In this case, the Supreme Court split 5 to 4 on the question of AEDPA deference to state-court harmless-error determinations. During jury selection in his triple-murder trial, Hector Ayala, who is Hispanic, objected to the prosecution's peremptory challenges of all seven of the potential black and Hispanic jurors in his ...

The Rank Hypocrisy of American Diplomatic Honor: Yesid Rios Suarez, a citizen of Columbia, operated a large-scale drug trafficking organization out of Colombia and Venezuela for nearly 20 years. In September 2010, while Suarez was in Venezuela, he was convicted in absentia in Colombia of drug manufacturing and trafficking. Approximately ...

Once again, our favorite judicial maverick, District Judge Jack Weinstein, has raised some weighty and searing questions about the automatically harsh sentences that are required to be imposed in child porn and sexual exploitation cases. Despite the importance of his questions, we doubt that the Second Circuit will ever let ...

Can a really rich defendant buy his way out of prison in the year 2015? That’s essentially the essence of the question that the Seventh Circuit addressed in this case; and it concluded that because of the “unique circumstances of this case” - i.e., the district court’s finding that the ...

This was an exceptionally rancorous death penalty decision - even for a Court that is so radically divided, both politically and philosophically, on the topic of capital punishment. In theory, the issue before the Court was whether the particular method of execution now used by the State of Oklahoma - ...

In this landmark decision, a divided panel from the Second Circuit reinstated a series of civil rights claims, initially asserted some 13 years ago against top Bush Administration officials, by some of the hundreds of men who were detained as “terrorism suspects” based solely on their race, religion, ethnicity and ...

In this opinion Judge Posner addressed an issue that, far too often, is totally ignored by sentencing judges who routinely (especially in cases involving drugs, guns or pornography) impose sentences that are humongously long and expressed in terms of hundreds of months. That issue, in Judge Posner’s words, is “the ...