Part 1
The Prosecutor and the Snitch Ring
“Cold Justice” star Kelly Siegler relied on jailhouse informants to win convictions despite reasons to doubt their credibility.
by Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith.
Originally published on December 17, 2023. Republished with permissions from The Intercept, an award-winning nonprofit news organization dedicated ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
A recent study by Binghamton University researchers offers hope for identifying victims of fires where traditional methods fail. Fire victims can be identified through dental records if the teeth are preserved and such records exist. DNA testing is often the only way to identify badly burned ...
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 Matt Clarke
The New York Court of Appeals held that the prosecution’s failure to turn over fundamental discovery items that were in its possession and control prior to filing a Certificate of Compliance (“COC”) with its statutory disclosure obligations pursuant to Criminal Procedure Law (“CPL”) 245.50(1), (3) rendered the ...
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 Dale Chappell
The term “procedural default” is a significant barrier in federal habeas corpus petitions. It means that if a claim could have been raised on direct appeal or at any earlier stage but was not, a federal court generally cannot consider the claim. However, there are several recognized ...
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 Jo Ellen Nott
A Colorado jury awarded a 78-year-old woman, Ruby Johnson, $3.76 million in damages on March 1, 2024, after a SWAT team raided her home based on a faulty phone tracking app and a misleading warrant. “The detective misled the court by portraying the phone pings ...
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 Matthew T. Clarke
There is nothing new about corporations that produce technology designed to enable law enforcement surveillance (snoop tech) composing press releases for law enforcement that promote both the brand and the equipment. There is also nothing new about media quoting at length from the snoop-tech-provided releases as ...
by Sam Rutherford
The Supreme Court of South Carolina held that a defendant’s confession was involuntary in violation of due process where the interrogating officer provided Miranda warnings but then assured the defendant that his statements would be confidential. This error, moreover, was not harmless because the defendant’s confession ...
by Sam Rutherford
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that police may ask whether a person stopped for a traffic infraction is on parole without violating the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Background
Victor Ramirez was stopped for speeding in a residential ...
by Matthew Thomas Clarke
The Human Rights Committee (“HRC”) of the United Nations, an independent body that monitors implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”), issued a report on its review of U.S. compliance with ICCPR, which is one of only four human rights treaties ever ...
by Sam Rutherford
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that District Courts have discretion to reduce sentences for both covered and noncovered offenses under the First Step Act if the sentences were originally imposed as part of a package.
Background
Following a jury trial involving six ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
In 2023, the general public became aware of the impending emergence of Artificial General Intelligence. It was not long after ChatGPT 3.5 became public that Americans began to understand the remarkable technology is spookily powerful while not completely reliable. Infamously, a law firm was reprimanded ...
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 Jo Ellen Nott
In a significant decision on May 16, 2024, the Justice Department of the Biden Administration proposed to reschedule marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. This history-making shift, though not legalization, acknowledges the drug’s medicinal value and lower abuse potential.
The proposed rule, endorsed by Attorney ...
by Casey J. Bastian
The Death Penalty Policy Project (“DP3”) analyzed exoneration data compiled by the National Registry of Exonerations (“NRE”) for 2023. The results are disturbing. Another 153 convicted people were exonerated. At least 19 resulted from either them or a witness being threatened with death. A total ...
by Sam Rutherford
The Supreme Court of the United States held that whether a state court drug conviction counts as a “serious drug offense” under the Armed Career Criminal Act (“ACCA”) is determined by comparing the state and federal statutes defining the controlled substance in effect at the time of ...
by David M. Reutter
The Court of Appeal of California, Fourth Appellate District, issued a writ of mandate directing a trial court to grant a defendant’s request for mental health diversion. At issue was the application of Stats. 2018, ch. 1005, which recognizes that incarceration of certain persons with ...
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 Michael Dean Thompson
Two men, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, have found themselves indicted for Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering and facing up to a quarter of a century of jail time. It is not apparent that the men themselves conspired to launder any money. Rather, they ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
If a technology is repeatedly shown by its own data to do very little to reduce crime or assist in homicide investigations – two functions for which it is purported to be designed – will a name change fix it? ShotSpotter had seen a rapid ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Dr. Robert Maher, electric and computer engineer who has researched and studied gunshot acoustics at the University of Montana, published the results of a two-year study on synchronizing and processing audio recordings of gunshots in 2018. His research was sponsored by a National Institute of Justice ...
by Sam Rutherford
The Supreme Court of Colorado held that convictions for second-degree burglary and first-degree criminal trespass of a dwelling arising from the same course of criminal conduct violate the double jeopardy clauses of the U.S. and Colorado Constitutions, requiring the trespass conviction and sentence be vacated and ...
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 ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
On May 24, 2024, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, signed a law prohibiting police officers from being trained about “excited delirium,” a widely rejected diagnosis characterized by a state of extreme agitation and delirium. The diagnosis frequently appears in the postmortem of young adult Black males, ...
by Sam Rutherford
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan’s order granting a Michigan prisoner’s petition for writ of habeas corpus based on claims that he received ineffective assistance of counsel and that the State struck Blacks ...
Loaded on
July 15, 2024
published in Criminal Legal News
July, 2024, page 50
Alabama: Advance Local Media reported that on May 15, 2024, John Winstead, a former Mississippi policeman, pled guilty to deprivation of rights under color of law. The incident occurred in September 2021. Winstead was on a task force when a suspect was taken into custody. While another agent was escorting ...
