Sentencing

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!

AH Datalytics has launched a “Real-Time” crime index, (RTCI), online. (access index). AH Datalytics launched the real-time crime index in an effort to “aid in the need for a faster understanding and visualization of national, state, and local crime trends.” AH Datalytics acknowledges certain crime data is under-reported to police and agencies can fail to provide complete or accurate information.

Man: The enhancement that led to my 13-year prison sentence finding pointing a gun meant I "physically restrained" the convenience store cashier is wrong. Eleventh Circuit: Not wrong. Concurrence 1: Not wrong, but only because of our dumb prior caselaw which we have to follow "even if we disagree with it or think that prior panels have overlooked important arguments." Concurrence 2: I welcome our new AI overlords' help in this case.

The United States Sentencing Commission releases new Quick Facts periodically, which give readers "basic facts about a single area of federal crime in an easy-top-read, two page format."

Quick Facts published in September include:

Today, the United States Sentencing Commission published Cyber Technology in Federal Crime (Sept. 18, 2024), which provides "demographic and sentencing information for individuals who used hacking, cryptocurrency, and the dark web in the commission of a federal offense."

Key Findings:

President Joe Biden secured the record for the highest number of openly LGBTQ judges appointed to the bench by any president when the U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted in favor of a military vet who spent years working as a prosecutor becoming a life-tenured judge in Philadelphia (access full article).