We strive on providing up the minute information on breaking cases and cases of interest Nationwide.  Feel free to contact us if you want more information on any of these cases and/or if the case of interest may assist you in any manner.

Germaine Cannady
Docket: 20-6906 
Opinion Date: March 24, 2023
Areas of Law: Constitutional Law, Criminal Law 

Defendant appealed the district court's dismissal of his motion for post-conviction relief under 28 U.S.C. Section 2255. A jury found Defendant guilty of one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute cocaine and heroin, as well as one count of attempted possession with intent to distribute cocaine and heroin. At sentencing, the district court deemed these offenses “controlled substance offense[s]” under Sections 4B1.1 and 4B1.2—the career offender provisions—of the Sentencing Guidelines. Defendant also had past convictions for conspiracy to distribute cocaine in violation of 21 U.S.C. Section 846 and assault. The district court considered the former to be a controlled substance offense and the latter to be a crime of violence under the career offender provisions. The district court applied the career offender enhancement to his sentence. While Defendant's appeal was pending, he moved for a new trial based on newly discovered. The district court granted the motion, and the government appealed. On remand, the government moved to reinstate the judgment of conviction and Defendant's sentence, to which Defendant's counsel consented. Defendant now argues that, on remand, his counsel rendered ineffective assistance. 
 
The Fourth Circuit vacated the district court's judgment and remanded the case to the district court for resentencing. The court held that Defendant's counsel rendered deficient performance by failing to make this objection. This failure resulted in prejudice to Defendant, whose 16-year sentence far exceeded the high end of what the Guidelines range would have been without the career offender enhancement.
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US v. Omar Alas 
Docket: 22-4193
Opinion Date: March 24, 2023

Defendant entered the United Stated without authorization in 2004. He was then convicted of malicious wounding in Virginia and was deported back to El Salvador. Defendant later re-entered the United States before being convicted of another crime in 2020. He was indicted for illegal entry. moved to dismiss that indictment, arguing that the five year statute of limitations on his prosecution had run and that his crime of malicious wounding was not a deportable offense. The district court rejected Defendant's claims. 

On appeal, Fourth Circuit affirmed the district court's denial of Defendant's collateral attack of his removal order, finding that Defendant entered the United States without authorization, committed a deportable offense, re-entered again illegally, and then committed another crime. The court explained that Defendant's "case falls right at the heart of what Congress sought to criminalize and the executive branch seeks to stop with the illegal reentry statute of 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1326."
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United States v. Taylor 

Docket: 22-1925 
Opinion Date: March 24, 2023
Areas of Law: Constitutional Law, Criminal Law 

The primary source of incriminating information against Taylor was “Doe,” a woman with whom Taylor and his wife were intimately involved. Law enforcement presented a warrant application to an Indiana judge, seeking to search Taylor's residence for evidence of child pornography and bestiality. The affidavit did not disclose that two officers involved in the investigation had been competing with Taylor for Doe's affection. The judge signed a typed warrant that authorized the search of Taylor's residence for evidence of child pornography; it did not mention bestiality. At a time unknown and under unknown circumstances, the lead detective apparently made handwritten alterations, adding “bestiality” to the warrant's scope. When officers executed the altered warrant, they found substantial evidence that Taylor was producing and distributing child pornography. They found no evidence relating to bestiality. Taylor's motion to suppress and request for a Franks hearing were denied. Taylor pled guilty and was sentenced to 324 months. 

The Seventh Circuit vacated. An evidentiary hearing is needed to determine whether the judge approved the alterations before the warrant's execution. Questions surrounding those alterations are relevant to the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule so the hearing must encompass false statements and material omissions in the affidavit and law enforcement's subjective good faith in seeking the warrant. The affidavit did not support probable cause to search for evidence of child pornography but did support probable cause to search for evidence of crimes of bestiality.
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United States v. Hunt 
Docket: 21-6046 
Opinion Date: March 24, 2023

