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!
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey issued sweeping pardons forgiving possession of marijuana convictions, following the directive of President Joe Biden, who urged state executives to follow his lead in pardoning low-level marijuana offenses (view announcement).
Prison: If you tested positive for a soy allergy, we'd stop feeding you soy, but we don't think you have a real allergy and we're not buying your "my religion prohibits me from eating foods that make my stomach hurt" schtick. Fourth Circuit: Um, that is, like, very precisely the sort of schtick you are required to buy. District court's contrary ruling vacated.
The case is Ricky Pendleton v. Betsy Jividen, No. 23-6334 (4th Cir. Mar. 20, 2024).
Washington man runs an organization that purports to help undocumented adult immigrants become U.S. citizens through adult adoption. He's convicted and sentenced to 240 months for unlawfully "encouraging or inducing an alien to come to, enter, or reside unlawfully in the United States for private financial gain." He appeals his conviction. Ninth Circuit (2022): That provision is unconstitutionally overbroad because it could reach all kinds of protected speech. Conviction vacated.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Fischer v. United States on April 16, 2024, regarding the criminal law used by the DOJ to prosecute those who breached the Capital on January 6, 2021. The law at issue is part of a statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c), which makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct congressional inquiries and investigations.
Six people who had been deported are prosecuted for illegally reentering. Defendants: When Congress passed this law in 1929 it was for super racist reasons which carry forward to the current version of the law and makes it unconstitutional. Training Division: Yup (view full article). Fourth Circuit: Nope.
The original law criminalizing illegal reentry under 8 U.S.C. 1326 grew out of a disturbing time in history marked by the rise of eugenics, the Ku Klux Klan, and deeply nativist sentiments. See, e.g., Webinar: The Racist Origins of Illegal Reentry (and how to Challenge Them in Your Practice) (Oct. 15, 2020), by AFDs Kara Hartzler and Nora Hirozawa,.
Tennessee’s GOP-controlled Senate advanced legislation on Tuesday allowing the death penalty in child rape convictions as critics raised concerns that the U.S. Supreme Court has banned capital punishment in such cases (view full article).
It must still clear the similarly conservatively dominant House chamber before it can go to the governor.