by Douglas Ankney
The Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) has an impressive cache of surveillance technology that includes, inter alia, automated license plate readers (“ALPR”) and cell-site simulators (“CSS”). The latest tracking and surveillance revelation is that DHS and other law enforcement agencies have been using TraffiCatch since 2019.
Deployed ...
by Douglas Ankney
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that a conviction for assault resulting in serious bodily injury under 18 U.S.C. § 113(a)(6) is not a qualifying predicate “crime of violence” for purposes of U.S. Sentencing Guidelines (“USSG”) § 2K2.1(a)(3).
Kenneth Devereaux pleaded guilty ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Supreme Court of Ohio held that the 365-day deadline set forth in R.C. 2953.21(A)(2)(a) for filing a postconviction motion begins from the date of the filing of the trial transcript in a delayed appeal.
Michael Dudas was sentenced to prison for murder and other crimes ...
by Douglas Ankney
The new “Transitional Analysis Dental Age” (“TADA”) estimation tool – funded by the National Institute of Justice (“NIJ”) – is now available online to assist forensic analysts with estimating the age of unidentified skeletal remains of infants and teens. The age of the skeletal remains of ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Supreme Court of Minnesota declined to extend the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule, as adopted under the Minnesota Constitution, to a search and arrest based on a quashed warrant that appears active to law enforcement because of a clerical error by court administration.
In ...
by Douglas Ankney
In a case involving three issues of first impression, the Court of Appeal of California, First Appellate District, ruled that Penal Code Section 1509(1)(c)’s 10- and 60-day deadlines are directory, not mandatory; the section’s “substantiality standard” is met where the applicant makes a strong enough case to ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Supreme Court of Tennessee abrogated the common law accomplice-corroboration rule on a prospective basis and dismissed the murder conviction of Laronda Turner due to insufficient evidence.
Turner, along with codefendants Tony Thomas and Demarco Hawkins, were involved in the triple homicide of Anthony Isom, Chastity ...
by Douglas Ankney
The District of Columbia Court of Appeals gave prosecutors Mary Chris Dobbie and Reagan Taylor an absurdly lenient sentence of one year’s probation for deliberately withholding evidence that resulted in an innocent man spending four years in prison. In re Dobbie, 305 A.3d 780 (D.C. Cir. ...
by Douglas Ankney
According to Techdirt, the federal government is obtaining court orders forcing Google and others to provide user ID information of people accessing innocuous videos based on the fact that one of the hundreds or even potentially thousands of former viewers might be a suspect of ...
by Douglas Ankney
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida’s grant of habeas relief to Florida state prisoner Jimmie L. Bowen, holding that the state court’s decision was not “so obviously wrong that its error lies beyond ...