Sentencing

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).

Prosecutor in plea negotiations: We agree to recommend a sentence at the bottom of the guideline range. Prosecutor to district court: We recommend a sentence at the bottom of the guideline range for this top-of-the-food-chain drug dealer who is worse than a murderer. District court: Top of the guideline range it is.

In Smith v. Arizona, No. 22-889 (June 21, 2024), a unanimous Court held, when an expert conveys an absent analyst’s statements in support of the expert’s opinion, and the statements provide that support only if true, then the statements come into evidence for their truth, implicating the Sixth Amendments Confrontation Clause.

Pennsylvania man is convicted of murder and appeals through the state court system. He ultimately loses at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court but receives no notice of the ruling. Uh oh! When the trial court dockets the Supreme Court's ruling, it gets the date wrong, recording it as March 16, 2015, rather than February 19, 2015. The error is not detected until the man files a federal habeas petition, which is dismissed for being 14 days too late (it would have been timely under the date recorded by the trial court). Is he out of luck? District court: Yup!

A California federal judge who ordered a teenager handcuffed at her father’s sentencing hearing was properly reprimanded, a judiciary conduct committee said Tuesday.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals announced Wednesday that U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez “engaged in abusive or harassing behavior” constituting a rare finding of judicial misconduct when he ordered a U.S.

Man and woman conspire to kill woman's former husband, which they accomplish. Both are sentenced to death. Yikes! Turns out the judge (ex parte) tasked the prosecutor with drafting the sentencing opinion with the aid of the judge's notes. (The judge and prosecutor are publicly reprimanded.) The condemned man gets re-sentenced to death by the same judge who refused to consider new mitigating evidence and in an opinion that is almost identical to the original. Sixth Circuit: Habeas granted.

In July, the Fourth Circuit (over a dissent) held that "geofence" warrants ordering Google to provide law enforcement with information about every account holder who enters a particular area in a particular time period are totally cool under the Fourth Amendment. But wait! A mere month later, here comes the Fifth Circuit to tell us that these same warrants are, in fact, totally bogus under the Fourth Amendment!