2009 New York Drug Sentencing Guide What with all the drug law reforms happening in New York, we thought we’d put together a quick-and-easy guide to what they mean. Click here to view it in PDF form. We used to do this all the time back when we were prosecuting...
There’s probably some really juicy legal stories out there today, but we haven’t bothered to look yet. Instead, we’re spending our free time preparing for our upcoming CLE webcast at 11 a.m. Eastern this Friday at West LegalEd Center. This will be the second in our “Hope for Hopeless Cases”...
We admit it: we like to skip to the Scalia dissent. Not because we necessarily agree with his philosophy of jurisprudence. But because it’s a good bet to be an entertaining read. Whether he’s dissenting from an expansive activist or a fellow limited-role jurist, he’s good for a bit of...
The DOJ got an indictment this week against a Hitachi executive, in the government’s ongoing prosecution of alleged price-fixing in the LCD monitor industry. We first blogged on this back on November 13th, when Sharp, LG Display and Chunghwa all pled guilty to price fixing, agreeing to pay $585 million...
We try not to report here on matters that everyone else in the world is already talking about. That’s why we’ve said nowt on Bernie Madoff and other headline-grabbing stories. For the same reason, we decided yesterday not to mention the DOJ’s request to dismiss the charges in its prosecution...
In an unusually mixed decision for the consensus-driven Roberts Court, the Supreme Court today ruled that federal public defenders can represent death-penalty clients at state clemency hearings. The more liberal justices said federal defenders could do so, but only if the state hearings followed a federal proceeding. Justice Thomas went...
In a unanimous decision this morning, the Supreme Court ruled that “there is no freestanding constitutional right to peremptory challenges,” during jury selection in criminal trials. So even if a judge erroneously refuses to let a defendant challenge a juror, so long as that juror couldn’t be challenged for cause,...
For 16 years, German police have been hunting a fiendish serial killer. Every time they have an unsolved crime, the DNA of an unknown woman has been found at the scene. This phantom killer baffled police with her ability to commit totally unrelated murders without any evidence (apart from...
Voting 7-2, the Supreme Court today ruled that a defendant cannot appeal when the prosecution reneged on a plea bargain, unless the issue was preserved before the trial court. In his majority opinion for Puckett v. U.S., Justice Scalia cleared up a split among the circuits. There had been differing...
During a restraining order hearing yesterday, a judge in Fort Lauderdale failed to show restraint himself. As this courtroom video shows (about 40 seconds in), Judge Ian Richards was informing the defendant that he was going to jail for violating the restraining order, when the defendant John Charles Reasee suddenly...
What with white-collar crime being such big news these days, it was only a matter of time: The Hollywood Reporter reports that the USA Network is about to pick up a new series, “White Collar.” Now that USA’s popular detective series “Monk” is ending, the cable network is looking for...
The 3rd Circuit is hearing an interesting appeal on whether the government needs to get a warrant before demanding cell site data from phone companies. Cell sites are those transmitters you see on rooftops and towers, beaming and receiving cell phone communications. Their range varies from a few blocks to...
Although juries have existed in one form or another since ancient times, the jury as we now know it originated in 12th-century England. At first an accusatory formality, the jury evolved into a check on governmental power. Nowadays, an accused’s right to have the evidence against him judged by members...
We’ve written about an upcoming wave of white-collar prosecutions, especially against Wall Street types. But wait, there’s more: the feds are now about to start prosecuting doctors. The Department of Justice and the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services are about to start prosecuting physicians...
In October, we reported that functional magnetic resonance imaging (better known as fMRI) is being touted as an honest-to-goodness lie detector. Unlike a polygraph, which required interpretation of physical bodily reactions, an fMRI looks at real-time brain activity to see if brain areas associated with lying are activated during any...
Recent Comments