This forfeiture case addresses the question whether, after a conviction has been reversed on appeal, a
defendant may bring an action under the All Writs Act (28 U.S.C. § 1651) for the return of property that was
previously seized by the Government in a forfeiture proceeding?

In this case, the ...

In this case, during voir dire, the district court asked the panel whether any of them felt that the American approach to marijuana was wrong, and two jurors raised their hands. The court immediately dismissed them for cause without additional questioning and over defense counsel's objections. Citing Wainwright v. Witt, ...

Court held that the district court did not abuse its discretion when it determined that defendant's offenses did not fall within the heartland of the money laundering guidelines, and instead applied the fraud guideline.

This is one of those illegal campaign contribution prosecutions by the Office of Independent Counsel which ...

Our dollar bills may say "In God We Trust" - but the message from this case is "Don't trust tin gods." Once again we have a case in which a snitch naively trusted government officials who orally promised her a percentage of the value of seizures and forfeitures resulting from ...

United States v. Costello, 16 F.Supp.2d 36 (D.Mass. 1998) (Judge Gertner)
United States v. McDougal, 16 F.Supp. 1047 (E.D.Ark. 1998) (Judge Howard)

The common theme in both of these cases is that the automatic rigid application of the sentencing grids established by the Guidelines would have produced results that were ...

The defendant in this case was indicted on three counts of aiding and abetting Federal program bribery. The trial court granted the defendant's motion for a judgment of acquittal pursuant to Rule 29(a) of the Fed.R.Crim.P.; and he later moved for attorneys' fees under the Hyde Amendment (18 U.S.C. § ...

Here theCourt held that testimony of a forensic chemist that 99 percent of United States currency was contaminated with some amount of drug residue was both unreliable and irrelevant.

Effectively, the Court held that Congress had not designed § 440(d) of the AEDPA to apply to persons whose deportaion proceedings were pending at the time the AEDPA was signed into law - although the Court expressly declined to consider generally the question of § 440(d)'s applicability to pre-enactment criminal ...

This is one of those illegal campaign contribution prosecutions by the Office of Independent Counsel which shows how the Government continues to fight to expand the parameters of the high-penalty money laundering statutes. It should be noted that the Seventh Circuit has warned that the growing use of the money ...

The Court noted that the average length of time served on death row between sentence and execution for the 45 persons executed in the U.S. in 1996 was ten and a half years. (Id., at 570, n. 8). The case is noted for the views of other courts throughout the ...

Court reversed conviction on the grounds that the Border Patrol did not have reasonable grounds to believe that the defendant had crossed the border, and thus the stop of defendant's vehicle violated the Fourth Amendment.

Citing U.S. v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 884 (1975) the Court observed that "officers on ...

We don't usually report Magistrate's decisions because they are generally deemed to have little precedential value. As we noted a few weeks ago, one Circuit Court recently made the rueful observation that "[D]istrict court decisions . . . cannot clearly establish a constitutional right because ‘while they bind the parties ...

United States v. Costello, 16 F.Supp.2d 36 (D.Mass. 1998) (Judge Gertner)
United States v. McDougal, 16 F.Supp. 1047 (E.D.Ark. 1998) (Judge Howard)

The common theme in both of these cases is that the automatic rigid application of the sentencing grids established by the Guidelines would have produced results that were ...

QUOTE OF THE WEEK - The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are "too long", "too complicated" and are "suffering from administrative neglect."

On November 21, 1998, the New York Times reported on a major speech by Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer at a sentencing conference at the University of Nebraska College ...

Quote from a 1998 speech by Justice Breyer in which he criticized some of the inherent weaknesses of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK - The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are "too long", "too complicated" and are "suffering from administrative neglect."

On November 21, 1998, the New York Times ...