Under the Federal drug forfeiture laws, a defendant can be ordered to turn over “any proceeds the person obtained, directly or indirectly,” from the crime. In addition, if assets traceable to the crime cannot be located, the Government can seize anything else a defendant might have to satisfy the forfeiture ...

The highly technical (and overly pious?) question before the Court in this case involved the proper application of two, intertwined doctrines - structural error and ineffective assistance of counsel. More specifically, the Court was asked to decide whether, when defense counsel in a criminal trial, through constitutionally deficient performance, fails ...

In a rare showing of judicial sympathy for an immigrant about to be deported, the Court latched on to a somewhat strained reading of the Strickland prejudice standard as the basis for granting relief to the petitioner in this case, and giving him a second chance to fight his drug ...

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in this country, the Federal government took into custody hundreds of “illegal aliens” and held them without bail pending determination of whether they had any connections to terrorism. In many instances, custody of those detainees lasted for days and ...

In this decision, “one of the first . . . to address the relationship between the First Amendment and the modern Internet,” the Supreme Court held that laws that bar sex offenders from using social media websites, like Facebook and Twitter, are unconstitutional because they prevent the user “from engaging ...

In this procedurally complex case, the Supreme Court gave a Texas death-row inmate a second chance to avoid the death penalty by ruling, among other things, that his lawyer during the penalty phase proceedings had unconstitutionally introduced testimony suggesting his client was more likely to be commit future crimes because ...