Articles Posted in Federal Criminal Law News

Last Friday, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals decided U.S. v. Nacchio, a white collar criminal case involving insider trading by the former CEO of Quest Communications. The Court held that, in calculating Mr. Nacchio’s gain for purposes of sentencing, the district court must determine the proceeds related to his insider information, rather than simply…

Time Magazine reported yesterday that a New York legislator, James Tedisco, introduced a bill in that state that, if passed, would require wealthy inmates to pay for the cost of their prison stays. A similar bill failed to pass in Georgia this year and the federal criminal justice system already takes the costs of incarceration…

Last week, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits here in Atlanta, Georgia, decided U.S. v. Valencia-Trujillo, a federal criminal case involving an extradition rule called the rule of specialty. The Court held that Mr. Valencia-Trujillo had not established that he had been extradited under Colombia’s treaty with the United States, rather than an…

As we discussed in this post, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed to hear media mogul Conrad Black’s appeal regarding whether the honest services fraud statute applies in a purely private setting where the defendant’s conduct risks no foreseeable harm to the putative victims. We are very interested in the outcome of this…

Last Tuesday, in Abuelhawa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that using a cell phone to make a misdemeanor purchase of drugs does not “facilitate” a felony drug distribution crime. The government charged Mr. Abuelhawa with six felony charges, one for each cell phone call, for facilitating the sale of drugs, although his two,…

Eleventh Circuit case law, the controlling federal law here in Georgia, is at risk of changing next fall, when the Supreme Court will likely decide a criminal case and resolve a split among the circuit courts of appeals. The mail fraud and wire fraud laws are the bread and butter for federal prosecutors bringing white…

In a previous post we discussed the federal statutes on money laundering, why they can prove complicated for criminal defense lawyers in defending cases, and how much broader they are than most people think, affecting even white collar cases. Last week President Obama signed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009 (FERA) into law,…

In a potentially huge decision for criminal law in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, the Eleventh Circuit federal appeals court in Atlanta held that twenty-one days was an unreasonably long time for law enforcement to wait before obtaining a search warrant after seizing a man’s computer hard drive. Because the circumstances of this case, United States…

Here in Atlanta, we have been involved in many criminal cases in which police arrested people for traffic offenses, then searched their vehicles and found evidence of completely unrelated crimes. The search incident to arrest rule has been unfairly used by police as an investigatory tool since New York v. Belton extended the rule in…

Last Monday, the United States Supreme Court issued its opinion in Corley v. United States. The issue in this case was whether a federal statute was intended to do away with the McNabb-Mallory exclusionary rule regarding criminal confessions or merely narrow it. In a 5 to 4 decision, the Court held that Congress meant to…