Sentencing

In Lackawanna County, Penn., if a court finds you can afford to pay child support but you didn't, you get a prison term and won't have access to work-release to earn money unless you spend the first half of the sentence doing "community service" at a private recycling center, for nearly no pay in unsanitary and dangerous conditions. Three people sued: This is a 13th Amendment and Fair Labor Standards Act violation. Third Circuit: That may sound like involuntary servitude, but it doesn't violate the Thirteenth Amendment.

In en banc news, the Ninth Circuit will not reconsider its opinion that "and" does not mean "or" in a case about the First Step Act of 2018. (view previous coverage)

The case is United States v. Lopez,  No. 19-50305 (9th Cir. Jan 27, 2023).

The “safety valve” sentencing provision in  18 U.S.C. § 3553(f) allows a district court to sentence a defendant below the mandatory-minimum sentence for certain drug offenses if the defendant can show he or she doesn’t have all three conviction categories, together, that are listed in the statute, the Ninth Circuit held Friday in United States v. Lopez,  No. 19-50305 (9th Cir. May 21, 2021).

The First Step Act expanded this rule:

(1) the defendant does not have—

The United States Sentencing Commission is currently seeking comment on whether it should list certain 2024 amendments relating to acquitted conduct, firearms, and drug offenses as changes that may be applied retroactively to previously sentenced defendants.

The bipartisan United States Sentencing Commission voted unanimously today to prohibit conduct for which a person was acquitted in federal court from being used in calculating a sentence range under the federal guidelines (USSC press release available here).

“Not guilty means not guilty,” said Commission Chair Judge Carlton W. Reeves.

In three and a half years, President Biden has already installed more non-White federal judges than any president in history. His slate of judges is also majority female — another first (article available here).

Defendant: Look, sure, I was just convicted of drug trafficking, and, yes, I testified that I deposited all my legitimate income in the bank while I kept all my drug-trafficking money in cash, and, okay fine, you found a bunch of cash in my house near my drugs and my scale and my notebooks meticulously documenting my drug-trafficking transactions, but that doesn't prove the cash is the proceeds of drug trafficking. District court: You're kidding, right? Forfeiture on everything.

In the consolidated cases Brown v. United States, No. 22-6389 (May 23, 2024), and Jackson v. United States, No. 22-6640 (May 23, 2024), opinion here, the Supreme Court held that a state drug conviction counts as an ACCA predicate if it involved a drug on the federal schedules at the time of the state conviction.  The 6 to 3 opinion, written by Justice Alito, joined by the Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, begins like this:

A first of its kind, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Wisconsin has charged a man for allegedly producing and possessing images of child pornography. The images at issue were generated entirely through artificial intelligence using the generative artificial intelligence model Stable Diffusion and created using text prompts describing the images to be generated. Images of children are not alleged to have been used in generating the images.

The presence of Black men serving as active judges on the federal appellate courts has stalled in the past 10 years, even as President Joe Biden has prioritized demographic diversity in his judicial nominations and almost doubled the number of Black women on the circuit courts (access full article).