Defendant Dominic Hunt appealed his convictions on two charges of being a felon in possession of ammunition. The ammunition was used in two shootings in early 2019. Investigators found three spent cartridges at the scene of one shooting and one spent cartridge at the other. A firearms expert testified that all four cartridges were fired from the same (undiscovered) weapon. Defendant's sole issue raised on appeal was that the expert testimony should not have been admitted at trial: the expert's field of firearm toolmark examination was not scientifically valid, and that the district court failed to perform its gatekeeping role in examining the admissibility of expert testimony because it relied on prior judicial opinions rather than the most up-to-date empirical evidence when it denied his pretrial motion to exclude the testimony without conducting a hearing. The Tenth Circuit held only that the district court adequately performed its gatekeeping role and did not err in admitting the testimony in light of the material presented on the pretrial motion and the expert testimony at trial.
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Brent Smith v. United States 
Docket: 22-1053 
Opinion Date: March 23, 2023
Areas of Law: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law 

Plaintiff, seeking to purchase firearms, successfully petitioned a Minnesota state court to restore his right to possess firearms under the Minnesota restoration of rights statute. He was then granted the right to purchase and a permit to carry by local Minnesota governments. But no federally licensed dealer will sell him a firearm. Federal law will not let them do that, the FBI advised Plaintiff, because “the Minnesota Restoration of Rights does not restore federal firearm rights for felony convictions listed on your Iowa state record.” Invoking the civil remedy Congress created in the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, Plaintiff then filed this civil action against the United States under 18 U.S.C. Section 925A, seeking an order allowing him to purchase firearms and directing the FBI to correct the allegedly erroneous information that he is ineligible to possess a firearm in Minnesota. The district court granted the government's motion to dismiss.
 
The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court explained that under federal law, Plaintiff may not possess a firearm if he is a person “convicted in any court” of a qualifying crime.” His prior Minnesota and Iowa felony convictions both qualify. Beecham teaches that, in evaluating whether rights have been restored, we look to the “law of the jurisdiction in which the proceedings were held.” Lowe held that “only the convicting jurisdiction can restore civil rights.” Therefore, the district court properly held that the restoration of civil rights in Minnesota applied only to Plaintiff's Minnesota convictions. As the Iowa convictions have not been restored, under federal law, they continue to bar him from possessing a firearm.
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United States v. Elmer Zahn 
Docket: 22-1408 
Opinion Date: March 23, 2023
Areas of Law: Constitutional Law, Criminal Law 

Defendant entered a conditional guilty plea to possessing with intent to distribute 50 grams or more of methamphetamine. He appealed the district court's denial of his motion to suppress evidence. Defendant argued that his unconstitutional arrest stemmed from the Brown County Sheriff's Office's reckless conduct, i.e., its failure to establish any procedure to handle recalled warrants. Defendant contends that the office should have implemented a review system, suggesting that “[a] simple, routine process of a weekly review would have caught the error.”
 
The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court concluded that it was employee negligence—not reckless disregard of constitutional requirements—that resulted in the failure to remove Defendant's recalled warrant from the file and the computer system. The sheriff's office manager and her co-worker's negligent conduct “was not so objectively culpable as to require exclusion” of the evidence garnered after Defendant's arrests. Thus, the court wrote in light of its conclusion that the exclusionary rule does not apply, it need not consider the government's alternate ground for admission of the evidence, i.e., that Defendant's resistance to his illegal arrest furnished grounds for a second, legitimate arrest.
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United States v. Travis Mayer 
Docket: 22-1259 
Opinion Date: March 23, 2023
Areas of Law: Constitutional Law, Criminal Law

Defendant was convicted of several child pornography-related offenses. He appealed the district court's denial of his pretrial suppression motion, the application of a sentencing enhancement, and the grouping of his counts at sentencing. 

The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court explained that even if Defendant showed cause, he wasn't prejudiced, which is required for good cause. The Government offered significant evidence at trial that supported Defendant's conviction, including his incriminating admissions that he received and produced child pornography and explicit content recovered from his and the minor victim's phones. While the motel room evidence was incriminating in the sense that it worked against Defendant, “[t]he desire to suppress” such evidence is “not by [itself] sufficient to establish good cause to justify relief from a waiver of a defense, objection, or request under Rule 12.” Thus, the district court did not abuse its discretion when it denied Defendant leave to make an untimely pretrial motion.

