In case where petitioner was convicted of second degree murder, robbery, and lesser crimes in state court, judgment of district court granting petitioner a writ of habeas corpus is reversed where: 1) petitioner's failure to timely appeal her conviction was an adequate state procedural bar foreclosing federal review of the ...

Although this decision seems to have been ignored by most commentators, it is an extremely important sentencing decision in which Judge Letts held that the ten year mandatory minimum sentence contained in 21 U.S.C. § 841(b) is unconstitutional as applied to “peripheral participants” in a drug transaction. After a careful ...

Here the Court the Court affirmed a sanction against an Assistant U.S. Attorney for a discovery violation; but then elected to report its ruling as an unpublished decision where it cannot be cited as precedent under Fifth Circuit rules.

Brandon Sample, a Federal prisoner, brought a civil rights lawsuit in ...

Here the Court joined a Circuit split by holding that statements made to the police by a defendant who has been placed under arrest but has not been given any Miranda warnings are admissible under the public safety exception to the Miranda rule.

Under the rule established in Miranda v. ...

Here the Court held, as a matter of first impression, that the mandatory pretrial electronic monitoring conditions of the Adam Walsh Act did not apply to the defendant, since those conditions apply only in cases involving a “minor victim”.

This is an interesting decision involving an issue of first impression ...