Cir. Aug. 14, 2006) (above), Judge Keith aptly noted that: “The current trend across the circuits is to afford less deference to district court sentences that depart below the advisory guideline range [than] over sentences that depart upward from the ...

Here the Ninth Circuit rejected a California inmate's 8th Amendment challenge to his 25-to-life three strikes sentence, which was imposed for possession of .036 grams of cocaine. The petitioner's prior strikes included a 1980 voluntary manslaughter conviction and a 1986 robbery with personal gun use. The Court concluded that no ...