Here, citing the decision and reasoning of the Fifth Circuit in U.S. v. Portillo-Munoz, 643 F.3d 437 (5th Cir. June 13, 2011) (petition for cert. filed Nov. 2, 2011) (P&J, 07/11/11), the Eighth Circuit held that illegal aliens do not have any Second Amendment rights. In Portillo-Munoz, a sharply divided ...
Among the many issues addressed by the Tenth Circuit in this case was the defendant’s challenge to his designation as a career offender under U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1 based on his prior conviction for attempted drug trafficking.
The defendant in this case, Christopher Chavez, was arrested for driving while intoxicated; and, ...
In this unusually arcane immigration case, the Supreme Court addressed the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (BIA) complex policy for deciding when resident aliens may apply to the Attorney General for relief from deportation under a now-repealed provision of the U.S. immigration laws - namely, § 212(c) of the Immigration and ...
Here the Court held that the district court violated the Supreme Court’s rule in Tapia v. U.S. by increasing the defendant’s sentence to provide additional time for the treatment of the his mental illness; and then boldly suggested how to fix the error.
In Tapia v. U.S., 564 U.S. ___, ...
In a scenario that seems to play out every day in the Federal courts these days, Jose Garcia-Torres, a native and citizen of Mexico, was arrested by local police officers in Missouri; and, after the local prosecutor found no probable cause for his arrest, he was quickly turned over to ...
Once again boldly challenging (if not defying) the Second Circuit, and once again attacking the premises and validity of both the child pornography laws and some of the many mandatory minimum sentencing laws, Judge Weinstein held, in this whopping 420-page long sentencing memorandum, that the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for ...
This decision is principally noted for Judge Gilbert Merritt’s strong dissent in which he sharply criticized "the gross disparity, inequality, and unfairness that exists" in sentencing generally, "but even more so in these child pornography viewer cases".
There is little noteworthy about this hum-drum child pornography sentencing decision other than ...
