This is a watershed criminal law decision that (a) strikes down as unconstitutionally vague a critical and frequently used mandatory minimum sentencing provision of the Armed Career Criminal Act of 1984 (“ACCA”); (b) opens up the possibility of appeals by some 7,000 Federal defendants who are currently serving ACCA-enhanced sentences; ...

In this case, the Court addressed the appeal of Kevan Brumfield, an inmate on death row in Louisiana, who was sentenced to death for the 1993 murder of a Baton Rouge police officer. At the time of his trial, no precedent of the Supreme Court barred the imposition of the ...

In this case, the Supreme Court, by a 9-0 vote (albeit with two concurrences, one of which was more like a dissent), reinstated the criminal conviction of Darius Clark for child abuse, ruling that the admission of out-of-court statements by the abused child to his teacher were not testimonial in ...

In the January 20, 2014 issue of P&J, we noted an en banc decision from the Ninth Circuit in which that Court held that a Los Angeles municipal ordinance, which required hotel operators to maintain certain guest registry information and to make that information available to the police on request ...

In 1934, Congress enacted what has become known as the “forced-accompaniment” provision to the Federal bank robbery statutes which provides in relevant part:

“Whoever, in committing any offense defined in this section, or in avoiding or attempting to avoid apprehension for the commission of such offense . . . forces ...

The Petitioner in this case, Michael Kingsley, was a pretrial detainee in a Wisconsin county jail, waiting trial on some drug charges. One day, he got into a dispute with two jail officers, who handcuffed him, forcibly removed him from his cell, and later used a taser on him. Kingsley ...

Here a divided Court held that a prisoner who sought federal habeas relief based on three theories and prevailed in the district court on two of them is not required to file a cross-appeal or seek a certificate of appealability on the third theory.

This is a death penalty/habeas corpus ...

This appeal involved multiple convictions of the petitioner, Stephen McFadden, arising from the sale of “controlled substance analogues” in violation of an almost unreadable statutory riddle, the Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act of 1986 (the "Analogue Act"), which is codified at 21 U.S.C. §§ 802(32)(A) and 813.

Federal law criminalizes ...