This case is another chilling example of the rampant nature of executive detention in America. Ahilan Nadarajah, is a 25 year-old citizen of Sri Lanka and a member of that country’s Tamil ethnic minority. After being tortured for years by Sri Lankan authorities, he finally fled to the United States ...

Here Judge Robertson ruled that the continued, indefinite detention of two Chinese Muslims at Guantanamo Bay is unlawful, but said he had no authority "to do what I believe justice requires" in ordering their release. The two men, Abu Bakker Qassim and Adel Abdu al-Hakim were captured by Pakistani security ...

For the second time in two years, the Supreme Court declined to review an issue that has become one of the centerpieces of the current Administration’s war on terrorism - namely executive detention. More specifically, in the words of Justice Ginsburg, the issue before the Court was: “Does the President ...

Injunction against municipal-defendants involving a class action by inmates of city jails challenging defendants' asserted failure to provide them with educational services pursuant to state and federal law is vacated in part as to portions of the injunction based purely on state law.

This Third Circuit decision addresses a very interesting separation of powers issue: do federal courts have the authority to enjoin the federal government from indicting a defendant? Here, the district court found that the government’s planned indictment would violate the terms of an immunity agreement and therefore granted the putative ...

The Fourth Circuit addressed an important sentencing issue in these two consolidated cases - namely whether a defendant’s failure to raise any objections to facts stated in his presentence reports constitutes an admission of those facts for purposes of U.S. v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005) - and its ruling ...

The issue before the Court in this case was whether a district judge may reject a guilty plea that satisfies all of the requirements of Fed.R.Crim.P. 11(b) - and the Court answered that question with an emphatic “No.”

Alvaro Vasquez-Ramirez (“Vasquez”) was deported from the United States after having been ...

Here a divided panel struck down the BOP's latest and "final" regulation limiting (halfway house) utilization to the last 10% of a defendant's sentence as contrary to the statutory command of 18 U.S.C. § 3621(b).

Joining with the Third Circuit’s decision in Woodall v. Fed. Bureau of Prisons, 432 F.3d ...

This is an interesting decision in which a divided panel overturned a sexual predator’s conviction due to the use of improper character evidence. Kevin Curtain was caught in the now-common sting operation: a police officer posed as a 14-year old girl in order to trap predators on the Internet. After ...

Kim Saenz was one of four defendants arrested and charged with the distribution of marijuana. She immediately pled guilty and, on the day of her arrest, she began cooperating with the Government in its case against the other defendants, including her ex-husband. Kim’s recommended sentencing range under the Guidelines was ...