Appeals

This morning, a 6 to 3 divided Supreme Court issued a significant decision in Jones v. Hendrix, No. 21-857 (June 22, 2023), limiting the availability of habeas relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 for federal prisoners.  Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.  Justices Sotomayor and Kagan filed a short dissenting opinion, and Justice Jackson filed a lengthy dissenting opinion.

Timothy Smith is an avid fisherman and software engineer who lives in Mobile, Alabama near the Gulf Coast.  He discovered that a private company named Strikezones, headquartered in the Northern District of Florida, was selling geographic coordinates of artificial reefs that individuals create to attract fish.  Irritated that Strikezones was profiting from the work of private reef builders, Smith used some software to secretly obtain tranches of coordinates from Strikezone’s website and made them available to requesters on social media.

Evidence of child pornography found on a defendant’s phone must be suppressed and his plea vacated because the application for the search warrant didn’t adequately establish probable cause, the First Circuit said (view full

In a case that could have easily sprung from the wild imagination of law school hypotheticals, the Fifth Circuit holds that hitching a ride across the border in a car with 283 pounds of marijuana, is not, strictly speaking, possessing marijuana. The two men could really have been hitchhikers. Mere presence in the area where the drugs are found is not a crime. Convictions vacated. Dissent: Shut the front door. Two hundred. Eighty-three. Pounds.

A dozen Philadelphia police officers take to Facebook and post offensive comments about protestors, refugees, police brutality, the LGBTQ community, transgender people, Muslims, families with incarcerated fathers, and more. Following media coverage, several officers are disciplined. A First Amendment violation? District court: Nope. Case dismissed. Third Circuit: Well, maybe, at least at the pleadings stage. The Pickering balancing test (the standard governing when public employees constitutionally can be disciplined for their speech) is pretty fact-intensive.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court rejected the government’s broad reading of aggravated identity theft under 18 U.S.C. § 1028(a)(1), which requires a two-year mandatory add-on sentence. See Dubin v. United States, No. 22-10 (June 8, 2023).  Justice Sotomayor delivered the opinion of a unanimous court, holding that under §1028A(a)(1), a defendant “uses” another person’s means of identification “in relation to” a predicate offense when the use is at the crux of what makes the conduct criminal.

In 1993, an Arkansas woman is brutally murdered in her apartment while her two young children watch from a closet. A man is convicted, twice sentenced to death due to a reversal. In the days before his scheduled execution, he seeks DNA testing—much improved since the 90s—on 26 pieces of evidence, which allegedly point to a perpetrator of a different race and would thus exonerate the condemned man.

The Supreme Court will take up yet another dispute involving the oft-litigated Armed Career Criminal Act, this time in relation to frequently changing federal drug laws.

The law at issue in the pair of cases granted Monday imposes a mandatory 15-year minimum for certain firearms offenses in which a defendant previously has been convicted of “serious drug offenses.”

A San Antonio man, during a traffic stop outside his mother's house, throws his jacket onto a garbage can on her property. Police grab the jacket and find a gun inside. Felon in possession? Suppress the evidence? District court: No suppression Fifth Circuit: Suppression. Tossing an item onto property you often visit and are welcome isn't abandonment, so the cops couldn't just search the jacket willy-nilly. You need a warrant for that but you didn't get one. Conviction vacated. Dissent: Anyone could've taken that jacket.

North Carolina man is involuntarily committed after threatening to kill a U.S. congressman. Years later, he's conditionally discharged, and though he breaks lots of rules at his halfway house, it's not obvious the violations mean he's especially likely to be dangerous to the public. Recommit him? Fourth Circuit: "While there have been profound developments in the science of risk assessment in the past three decades, they are unmatched by updated, corresponding legal guidance respecting how the inquiry ought to proceed for those under a federal civil commitment order.