This is an interesting prisoner’s rights case in which the plaintiff, Marvin Reeves, an inmate in an Arkansas state prison, brought a civil rights action, pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, against Lieutenant Jacob King, for violating Reeves’ Eighth Amendment rights by calling him a snitch in the presence of ...

In this case, the First Circuit addressed a series of errors made by the district court (the error-prone Judge Jose Antonio Fuste of the D. Puerto Rico) when it imposed a 20-year term of supervised release with a number of special conditions on a defendant convicted of failing to register ...

In the 04/14/14 issue of P&J, we noted that a sharply-divided panel from the Fourth Circuit had issued an opinion in which it addressed the question of whether a federal inmate may use a 28 U.S.C. § 2255 motion to challenge a sentence that was based on the career offender ...

One of the several issues raised in this drug case was whether a defendant has a right to compel discovery of all the past field performance records of the drug-sniffing dog whose alert provided the probable cause for his arrest. And on that issue the Court squarely held that a ...

The debate over what is an appropriate sentence for the possession of child pornography continues to rage in the courts. And, while most of the child porn sentencing decisions involve a discussion of why the sentence was too high, this one is a rare example of a debate over whether ...

In the 09/08/14 issue of P&J, we noted a remarkable and ominous panel decision from the Third Circuit in which the Court created a new draconian remedy to deal with defendants who attempt to appeal some aspect of their sentence after agreeing in their plea agreements to waive some of ...