by Jacob Barrett
Highly experienced lawyers and new lawyers alike can improve their negotiation skills (just as they improve their trial skills). But without legal training, what can you do?
Lawyers often use checklists as part of learning how to handle certain types of cases or defenses. This article is ...
by Dale Chappell
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated a defendant’s 10-term of supervised release because the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York failed to explain its rationale for not reducing the term when it reduced the incarceration portion of the sentence ...
by Marissa Boyers Bluestine and Kia Hall Hayes
Over the past several years, more and more prosecutors have created conviction integrity units (“CIUs”), or conviction review units (“CRUs”), in their offices. While still primarily used in offices serving bigger cities, such as Philadelphia, Chicago, or Detroit, many offices in smaller ...
by David M. Reutter
Prosecutors are empowered with unparalleled and nearly unchecked discretion in making charging and plea-bargaining decisions. Their decisions have been called a “black box” for their inscrutability. A recent study casts some light onto the how and why of those decisions.
The role of prosecutorial discretion has ...
by Ashleigh Dye
A Colorado man who was driving a truck when his brakes failed resulting in an accident that killed four people in 2019 was sentenced on December 13, 2021, to 110 years in prison. Rogel Aguilera-Mederos’ harsh prison sentence gained a lot of attention and caused widespread condemnation, ...
by David M. Reutter
Systematic “lying at plea bargaining allows defendants the opportunity to negotiate fair resolutions to their cases in the face of a deeply unfair system, even as that lying makes way for—and sustains—the problematic system it seeks to avoid,” wrote Thea Johnson, an associate professor at Rutgers ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Supreme Court of Iowa clarified when forensic interviews of child complaining witnesses may be admitted into evidence at trial.
Jake Skahill was tried on sexual offenses alleged to have been committed against his seven-year-old daughter “K.W.” She testified at trial that while sitting on Skahill’s lap, ...
by David M. Reutter
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held the Government violated a plea agreement by arguing for a sentence that exceed the Guidelines. It remanded for resentencing before a different district court judge.
The Court’s opinion was the second time the issue was before ...
by Dale Chappell
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that defendant’s sentence for a drug conviction under Kansas law, for which the maximum potential term of imprisonment was 32 months, to a drug treatment program and probation, in lieu of prison, did not render that conviction ...
Loaded on
March 15, 2022
published in Criminal Legal News
April, 2022, page 21
It is reasonable that the California Highway Patrol (“CHP”) would use helicopters equipped with surveillance cameras to track fleeing felons—or even use them to scan crowds of protestors to detect criminal activity. But surveillance footage obtained by the ACLU reveals a disturbing pattern of CHP using cameras in an apparent ...
by David M. Reutter
A counseled plea bargain is the fastest and most economical resolution to a criminal case. The American justice system has come to tolerate and encourage plea bargains because of these attributes. Recent studies, however, find that a defendant who enters a plea with the assistance of ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico’s denial of defendant’s 28 U.S.C. § 2255 motion, ruling defendant’s appellate counsel was constitutionally ineffective under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), for failing ...
Memory-Expert Psychologists Recommend Stopping All In-Court Identification and Repeated Lineups
by Matt Clarke
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a scientific concept in quantum physics explaining that the position and velocity of a sub-atomic particle can never be truly known because the very act of measuring those quantities changes them. Now ...
by Jacob Barrett
TheU.S.CourtofAppeals for theFourthCircuitruledadistrictcourtcannot simply“guess”that a victim suffered a qualifying “bodily injury” in connection with a robbery to trigger the two-level, bodily injury sentence enhancement under U.S. Sentencing Guidelines (“Guidelines”) § 2B3.1(b)(3)(A).
MelvinThomasLewisandtwoothersrobbedapawnshop.Lewisstruckthe managerinthebackoftheheadthreetimes,causinghimtofalltothefloor.Thepoliceobserveda“redspot”onthebackofthemanager’s head, and he stated that he felt “dizzy.” He was taken to the hospital ...
by David M. Reutter
The Supreme Court of Iowa reversed a conviction where the trial court allowed the prosecutor to amend an information at trial and abandon the original charge to bring a more severe charge.
The Court’s opinion was issued in an appeal by Jameesha Renea Allen after a ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas reversed a judgment of the Court of Appeals (“COA”) that ruled a trial court abused its discretion when dismissing a charge of capital murder pursuant to Texas Rule of Evidence 508 (“Rule 508”) based on the State’s refusal to disclose ...
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 Douglas Ankney
The Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District, ruled that the defendant satisfied the statutory criteria of Cal. Penal Code §1170.91(b)(1) for a hearing on possible resentencing by alleging he “may be suffering from” a qualifying condition, viz., sexual trauma or substance abuse, and that the trial court ...
by Jacob Barrett
OnremandfromtheU.S. SupremeCourt, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in light of Borden v.United States,141 S. Ct. 1817 (2021), Alan Victor Gomez Gomez’s conviction for aggravated assault in Texasdoes not qualify as an aggravated felony under 8 U.S.C. § 1326(b)(2).
