Here the Court held that the retroactive use of a new parole board rule, decreasing the frequency of parole hearings from every three years to every eight years, did not violate the Ex Post Factor Clause absent a showing that it increased sentences.

This is one of those pragmatic Ivory-tower ...

Here the Court held that no Apprendi error occurs when the district court sentences the defendant within the prescribed statutory maximum, even where the jury never determined the drug quantity by proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

In this case and U.S. v. LaFreniere, 236 F.3d 27 (1st Cir. 2001) (both ...

Here the Court held that challenges to special conditions of supervised release must be made at the time of the defendant’s direct appeal; and it then vacated, as unconstitutionally vague, a condition barring the defendant from possessing any pornography.

This case is noted for its excellent discussion of when a ...

In this case the defendant, a staff accountant who stole $115,000 from Zenith Electronics Corporation, challenged the imposition of a two-level enhancement under U.S.S.G. § 3B1.3 for abuse of position of trust. He argued that his "staff accountant" position could not possibly have constituted a "position of trust"
within the ...

Here the Court held that a conviction for attempt to reenter the U.S. without the consent of the Attorney General, in violation of 8 USC § 1326, requires a jury finding that the defendant consciously desired to reenter the U.S. without such consent.

In this en banc decision, the Court ...

In Bellis v. Davis, 186 F.3d 1092 (8th Cir. 1999), the Eighth Circuit held that under 28 C.F.R. § 550.58 the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had authority to exclude prisoners from participating the drug treatment programs to gain eligibility for early release from prison under 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e). This ...

Here the en banc court held that it was error to dismiss as untimely a prisoner's habeas petition without giving him a hearing to allow him to prove that the absence of adequate materials in the law library constituted an "impediment" under 28 USC 2244(d).

This is a decision that ...

United States v. Wash, 231 F.3d 366 (7th Cir. 2000) (Judge Flaum)
United States v. Varoudakis, 233 F.3d 113 (1st Cir. 2000) (Judge Lipez)

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that, next to a signed confession, evidence of a defendant’s prior crimes is probably the most devastating information that ...

In this decision, the Ninth Circuit highlighted the growing disagreements among the Circuits on the question of whether money laundering counts should be grouped with other counts of conviction as “closely related counts” for sentencing purposes under U.S.S.G. § 3D1.2. Here, the Court rejected a defendant’s claim that his convictions ...

In this case the First Circuit held that a drug weight that requires a statutory mandatory minimum sentence need not be submitted to a jury nor proved beyond a reasonable doubt under the rule established in Apprendi v. New Jersey.

The defendant in this multi-issue case raised two arguments on ...

Here, over the dissent of Judge Williams (which was not included in the Fed. Reporter), a majority of the panel held that a violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Rights does not give rise to the use of the exclusionary rule as a remedy.

Here, relying on the Vienna ...