Here, after the defendant was convicted of various drug charges, he filed a motion to vacate, set aside, or correct his sentence under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 contending that his court appointed counsel was constitutionally ineffective during the plea proceedings and at sentencing. The defendant contended that his counsel was ...

Here the defendant was convicted by a jury of subscribing false corporate tax returns and submitting false documents to the Internal Revenue Service. His conviction and sentence were affirmed in a decision reported at 211 F.3d 1271; and his petition for writ of certiorari was denied. He then filed a ...

The defendant-appellant in this case conditionally pleaded guilty to sexual contact with a minor in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2244(a)(3), but asserted that the United States lacked jurisdiction since the crime occurred in foreign territorial waters. He was charged with fondling a minor, a United States citizen, while he ...

Recently, District Judge Gonzalez of the S.D.Cal. Ruled that the retroactive application of the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act (42 U.S.C. § 14135) (the DNA Act) to all Federal defendants serving terms of supervised release, including those defendants whose convictions were entered before that act became law, did not violate ...

Here the Court granted the defendant’s motion for severance under Rule 8(a) of the Fed.R.Crim.P., after finding that two charges of assault were not of the same or similar character as the third count of resisting arrest by a Federal officer.

This case is noted as a rare example of ...

The defendant was the pastor of a Baptist church in Memphis, TN. He was charged with destroying his church building by arson in order to collect insurance proceeds, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 844(i). The United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee dismissed the indictment finding ...

Here, on remand from the Supreme Court, the Third Circuit again affirmed its prior decision that the state courts had unreasonably applied Supreme Court precedent during the penalty phase of the appellant's trial and it remanded for a new penalty phase.

In its earlier decision, reported at Banks v. Horn, ...

The defendant in this case was convicted of one count of possession of child pornography. He had previously been convicted of sexually abusing a child, he was paroled. As a part of his parole agreement, he agreed to permit parole agents to search his person, residence, vehicle, or any other ...

In this case, the Supreme Court addressed a rule, unique to the Ninth Circuit, that a conspiracy ends automatically when the object of the conspiracy becomes impossible to achieve – such as when, for example, the Government intervenes and frustrates a drug conspiracy's objective by seizing the drugs that its ...

Although it is a generally accepted principle of law that jurisdictional defects may be raised by a party at any point in the litigation and that a plea of guilty does not waive any jurisdictional defects to the crimes that may exist, the Court’s ruling in this case threatens to ...

This case will long be remembered for the Ninth Circuit’s scathing rebuke of two IRS lawyers, Kenneth McWade and William Sims, who engineered quite a fraud on the Tax Court and on 1,300 taxpayers that almost worked. Without mincing words, the Ninth Circuit charged the two Government lawyers with “extreme ...