In this case, a unanimous Court held that a second or subsequent conviction on a simple drug possession charge is not necessarily an “aggravated felony” for purposes of removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). In so ruling, the Court clarified another of the many inscrutable provisions in the ...

In a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action claiming that plaintiff-inmate was improperly labeled as a sex offender in violation of the Due Process Clause, summary judgment for plaintiff is reversed where: 1) while it may be the case that, in certain circumstances, misclassification as a sex offender results in "stigma ...

This case, which has a long and fractious history, is essentially about a controversial provision of the Patriot Act, namely 18 U. S. C. § 2339B, which makes it a federal crime to “knowingly provid[e] material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” The material support statute was first ...

Here the Court unanimously held that a California police department did not violate the constitutional privacy rights of a police officer when it audited his sexually explicit text messages on a pager issued to him by the police.

In this case, the Supreme Court unanimously held that a California police ...

Here, over a strong dissent by Justice Stevens, the Court held that, notwithstanding it ruling in U.S. v. Booker, the Federal Sentencing Guidelines are binding in sentencing modification rehearings held pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2).

In this 7-1 decision, the Court held that its landmark sentencing decision in U.S. ...

In this 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court delivered a rare victory to a death penalty inmate, holding that his lawyer’s negligence and misconduct may entitle the inmate to an “equitable tolling” of the otherwise strict one-year statute of limitations for filing an appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d) of the ...

Here the Court held, by a 5-4 vote, that even when a sentencing court misses the statutory deadline for making an order of restitution, as set forth in 18 U.S.C. § 3664(d)(5), the court still retains the power to award restitution at least sometimes.

The Mandatory Victims Restitution Act of ...

Defendant's amended sentence for attempted robbery is affirmed where: 1) an obstruction of justice enhancement applied to conduct that occurred with respect to an otherwise closely related case, such as that of a co-defendant; 2) except in extraordinary cases, the application of an enhancement for obstruction of justice ordinarily indicated ...

From its outset, the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has created a political, moral, legal and public relations disaster for the United States. The justifications used to support its existence were so patently pretextual that they made a shambles of America’s claims of righteousness and honor and justice; ...