Appeals

Former President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández has been found guilty on charges relating to drug trafficking and weapons possession in a federal jury trial in New York (view full article).

The verdict was announced during the second day of deliberations, after a two-week trial.

Hernández served as a Honduran congressman, congress leader and finally two-term president. He was arrested in February 2022, only weeks after he finished his second presidential term.

The Supreme Court on Friday dealt a blow to potentially thousands of federal prison inmates by ruling against a convicted drug dealer seeking a shorter sentence under a 2018 law.

The issue involved how to read a “safety valve” in federal criminal sentencing laws, which allows defendants to avoid the often lengthy mandatory minimum sentences scattered throughout the federal criminal code. The safety valve requires the defendant to satisfy a laundry list of each of five separate rules.

The Supreme Court opens its new 9-month term today with arguments in a case that considers what the meaning of the word “and” is in a provision of the First Step Act, an esoteric English lesson with real-world impact for thousands of federal prisoners (view full article).

Two former law enforcement officers who were part of a self-styled “Goon Squad” that tortured, sexually assaulted and beat residents of a Mississippi county were given hefty prison sentences on Tuesday for brutally attacking two Black men last year (view full article).

A federal judge ordered Hunter Elward, who shot one of the victims in the mouth, to serve 20 years in prison. Jeffrey Middleton, a former lieutenant who supervised the Goon Squad, was sentenced to nearly 18 years.

New FBI data released on Tuesday confirms previous indications that crime in the U.S. declined significantly in 2023, continuing a post-pandemic trend and belying widespread perceptions that crime is rising.

Late Tuesday evening, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order that temporarily halts the state of Texas’s plans to arrest migrants along the Texas-Mexico border. See Associated Press. Texas’s Senate Bill 4, SB4, is at issue in litigation before the Fifth Circuit. SB4 authorizes Texas law enforcement to question, arrest, and detain individuals state law enforcement suspects of entering the country without proper documentation.

Federal procurement law includes contracting preferences for service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses (SDVOSBs). That creates an incentive for people to game the procurement system by, for example, nominally having service-disabled veterans as the owners of a company, while actually having non-veterans run everything. Is that really basis for conspiracy to defraud the United States and six counts of wire fraud? Jury: Yes. And who's going to jail for it? Fifth Circuit: This guy!

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey issued sweeping pardons forgiving possession of marijuana convictions, following the directive of President Joe Biden, who urged state executives to follow his lead in pardoning low-level marijuana offenses (view announcement).

Prison: If you tested positive for a soy allergy, we'd stop feeding you soy, but we don't think you have a real allergy and we're not buying your "my religion prohibits me from eating foods that make my stomach hurt" schtick. Fourth Circuit: Um, that is, like, very precisely the sort of schtick you are required to buy. District court's contrary ruling vacated.

The case is Ricky Pendleton v. Betsy Jividen, No. 23-6334 (4th Cir. Mar. 20, 2024).

Washington man runs an organization that purports to help undocumented adult immigrants become U.S. citizens through adult adoption. He's convicted and sentenced to 240 months for unlawfully "encouraging or inducing an alien to come to, enter, or reside unlawfully in the United States for private financial gain." He appeals his conviction. Ninth Circuit (2022): That provision is unconstitutionally overbroad because it could reach all kinds of protected speech. Conviction vacated.