Federal law prohibits the possession of firearms by anyone convicted of “a misdemeanor crime of violence.” (18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(9).) The narrow issue addressed by the Court in this case involved the meaning of the phrase “the use . . . of physical force” in the Federal statute (18 U.S.C. ...

The question before the Court in this drug deal gone bad case was whether the federal offense of aiding and abetting the use of a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence or drug trafficking crime requires proof of intentional facilitation or encouragement of the use of ...

This decision finally resolved (at least in part) a growing, and increasingly contentious, divide among the lower courts over the correct interpretation of 18 U.S.C. § 2259, a component of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. That confusing and confused statute requires district courts to order defendants convicted of ...

In this case, a sharply divided Supreme Court expanded significantly the scope of the existing precedents on the right of the police to make a lawful stop and search and seizure of a vehicle based on anonymous tip, “true or false.” In fact, to emphasize the significance of the Court’s ...

Most of the myriad cases decided by the Supreme Court since the enactment of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) have addressed issues that were so highly technical and fact-specific that they have very little precedential value. (They do, of course, have two traits in common: ...

The defendant in this case, Rikey Benns, was named in a one-count indictment charging him with making false statements relating to a credit application, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1014. The indictment alleged that Benns "knowingly made a material false statement for the purpose of influencing the action of ...

In 2010, Robert Freeman, who was also known as “Dr. Shine,” was indicted and charged with two counts of obstruction of an official proceeding, two counts of making false statements in a bankruptcy proceeding, and one count of providing false records in a bankruptcy proceeding that he and his wife ...