In calculating his sentence, Defendant says that the district court erred when it declined to group three counts together because those counts involved substantially the same harm. But the court explained that even if it grouped Defendant's offenses the way he suggests, he would still receive a life sentence because his combined offense level would exceed 43, so any error was harmless.
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USA v. Hill 
Docket: 19-20251 
Opinion Date: March 22, 2023
Areas of Law: Constitutional Law, Criminal Law 

Defendants, in concert with a co-conspirator, became involved in an armored car robbery at a bank automated teller machine (ATM) scheme masterminded by the co-conspirator. The scheme involved staking out ATMs to identify when armored car drivers would replenish the cash inside and then robbing the armored car at the time of delivery by shooting and killing the driver. As the result of the Wells Fargo ATM robbery and the attempted robbery of the Amegy ATM, the surviving Defendants were charged and prosecuted for aiding and abetting robbery, attempted robbery, and aiding and abetting the use of a firearm during a crime of violence causing death of a person. In one consolidated case, after a two-week jury trial, the Defendants were each convicted on all counts. On appeal, the Defendants each raise multiple issues challenging their convictions and sentences. Specifically, all four Defendants argue that attempted Hobbs Act robbery is not a crime of violence under 18 U.S.C. Section 924(c)'s elements clause and thus cannot support their convictions under Count Four.
The Fifth Circuit vacated Defendants' convictions as to Count four and affirmed the judgment in all other respects. The court explained that the Supreme Court has recently held that attempted Hobbs Act robbery does not qualify as a crime of violence under the elements clause. Accordingly, the court wrote it must vacate Defendants' convictions on Count Four. Because Defendants' sentences on the remaining counts are not “interrelated or interdependent” on Count Four, resentencing is unnecessary.
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LeChase Constr. Servs. LLC v. Argonaut Ins. Co. 
Docket: 21-1748 
Opinion Date: March 23, 2023
Areas of Law: Civil Procedure, Contracts 

Argonaut Insurance Company (“Argonaut”) appealed from an order of the district court remanding this breach-of-bond action, brought by LeChase Construction Services, LLC (“LeChase”), to New York state court after Argonaut removed it on the basis of diversity jurisdiction. The district court purported to issue its remand order pursuant to 28 U.S.C. Section 1447(e), which authorizes remand if, after removal, a plaintiff joins defendants whose inclusion would destroy diversity jurisdiction. The district court expressly acknowledged that section 1447(e) is facially inapplicable here, as LeChase was not seeking to join a non-diverse defendant or otherwise contesting the existence of diversity jurisdiction. Nevertheless, the district court reasoned that, since remand would facilitate this case's consolidation with two related actions then pending in New York state court, thus conserving judicial resources and avoiding the risk of inconsistent outcomes, it was appropriate under the “rubric” of section 1447(e). At issue was: (1) whether the Second Circuit has appellate jurisdiction over the district court's remand order notwithstanding Section 1447(d; and (2) if the court does, whether the district court issued such order in excess of its statutory authority under section 1447(e).
 
The Second Circuit vacated the district court's order and remanded. The court concluded, as a matter of first impression, that “[section] 1447(d) permits appellate review of a district-court remand order that dresses in [section 1447(e)'s] jurisdictional clothing a patently non-jurisdictional ground,” such as the prudential considerations invoked by the district court here. The court concluded – for essentially the reasons acknowledged by the district court itself – that its remand order here was unauthorized under section 1447(e).
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Vincent v. Annucci 

Docket: 21-22 
Opinion Date: March 23, 2023
Areas of Law: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law 

Plaintiff brought a 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, seeking compensatory damages for the 686 days that he was unlawfully incarcerated after the Second Circuit clearly established in Earley v. Murray that only a court could lawfully impose post-release supervision (PRS). Plaintiff served this time for violating the terms of his PRS that the New York Department of Correctional Services (DOCS)—not his sentencing judge—had imposed. He sued various New York state officials, including Defendant, then-Deputy Commissioner and legal counsel for DOCS, for the unlawful deprivation of his liberty under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. On appeal, Defendant challenged the district court's award of compensatory damages to Plaintiff and revives his claim of qualified immunity, which was previously unsuccessful. 
 
The Second Circuit affirmed in part and vacated in part the district court's decision. The court explained that it previously held in Vincent v. Yelich, 718 F.3d 157 (2d Cir. 2013) that the unconstitutionality of administratively imposed terms of PRS was clearly established by Earley I. And the court later held in Betances v. Fischer, 837 F.3d 162 (2d Cir. 2016) that because Defendant failed to make objectively reasonable efforts to comply with federal law that was clearly established by Earley I, he was not entitled to qualified immunity. Defendant offers no compelling argument for the court to reconsider these prior holdings. The court thus concluded that the district court did not err in applying the court's prior precedents to deny him qualified immunity.
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