The defendant in this case, Alan Zaleski, owned and kept at his home in Berlin, CT, a large cache of firearms, ammunition and explosives. Although most of those weapons were lawfully owned, a “small fraction” were determined to be illegal. After the local police discovered the cache, they arrested Zaleski ...

In an extremely wary decision that the panel specifically directed should not be published or treated as precedential, a panel from the Fifth Circuit held that “allowing a prisoner to be exposed to extreme temperatures can constitute a violation of the Eighth Amendment.”

That ruling came in a civil rights ...

In a decision that is likely to send daggers of concern to prison officials and stir the imagination of pretrial detainees all across the country, the Second Circuit has reinstated a civil rights lawsuit brought by a pretrial detainee who claimed that prison officials at the Chittenden Regional Correction Facility ...

Mark Allen Youngs pled guilty pursuant to a plea agreement to a two-count indictment charging him with producing and possessing child pornography. At his plea hearing, the district court reviewed in detail the plea agreement with Youngs and the various rights set forth in Rule 11. As a part of ...

Here the Court held that the district courts have original jurisdiction over claims of U.S. citizens that the Government failed to afford them an adequate opportunity to contest their inclusion on its massive No-Fly List.

In Ibrahim v. Dept. of Homeland Security, 669 F.3d 983 (9th Cir. Feb. 8, 2012) ...

Here the Court addressed “the largest civil in rem forfeiture proceeding against firearms unlawfully possessed by a convicted felon in American history”; and presented a current analysis of the law on excessive fines under CAFRA.

This case involved the seizure of 1,679 firearms from a felon’s home in what the ...