Under the common law principle of sovereign immunity, the Federal Government is immune from civil suit unless it has waived its immunity or consented to such a suit. The United States has waived its sovereign immunity, at least to a limited extent, mainly through the Federal Tort Claims Act (“FTCA”) ...

The debate continues over whether restrictions on the right to carry concealed guns in public and away from the home violate the Second Amendment in the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). In this case, Raymond Woollard and the Second Amendment Foundation, Inc. initiated an ...

In this case, the Supreme Court limited the right of the police to use drug-detecting dogs within the “curtilage” of a home without a warrant based on probable cause. It did that by holding that a dog sniff at the front door of a house where the police suspected drugs ...

In The New York Times v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, No. 11 Civ. 9336(CM) (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 2, 2013)(P&J, 01/07/13), District Judge Colleen McMahon of the S.D.N.Y. denied a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by The New York Times to compel the Department of Justice (DOJ) to disclose the ...

This case explores an interesting question of first impression concerning the so-called sentencing “safety valve,” a provision enacted by Congress in 1994 that enables a Federal sentencing judge to impose a sentence on a defendant convicted of certain drug offenses that is below the otherwise applicable mandatory minimum. To qualify ...

This disgraceful and disturbing case might just represent the perfect example of why and how police misconduct can and will result in the total breakdown of the criminal justice system in America.

In 1990, a jury convicted Debra Jean Milke of murdering her four-year-old son; and she was sentenced to ...

This is another case that shows the dangers of social media; and the Government’s increasing use of social media in criminal prosecutions. Here, after one of the defendants in this case, Melvin Colon, was indicted for multiple, but unspecified, crimes, he moved to suppress evidence seized from his Facebook account ...

Here the Court held that two key provisions of the law which authorize the FBI to issue National Security Letters (NSLs) (namely 18 U.S.C. §§ 2709(c) and 3511(b)), suffer from “significant constitutional infirmities” and it enjoined their use.

Within the space of a few years, National Security Letters (NSLs) have ...