Articles Posted in Criminal Law and Justice

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March 21-25, 2011.

United States First Circuit, 03/22/2011
US v. Werra, No. 09-1593
Conviction and sentencing of defendant is reversed because stop-and-frisk conducted on him after law enforcement officers forced their way into a house occupied by a group of unrelated individuals to execute an arrest warrant violated the Fourth Amendment rights of defendant, where he was not the subject of the warrant.

United States Fourth Circuit, 03/25/2011
US v. Masciandaro, No. 09-4839
Conviction and sentencing of defendant for carrying or possessing a loaded handgun in a motor vehicle, under 36 C.F.R. section 2.4(b), is affirmed where the general federal savings statute, 1 U.S.C. Section 109, denies defendants an automatic entitlement to the benefit of post-arrest changes in the law.

United States Ninth Circuit, 03/21/2011
Smith v. Almada, No. 09-55334
In an appeals arising out of the arrest and trial of the appellant for arson, summary judgment in favor of the appellee is affirmed where failure to disclose evidence during criminal trial did not prejudice appellant.
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November 8-12 2010.

United States Fourth Circuit, 11/12/2010
US v. Ide, No. 09-4833
District court’s grant of government’s petition to revoke defendant’s term of supervised release originally imposed in May 2002 as part of his sentence on a federal charge, claiming that defendant’s commission of an additional state offense, along with his failure to file monthly reports, violated the conditions of his supervised release, is affirmed as, under the circumstances, a defendant’s supervised release term is tolled under 18 U.S.C. section 3624(e) during the period that he spent in pretrial detention awaiting trial on the state charge for which he later was convicted. ..

United States Fifth Circuit, 11/09/2010
US v. Jackson, No. 09-10850
Defendant’s conviction and sentence, following a jury trial, for conspiring to possess with intent to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine, are vacated where certain notebooks introduced into evidence were not sufficiently authenticated, the error violated defendant’s rights under the Confrontation Clause, and the error was not harmless.

United States Fifth Circuit, 11/09/2010
US v. Flores-Gallo, No. 09-40882
Defendant’s sentence for unlawful reentry into the U.S. is affirmed where the district court properly found that defendant’s prior Kansas aggravated battery offense was a “crime of violence” for sentencing purposes and imposed an enhancement accordingly.
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