News

California man charged in gun case was facing trial in September 2020. The trial court adopted COVID restrictions and precluded the public from entering the courtroom and giving access to the proceedings only by streaming audio. Man: objection! This violates my Sixth Amendment right to a public…

The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm Sunshine Suzanne Sykes to a lifetime seat on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, making her the state’s first-ever Native American federal judge and just the fifth Indigenous woman in U.S. history to serve on a federal court (…

For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while laden with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them to operate safely and analyze instances where…

Midland, Texas, prosecutor's office investigator told jury a reliable source told him that someone named Cali was selling drugs from a hotel and other law enforcement agents told him Cali was the defendant. Defendant: hearsay! Prosecutor: testimony is admissible to give jury context. Fifth…

The White House is nominating seven lawyers for posts on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a bipartisan panel that helps set policies for punishing people convicted of federal crimes. The panel has lacked enough members to do important work since 2019 (…

In 2016, the Supreme Court tossed out the murder conviction of Michael Wearry, who was found guilty of a 1998 murder and sentenced to death in 2002. After that conviction was vacated, Wearry sued Scott Perriloux, a prosecutor, and Marlon Foster, a police officer, alleging that the prosecutor and…

A man whose death sentence for killing a Missouri couple during a robbery more than a quarter of a century ago was put to death Tuesday, becoming the fifth person executed in the United States this year (…

A Maryland federal judge has approved federal prosecutors' request to bar any discussion of cannabis legalization from the upcoming trial of a man indicted for criminal conspiracy to traffic marijuana from California to Maryland (…

After being struck in the head with a metal handlebar, called the n-word, and having his life threatened by four white men in Lewiston, Me., Black man retrieves a gun from his home nearby, returns to the scene, and fires a shot into a dirt pile. At trial, the prosecutor peremptorily struck the…

Although the United States Sentencing Commission lost a voting quorum shortly after enactment of the First Step Act in December 2018--and cannot amend the Guidelines without four commissioners--the Commission continues to do research and generate a wide range of reports.  This week the…