Immigration Courts Under Attack - We have seen a lot of cases of late in which the Circuit Courts have expressed great dismay and concern about the growing chaos and lack of justice in the nation’s immigration courts, whose judges are employees of the increasingly politicized Department of Justice - …

One of the few statutory provisions that enables a defendant to obtain relief from the growing assortment of mandatory minimum sentences is the safety valve statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(f), and its Guidelines’ counterpart contained in U.S.S.G. § 5C1.2. To receive such relief, the defendant must satisfy five …

In 2006, a panel of the Ninth Circuit faced a question of first impression among the circuits: does the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act of 1996 (MVRA) allow the government to seize a defendant’s pension benefits protected under the provisions of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974(ERISA)? At that …

The question before the Court in this case was whether, under the framework established in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989), its decision in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), should be applied retroactively to cases on collateral review. Teague held that a new rule announced by the …

In this case, the Supreme Court addressed what appears to be a very straightforward question - namely does a false arrest statute of limitations begin to run at the time of the person’s arrest, or only after the arrested person is later exonerated?

That recurrent issue is complicated by so-called …

Here the Court held that a post-9/11 amendment to the Handschu Guidelines had been violated by the police when they used its authority to videotape two innocuous demonstrations by citizens, thus violating their First Amendment rights.

In 1971, a group of private citizens filed a class-action lawsuit complaining that the …

Here a divided panel held that the district court had not abused its discretion by failing to appoint counsel for an in forma pauperis prisoner who brought a § 1983 action alleging that he was sexually assaulted by a prison guard.

Plaintiff inmate appealed from a judgment of the District …

In U.S. v. Souser, 405 F.3d 1162 (10th Cir. May 4, 2005) (P&J, 04/18/05), the Tenth Circuit held that an “employment verification policy” for federal probationers established by the Colorado probation office was an improper occupational restriction under U.S.S.G. § 5F1.5. That policy required all probationers "to inform their employers …

Immigration Courts Under Attack - We have seen a lot of cases of late in which the Circuit Courts have expressed great dismay and concern about the growing chaos and lack of justice in the nation’s immigration courts, whose judges are employees of the increasingly politicized Department of Justice - …