Here a 5-4 majority issued an order known as a GVR over the bitter dissent of four Justices who championed the “traditional requirements” of the GVR over the petitioner’s rights to a full and fair hearing on the blatant misconduct that had occurred.
Early on in the unsigned majority opinion, ...
Here the Coirt held that, absent special circumstances, a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a public trial requires that the public have access to the jury selection phase of trial, including specifically the voir dire of prospective jurors.
In this case the Supreme Court strengthened the right to open public ...
Here the Court held that attaching various mobile tracking devices to a suspect’s vehicle on seven separate occasions and continuously monitoring his activities by using those tracking devices did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights.
The issue before the Court in this case was “whether law enforcement officers violate a ...
In this case, the Eleventh Circuit rejected a Second Amendment challenge to a Federal conviction for possession of a firearm by a person convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(9). The defendant, Ludivic White, raised that challenge based upon the Supreme Court’s ...
This is Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s first signed criminal opinion since joining the Supreme Court; and her rigid stance in this case upholding the death penalty suggests that she certainly hasn’t changed her stripes much since her days on the Second Circuit when she rarely cast a sympathetic vote for the ...
Here the Court held that the police were not entitled to assert the defense of qualified immunity in a civil rights lawsuit because it was clearly established that the interrogation techniques they employed on three teenagers shocked the conscience.
This is a fascinating - but extremely disturbing - decision which ...
Here the Court rejected as unreasonable a special condition of supervised release which unconditionally barred the defendant, a "lifelong sexual predator," from using the Internet throughout his term of lifetime supervised release.
In this case the Third Circuit rejected as unreasonable an “unconditional ban on Internet access” that was imposed ...
Here the Court rejected, at least for now, any reconsideration of its controversial Confrontation Clause ruling in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, which reinforced the rights of criminal defendants to challenge the use of crime lab reports.
In this case, the Court issued a single sentence, per curiam ruling which reads in ...