Continuing his penchant for embarrassing the Government, the indefatigable District Judge Jed Rakoff of the S.D.N.Y. has openly challenged the trustworthiness of the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States (OSG) by suggesting that it may have deliberately misled the United States Supreme Court about the Administration’s immigration ...

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are littered with examples of a near-frenzied effort by the Sentencing Commission and/or Congress to impose the maximum possible punishment on all sex offenders, regardless of the specific sentencing factors listed in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). One such example is the Policy Statement set forth at ...

Here the Court ordered the release of a 500-page special Report on the “pervasive” prosecutorial misconduct that “permeated” the trial of former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, stating it would be an "affront to the First Amendment" not to release it.

In the fall of 2008, then-U.S. Senator Theodore F. ...

Here the Court clarified an earlier ruling held that, while restitution can be awarded under § 2259(c) against a mere possessor of child pornography, it can only be ordered when the Government can demonstrate proximate causation of harm to the victim.

This mammoth, 130-page decision addressed a plethora of issues ...

In this case, the Tenth Circuit addressed the meaning of U.S.S.G. § 2L1.2, an awkwardly phrased provision of the Guidelines that applies to defendants who illegally reenter the United States in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326. As relevant to the facts of this case, § 2L1.2 provides as follows: ...

This decision was one of five nearly identical orders issued by a sharply divided panel from the Ninth Circuit challenging the Obama Administration’s enforcement of its deportation policies. All five cases arose out of a memorandum (herein the “Morton Memorandum”) issued on June 17, 2011 by John Morton, the Director ...

Here the Court held that a Joint Defense Agreement cannot be unilaterally waived to satisfy the discovery needs of one of the parties created by her subsequent claim of ineffective assistance of counsel in a §2255 habeas proceeding.

This is an interesting decision that examines briefly the scope and sanctity ...