Articles Posted in Appeals

Today, by a 7-2 vote, the United States Supreme Court sided with a man on Alabama’s death row. The Supreme Court overturned a decision where the Eleventh Circuit held that a death-row inmate should lose his ability to challenge his conviction just because the mail containing an order never got to the out-of-state attorneys then…

In a case arising out of south Florida and its proximity with Cuba, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit recently affirmed parts of a case involving a plan to smuggle potential baseball players into the United States. Besides being an interesting view into the modern methods of stocking a Major League…

A seemingly overzealous prosecution team went after a medical doctor in a federal criminal prosecution regarding supposed excessive prescriptions for pain medicines. My law partner Carl recently wrote on this same topic. The defense team uncovered the possibly improper prosecution tactics. The jury found the doctor innocent, after which the trial judge ordered that the…

We practice quite a bit in the federal appeals courts. The federal courts are often where injustices are fixed when a wrongly convicted person gets post-conviction relief by the granting of a writ of habeas corpus. However, a recent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit shows that on occasion…

When we handle federal criminal cases here in Atlanta, Georgia and in other parts of the country, our clients often face criminal penalties along with possible forfeiture of their property. Lawyers often forget how important these financial penalties can be. A recent case from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (located…

Our local Federal Court of Appeals, sitting just down the street from our offices here in Atlanta, yesterday reversed a federal criminal conviction for obstruction of justice. The prosecutors contended that the defendant tried to obstruct a forfeiture matter. The Eleventh Circuit joined other courts and relied on some earlier Supreme Court cases by holding…

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which sits several blocks from our offices here in Atlanta, reversed some of the convictions in a federal fraud prosecution that were brought against a defendant in Alabama. The reversal of some of the charges was because the indictment failed to allege the necessary facts…

The United States Supreme Court announced last month that it will review a case involving the “exigent circumstances” exception to the Constitution’s requirement that the police get a search warrant before conducting a search or seizing property. We regularly confront similar matters when we litigate federal cases here in Georgia, Alabama and Florida and when…

Last week, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, decided United States v. Irey. The 142-page majority opinion recounted gruesome sex crimes that Mr. Irey admitted to committing against as many as 50 Cambodian girls, some as young as four years old. The Court held that the 17½ year sentence ordered by the…

This Monday, the Eleventh Circuit held in Gilbert v. United States that, for federal sentencing purposes, the act of being a U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1 career offender is essentially a separate offense. Based upon the Supreme Court’s retroactive decision in Begay and the Eleventh Circuit’s implementation of that decision in Archer, Gilbert is actually innocent of…