With her usual courage and foresight, Judge Nancy Gertner used this well-documented Sentencing Memorandum to show why and how a rigid application of the career offender provisions of the Guidelines (U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1) can produce results that are, in her words, are both “astonishing” and “wholly inconsistent with the purposes ...

This is another death penalty case. However, in crafting this “Memorandum of Intended Decision”, Judge Fogel made clear:

“This case is not about whether the death penalty makes sense morally or as a matter of policy: the former inquiry is a matter not of law but of conscience; the latter ...

Defendant appealed his 33-month prison sentence, imposed by the United States District Court for the District of Montana following a remand for resentencing under Booker.

Defendant's sentence was the third sentence imposed in the instant case, and it was the most severe. He argued, inter alia, that he was entitled ...

In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 126 S.Ct. 2749 (June 29, 2006) (Hamdan I) (P&J, 05/29/06), a sharply divided Supreme Court held that President Bush did not have the legal authority to set up military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay to try the detainees being held there on terrorism charges, and that those ...

After the defendant in this case, James Thorpe, an African-American, was indicted for being a felon in possession of a firearm, he moved to dismiss his indictment on the ground that he was being selectively prosecuted because of his race. After conducting a preliminary investigation in support of his claim, ...

In this case, a panel from the Seventh Circuit unanimously rejected the defendant’s argument that evidence gathered under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ("FISA") cannot be used in domestic criminal investigations or prosecutions.

FISA, which was first enacted in 1978, applied to interceptions the "primary purpose" of which was foreign intelligence. ...

Here a divided panel held that the admission of a defendant’s eighteen year old prior conviction for armed robbery was not too remote in time to make in inadmissible, under the standards of Rule 404(b), in a later felon-in-possession trial.

Under the Rule 404(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence, ...

In this lengthy decision, Judge Young has produced another in a long list of signature masterpieces. (See, e.g., U.S. v. Kandirakis, 441 F.Supp.2d 282 (D.Mass. 2006) (P&J, 07/10/06); and U.S. v. Green, 346 F.Supp.2d 259 (D.Mass. 2004) (P&J, 05/31/04). Here, in the context of a relatively mundane case - an ...