This is an important case of first impression about the Government’s disclosure obligations under two of the most frequently used anti-terrorism statutes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (“FISA”) and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 ("FAA"); and it potentially could add a potent new exception to the law ...

In this case, the Court addressed an interesting immigration law issue - namely whether the defendant, Jorge Humberto Thum, encouraged or induced an illegal alien to reside in the United States, in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv), or aided and abetted the commission of this crime, in violation of ...

The defendant in this case, Juan Salazar, was charged with four counts of multiple drug and firearms offenses; and, at trial, his sole theory of defense was that, while he had initially engaged in the two underlying conspiracies that were charged, he had ultimately withdrawn from both conspiracies. The Court ...

In this case, a divided panel from the Ninth Circuit granted habeas relief to the petitioner, Bryant Williams, who was convicted in 2006 by a California state court of three sex-offense related charges on the basis that the trial judge’s statement that Williams had pled guilty - a misstatement made ...

Here the Court vacated a conviction because the district court had engaged in repeated “improper judicial intervention” by “taking on the prosecutor’s role” through hostile and prejudicial questioning of witnesses and by “unreasonable fact-finding”.

This is an important and instructive decision in which the First Circuit vacated the conviction of ...

Although there are nearly two full months left this year for additional decisions, the claims made in this case by the plaintiffs from the Seattle police force were so outlandish and so brazen that this decision has to be the hands down winner of our annual “Chutzpah Case of the ...