Articles Posted in Court Decisions

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Retired New Jersey Appellate Division Judge Geoffrey Gaulkin released his report in State v. Henderson today June 21, 2010. . The New Jersey Supreme Court appointed judge Gaulkin in May 2009 to serve as special master and to hold hearings and issue a report “to test the validity of our state law standards on the admissibility of eyewitness identification.” According to news comments, the report suggests that eyewitness testimony should be treated more like physical evidence and be subjected to pretrial hearings to assess how reliable it is.

According to a June 21, 2010 New York Times article ” Use of Eyewitnesses in New Jersey Courts Needs Change, Ex-Judge Says” by Richard PÉREZ-PEÑA, the report recommends that”Courts should do more to gauge the accuracy of witnesses to crimes, and to let juries know how flawed their testimony can be, according to a former appellate judge assigned by the New Jersey Supreme Court to review the matter….In particular, [judge Geoffrey Gaulkin] wrote, judges should assess factors that might limit a witness’s reliability in picking someone out of a lineup, either in person or in a photo array…”

Click on the link below the see the complete report:

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NOTE: This posting includes Professor Little’s perspective on City of Ontario v. Quon, the cfase whch includes interesting discussion about whether public employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding text messages went on government owned equipment during working hours.

A Service from the ABA Criminal Justice Section, http://www.abanet.org/crimjust

This summary has been created by Professor Rory K. Little (littler@uchastings.edu), U.C. Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco, who has long presented “Annual Review of the Supreme Court’s Term” program at the ABA’s Annual Meetings. It represents his personal, unofficial views of the Justices’ opinions. The original opinions should be consulted for their authoritative content.

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On October 1, 2009 I posted an appalant brief for U.S.A v. Justin K. Dorvee on this blog. The Brief was prepared by Paul F. Angioletti, attorney for the defendant-appellant.

Mr. Angioletti has now informed me that the Court of Appeals Second Circuit issued an opinion on the Dorvee appeal on May 11, 2010. In this posting we are including a paragraph from the Second Circuit decision which summarizes the conclusion that the sentence imposed on Dorvee by the District Court was “substantively unreasonable”, therefore vacating the judgment and remanding the case to the District Court for resentencing.;

EXCERPT FROM OPINION:

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To view the full-text of cases you must sign in to FindLaw.com. All summaries are produced by Findlaw
May 31 – June 4, 2010.

U.S. Supreme Court, June 01, 2010 Carr v. US, No. 08–1301 The Seventh Circuit’s affirmance of defendant’s conviction for failure to register as a sex offender in Indiana under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act is reversed where 18 U.S.C. section 2250 did not apply to sex offenders whose interstate travel occurred before SORNA’s effective date.

U.S. Supreme Court, June 01, 2010 Berghuis v. Thompkins, No. 08–1470 In a murder prosecution, the Sixth Circuit’s reversal of the district court’s denial of petitioner’s habeas petition is reversed where the state court’s decision rejecting petitioner’s Miranda claim was correct under de novo review and therefore necessarily reasonable under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act’s more deferential standard of review because petitioner’s silence during his interrogation did not invoke his right to remain silent.

U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, June 02, 2010 US v. Roa-Medina, No. 08-2490 District court’s denial of defendant’s motion to modify his sentence of 72-months for crack and other drug related offenses is affirmed where: 1) defendant was sentenced to a term of imprisonment that was “based on a sentencing range” of 120 months to 135 months, and his reduced sentence represented a 40% deviation from the bottom of that range; and 2) defendant’s sentencing range has not been “lowered” within the meaning of section 3582(c)(2).
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To view the full-text of cases you must sign in to FindLaw.com. All summaries are produced by Findlaw
May 31 – June 4, 2010.

U.S. Supreme Court, June 01, 2010 Levin v. Commerce Energy, Inc., No. 09–223 In an action by independent natural gas marketers (IMs) who offered to sell natural gas to Ohio consumers against the Ohio Tax Commissioner (Commissioner), alleging discriminatory taxation of IMs and their patrons in violation of the Commerce and Equal Protection Clauses, the Sixth Circuit’s reversal of the district court’s dismissal of the action is reversed where, under the comity doctrine, a taxpayer’s complaint of allegedly discriminatory state taxation, even when framed as a request to increase a competitor’s tax burden, must proceed originally in state court.

U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, June 03, 2010 Chaparro v. Ruiz-Hernandez, No. 08-1989 In a 42 U.S.C. section 1983 suit brought by a group of twenty-two contract employees against a Puerto Rican municipality and its officers, a grant of plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment is affirmed in part, vacated in part and remanded where: 1) plaintiffs had a reasonable expectation of continued employment; 2) a one-year term of employment with Puerto Rican government bodies is generally considered a protected property interest for procedural due process purposes; and 3) defendants’ claim that plaintiffs were not deprived of protected property interests without due process of law because the process Puerto Rico provided was adequate is rejected.

U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, June 04, 2010 Harrington v. Cty. of Suffolk, No. 09-3911 In an action pursuant to 42 U.S.C. section 1983 asserting that defendants deprived plaintiffs of a property interest protected by the Due Process Clause by conducting an inadequate investigation into their son’s fatal traffic accident, the dismissal of the action is affirmed where plaintiffs had no property interest in an adequate police investigation.
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In an earlier posting on this blog we reported that on February 23, 2010 a divided Panel of the Appellate Division, First Department, New York Supreme Court ruled in People v. Correa (2010 NY Slip Op. 01533) that the 2004 merger of the criminal courts in the Bronx into a single court with jurisdiction to handle both felonies and misdemeanors is unconstitutional. That Appellate Division ruling has now been overturned by the New York Court of Appeals in a single 6-0 opinion on June 3, 2010 that decided three cases–People v. Correa, People v. Fernandez, and People v. Mack, upholding administrative experiments that have New York State Supreme Court judges presiding over misdemeanor cases as well as felonies within a merged Bronx Supreme Court Criminal Division and an Integrated Domestic Violence (IDV) Court in Brooklyn.

The high court’s ruling regarding IDV Courts also applies to 44 other IDV Courts throught the State of New York. that centralizes the handling of all aspects of domestic disputes, including criminal charges, in one court. The judges noted that neither the New York Constitution nor its statutes call into question the legality of either court addressed in this opinion.

See also the following articles which discuss this New York Court of Appeals opinion and its implications:

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United States v. Marcus, No. 08-1341, 130 S.Ct. ___(may 24, 2010).

A Service from the ABA Criminal Justice Section, http://www.abanet.org/crimjust

This summary has been created by Professor Rory K. Little (littler@uchastings.edu), U.C. Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco, who has long presented “Annual Review of the Supreme Court’s Term” program at the ABA’s Annual Meetings. It represents his personal, unofficial views of the Justices’ opinions. The original opinions should be consulted for their authoritative content.

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