In a drunken ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts upheld the suppression of a defendant’s statements to police after invoking his right to an attorney, because the Commonwealth failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he had knowingly, voluntarily, and intelligently waived his right to ...
by David M. Reutter
In a precedential ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that Hobbs Act robbery does not qualify as a “crime of violence” under the career-offender sentence enhancement in U.S. Sentencing Guidelines (“U.S.S.G.”), § 4B1.2(a).
The Court’s opinion was issued in an appeal ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Before Alice Sebold wrote her New York Times Bestseller, The Lovely Bones, she published a haunting memoir recounting her rape in 1981 when she was a freshman at Syracuse University. The book, Lucky, details not only the experience but also how she saw her attacker ...
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 Jayson Hawkins
Despite the constant glamorization of forensic evidence analysis that has become so common on TV shows, regular readers of CLN should be well aware that what passes for “science” in many actual cases amounts to little more than wishful thinking on the part of prosecutors and law ...
by Richard Resch
In an 8-1 opinion written by Justice Sotomayor, the Supreme Court of the United States held that a trial court’s admission of unconfronted testimonial hearsay evidence because the trial court believed it was reasonably necessary to correct a misleading impression caused by the defendant’s presentation of his ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Court of North Dakota upheld the suppression of evidence obtained from a warrantless backpack search because neither the automobile nor the search incident to arrest exception applied, and the inevitable discovery doctrine didn’t apply.
On August 28, 2019, Nicholas Lelm was a passenger in ...
by Ashleigh N. Dye
The threat of terrorism in America has gripped the hearts of Americans for the past two decades since the 9/11 attacks. This fear has, however, been monopolized by the U.S. Government. Immediately following September 11, 2001, government agencies were formed such as the Transportation Security Administration ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Samuel Landes, a federal public defender representing Muhammed Momtaz Alazhari, filed a motion in federal court on August 30, 2021, alleging that the FBI used its small fleet of Cessna airplanes outfitted with spy equipment to continuously surveil Alazhari for 429 hours between April 18 and ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Court of Appeal of California, Fifth Appellate District, vacated a trial court’s decision to deny a defendant participation in mental health diversion, ruling that a diagnosis of Antisocial-Personality Disorder (“ASPD”)—an excluded condition under the statute—does not disqualify him because he was also diagnosed with at ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Since a New York Times articlein 2019 broke the news that Google’s Sensorvault database stores location information from hundreds of millions of devices worldwide, we have also learned that law enforcement have been increasingly reliant on this data to help solve crimes. Just how reliant they ...
by David M. Reutter
The majority of people held in jails throughout the U.S. have not been convicted of a crime. They are more inclined to accept plea offers to secure immediate release from incarceration. A recent study found that “the added risk of COVID exposure in jail made participants-defendants ...
by Douglas Ankney
Over the past couple of decades, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and its components have been requesting and receiving data from electronic media service providers, utilizing warrants, subpoenas, and National Security Letters (“NSLs”) that come with indefinite gag orders attached. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, et al., are sworn ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
A public-records request uncovered details about the New York Police Department’s use of a secret fund the agency has been using to purchase surveillance tech.
Two civil rights groups, the Legal Aid Society and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, obtained documents that were released by Wired ...
by Ed Lyon
For decades, officers with California’s Los Angeles Police Department (“LAPD”) have utilized Field Information Cards (“FIC”) for reference whenever they interact with citizens. This contact may take the form of a traffic stop whether or not a citation is issued, obtaining a witness statement, or incidental to ...
by Dale Chappell
Hundreds of protestors marched in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in August 2020. Little did these protestors know that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms issued at least a dozen geofence warrants to gather data from their electronic devices they carried that ...
by Jacob Barrett
On May 24, 2021 the Oregon Legislature passed SB 418 banning police from lying to juveniles in order to obtain a confession during interrogations. The bill is part of a number of youth reform measures recently passed by the Legislature. Oregon is only the second state to ...
by Douglas Ankney
Thousands of protesters stormed the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, in response to yet another killing of a Black man. At the Kenosha Public Library, lighter fluid and rags were found in a window well. There were no eyewitnesses to the incident. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, ...
Loaded on
March 15, 2022
published in Criminal Legal News
April, 2022, page 50
Alabama: Techdirt reports that police in Brookside have routinely violated the law in traffic enforcement. By early February 2022, it was clear that the local police department in the small town had been racking up staggering amounts of income in traffic fines, receiving more than $600,000 in 2020 alone. ...
by Douglas Ankney
During a late-night SEPTA train ride on the Market-Frankford line in October 2021, a woman was raped. In an apparent rush to disparage Philadelphia’s citizenry, Upper Darby police initially reported that other passengers looked on while the woman was being raped, with some filming for their own ...
