This is an interesting decision in which the Fifth Circuit caught the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, appropriately referred to as “ICE”, at a game of cooly manufacturing the very exigent circumstances they needed to justify a warrantless entry of a residence. As a result, the Court reversed the district ...

Here, in affirming a sentence increase based on the district court's use of conduct underlying a count for which the defendant had been acquitted, the Court stated: "It is true that the jury acquitted Gobbi of possession of a weapon in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). Nevertheless, the pre-Booker ...

Plaintiff, after being convicted but while out of prison on recognizance bail after being sentenced to a four-month term, sued defendant Bureau of Prisons (BOP), alleging that the BOP's rules limiting community confinement center (CCC) designations violated 18 U.S.C.S. § 3621(b)'s mandate that the BOP consider each prisoner's sentencing location ...

While the sentencing world waits for the Supreme Court to put some clarity, consistency and direction back into the Federal sentencing system in the wake of U.S. v. Booker, the courts continue to churn out wildly disparate decisions regarding the discretion of sentencing judges to vary from the range suggested ...

In this decision, District Judge Reggie Walton rejected the motion of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to permit the expert testimony of Dr. Robert J. Bjork in support of his faulty memory defense. Libby, who was charged with five counts of obstruction of justice and two counts of making false statements, ...

In this decision, a divided panel from the D.C. Circuit held that Congress stripped the Federal courts of jurisdiction to hear any habeas challenges from the hundreds of foreign nationals being held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba when it enacted the Military Commissions Act (“MCA”). Writing ...

In this case, the Government served a subpoena on defense counsel, seeking the production of records relating to the source and amounts of payments for “legal, investigative and other fees for services provided in connection with” his representation of the defendant in a prior extortion proceeding, “and in any related ...

This is one of those procedurally complex habeas corpus cases that illustrates, once again, the chaotic disarray and sometimes mind-blowing incoherence wrought on the once clear law of habeas corpus by the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA).

One of the provisions of that Act established a ...