Juan Esquivel-Quintana was admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident in 2000. In 2009, he pleaded no contest in the Superior Court of California to a statutory rape offense: “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor who is more than three years younger than the perpetrator.” At the ...

In this decision the Supreme Court vacated a $4 million judgment against two deputies of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that was awarded to the Plaintiffs/Respondents Angel Mendez and Jennifer Garcia at the conclusion of a trial in a civil rights action for damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. ...

In this decision, the Eighth Circuit issued a surprisingly stern rebuke to an un-named district judge from the D.S.Dak. for abusing his or her discretion by sua sponte departing upward from a criminal category II to Category VI, based on the judge’s stated perception that “a criminal history category of ...

In the context of the maze of Federal criminal laws (including the Sentencing Guidelines) relating to child pornography, an effort has been made to punish more severely one who has been convicted of the crime of producing child pornography versus one who has been convicted of the crime of mere ...

This decision is noted for Judge Juan Torruella’s delicious and heart-warming dissent in which he railed against the rank idiocy of a combined sentence of 161 plus years given to a man who provided security services during six separate fake drug transactions staged by the FBI.

The defendant, Wendell Rivera-Ruperto, ...

In September 2015, an undercover detective, posing as the mother of fictitious 11- and 14-year-old daughters, placed an advertisement on Craigslist soliciting sexual partners for the fictitious girls. The defendant in this case, James Kirkland, who at that time was on supervised release following his 2010 conviction for failing to ...