News

Via the Seventh Circuit: In which the defendant's connection to Jared Fogle isn't even close to the fascinating part of the story, which for now results in a remand to determine whether Indiana State…

After his indictment on drug conspiracy charges, man's arrest warrant mysteriously vanishes from the FBI's database. Human error? A technical glitch? Divine intervention? Eighth Circuit: Shrugs. We'll never know. But what we do…

Over the course of more than a decade a New York federal court clerk illegally referred dozens of criminal defendants to a New York City attorney who paid the clerk tens of thousands of dollars in referral fees since 2011, according to a grand jury indictment on Thursday that charged the pair…

Disgruntled lawyers may grumble about a judge in private. Really disgruntled lawyers might even post disparaging Facebook comments on the judge's personal Facebook page. Only super-mega-disgruntled lawyers, though, file First Amendment lawsuits against judges who block them from posting…

The State Bar of Michigan recommended that judges rarely dig into a lawyer's reasons for withdrawal from a case and that lawyers concerned about mental incapacity of a client should ask the client to submit to an evaluation, in the bar's first pair of ethics opinions of the year (…

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to examine the constitutionality of a criminal contempt conviction for disbarred human rights lawyer Steven Donziger that was obtained by court-appointed prosecutors, prompting a dissent from Justice Neil Gorsuch, who decried the broken "constitutional…

Gov. Josh Shapiro urged members of the Philadelphia Bar Association on Wednesday to support dedicating $10 million of his $44 billion budget proposal to end Pennsylvania's distinction as being the only state to not provide state-level funding to public defenders (…

Man calls 911 to report that a store clerk pulled a gun on him, threatened him, and taunted him with racial slurs. When Saginaw, Mich. police arrive, they arrest the man(!) him for filing a false police report. He spends 18 days in jail before being released and all charges against him are…

Former federal inmate, a devout Muslim, sues under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, alleging that when he would try to perform his required daily prayers during shift breaks at the prison commissary where he worked, prison guards—who also said "There is no good Muslim but a dead Muslim"…

Fourth Circuit (2021): This petitioner's South Carolina state court death sentence was defective because his trial counsel failed to present mitigating evidence during sentencing. We relied on evidence introduced in his federal habeas proceedings.…