by Matt Clarke
The Supreme Court of Vermont held that a trial court erred when it prohibited a defendant from raising the defense of diminished capacity, without relying on any expert witnesses, because she failed to give notice of intent to use that defense. In refusing to consider a diminished ...
by Matt Clarke
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California erred in failing to provide advance notice of a special condition of supervised release that wasn’t listed in the mandatory or discretionary conditions in the Sentencing ...
by Matt Clarke
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri erroneously relied on inadmissible hearsay to revoke a federal defendant’s supervised release. The Court vacated the revocation of sentence and remanded for resentencing on a closed ...
by Matt Clarke
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that a note implicating the husband of a woman who was drowned the day after she wrote it was inadmissible hearsay, after it had announced a new analytical framework for determining whether the state of mind exception to the hearsay rule ...
by Matt Clarke
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that a third party who is ordered to provide biological materials pursuant to G. L. c. 278A has a right to appeal such order even where the party hasn’t intervened in the case.
After an evening of drinking at his ...
by Matt Clarke
On June 25, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused to re-visit its decision that Texas police officers who used a Taser on a suicidal man who had drenched himself in gasoline knowing it could ignite him were entitled to qualified immunity. Ramirez ...
by Matt Clarke
In Steven Spielberg’s science fiction movie, Minority Report, police armed with nebulously sourced predictions of people who are supposedly going to commit murder before they can actually do so. Troublingly, only a few years after the film’s 2002 release, a real-world version of predictive policing was ...
by Matt Clarke
The Supreme Court of the United States reinstated the death sentence of an Alabama man who had been convicted of murder. The Eleventh Circuit had reversed, in part, the conviction based on the incorrect claim that Alabama had established a categorical rule requiring post-conviction habeas corpus applicants ...
by Matt Clarke
The Supreme Court of California held that, for charges of gang participation and gang enhancements under California Penal Code, § subdivisions (a)and (b), respectively, which require the State to prove that gang members had previously committed two or more enumerated offenses (predicate offenses), the State may not ...
by Matt Clarke
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts held that the prosecution in a first-degree murder (extreme atrocity or cruelty) trial failed to disclose material, exculpatory evidence that a key witness had changed her testimony to include visceral depictions of the victim’s dying last words and the defendant’s reaction, ...
