In August 2010, Congress enacted The Fair Sentencing Act (“FSA”); and, from the outset, that law was not deemed to be one of Congress’ stellar accomplishments. For example, although Congress boldly proclaimed that the FSA was designed to “restore fairness to Federal cocaine sentencing,” it failed to achieve that lofty ...

This is another of a long line of habeas cases that have addressed the rigid standards of review established under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 ("AEDPA"). In this case the Court specifically addressed the meaning of the particularly cumbersome language of 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1) which ...

This is an extremely important Fourth Amendment decision in which the Court was required to decide “whether the police, after seizing a cell phone from an individual's person as part of his lawful arrest, can search the phone's data without a warrant” - an issue that neither the First Circuit ...

This case is noted as a good example of a sentencing gone badly awry. Not only did the First Circuit find that “the general sentence of life imprisonment imposed on the [defendant] must be vacated because it exceeds the statutory maximum on each of the nine counts” to which the ...

This decision marks the culmination of the sordid “Kids for Cash” scandal that erupted in Pennsylvania in 2008, in which the defendant, Mark Ciavarella, a former state judge, and a number of cohorts, including a fellow judge, Michael Conahan, were convicted for accepting bribes and kickbacks in excess of $2.8 ...