Appeals

Oklahoma police stop car for traffic violations, search it, and discover 29 pounds of meth stashed in secret compartments (which carried a wholesale value of about $75k). The driver-husband knew, but there's no evidence that the passenger-wife did. Nevertheless, a jury convicts her of conspiracy to distribute meth and interstate travel in aid of drug trafficking. Tenth Circuit: The prosecution needed to prove that the wife at least knew about the meth, and speculation doesn't substitute for evidence.

The execution of Thomas Eugene Creech, 73, one of the nation's longest-serving death row inmates was put on hold Wednesday, the latest in a number of botched lethal injections across the country (view full article).

For nearly an hour, Thomas Eugene Creech lay strapped to a table in an Idaho execution chamber as medical team members poked and prodded at his arms and legs, hands and feet, trying to find a vein through which they could end his life.

Wherein the Tenth Circuit gives some side-eye to a Colorado prison's "troubling" DEI programming—warning that "race-based training programs can create hostile workplaces when official policy is combined with ongoing stereotyping and explicit or implicit expectations of discriminatory treatment"—but holds that in this particular case it wasn't so bad as to violate a white former officer's Title VII suit. The court also declined to reinstate his equal protection claim.

Former President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández has been found guilty on charges relating to drug trafficking and weapons possession in a federal jury trial in New York (view full article).

The verdict was announced during the second day of deliberations, after a two-week trial.

Hernández served as a Honduran congressman, congress leader and finally two-term president. He was arrested in February 2022, only weeks after he finished his second presidential term.

The Supreme Court on Friday dealt a blow to potentially thousands of federal prison inmates by ruling against a convicted drug dealer seeking a shorter sentence under a 2018 law.

The issue involved how to read a “safety valve” in federal criminal sentencing laws, which allows defendants to avoid the often lengthy mandatory minimum sentences scattered throughout the federal criminal code. The safety valve requires the defendant to satisfy a laundry list of each of five separate rules.

The Supreme Court opens its new 9-month term today with arguments in a case that considers what the meaning of the word “and” is in a provision of the First Step Act, an esoteric English lesson with real-world impact for thousands of federal prisoners (view full article).

Two former law enforcement officers who were part of a self-styled “Goon Squad” that tortured, sexually assaulted and beat residents of a Mississippi county were given hefty prison sentences on Tuesday for brutally attacking two Black men last year (view full article).

A federal judge ordered Hunter Elward, who shot one of the victims in the mouth, to serve 20 years in prison. Jeffrey Middleton, a former lieutenant who supervised the Goon Squad, was sentenced to nearly 18 years.

New FBI data released on Tuesday confirms previous indications that crime in the U.S. declined significantly in 2023, continuing a post-pandemic trend and belying widespread perceptions that crime is rising.

Late Tuesday evening, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order that temporarily halts the state of Texas’s plans to arrest migrants along the Texas-Mexico border. See Associated Press. Texas’s Senate Bill 4, SB4, is at issue in litigation before the Fifth Circuit. SB4 authorizes Texas law enforcement to question, arrest, and detain individuals state law enforcement suspects of entering the country without proper documentation.

Federal procurement law includes contracting preferences for service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses (SDVOSBs). That creates an incentive for people to game the procurement system by, for example, nominally having service-disabled veterans as the owners of a company, while actually having non-veterans run everything. Is that really basis for conspiracy to defraud the United States and six counts of wire fraud? Jury: Yes. And who's going to jail for it? Fifth Circuit: This guy!