Recently in Criminal Law Category

California cities and counties are free to ban the sale and distribution of medical marijuana. Pot dispensaries can be banned via zoning laws, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The unanimous ruling, which approved a ban by the city of Riverside, is expected to spur more such bans statewide. About 200 communities now have zoning laws that exclude cannabis dispensaries.

Supporters of medical marijuana have argued that patients would be forced to drive hundreds of miles to obtain marijuana legally or to buy illegally on the street.

“While some counties and cities might consider themselves well-suited to accommodating medical marijuana dispensaries, conditions in other communities might lead to the reasonable decision that such facilities within their borders, even if carefully sited, well managed, and closely monitored, would present unacceptable local risks and burdens,” Justice Marvin Baxter wrote for the seven-member court.

Three college friends of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect removed a backpack with fireworks emptied of gunpowder from his dorm room three days after the attack, according to the attached FBI affidavit.

Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev are charged with conspiring to obstruct justice. A third man, Robel Phillipos, is charged with making false statements to federal investigators.

The FBI affidavit says Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev agreed to get rid of the backpack after concluding from news reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was one of the bombers.

The FBI alleges that on the night of April 18, after the FBI released photos of the bombing suspects, the three men went to Tsarnaev's dorm room. The men noticed a backpack containing fireworks, which had been opened and emptied of powder.

Kadyrbayev knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the bombings and decided to remove the backpack from the room "in order to help his friend Tsarnaev avoid trouble," the FBI said in the affidavit. He also decided to remove Tsarnaev's laptop.

After the three men returned to Kadyrbayev's and Tazhayakov's apartment with the backpack and computer, they watched news reports featuring photographs of Tsarnaev. The affidavit says Kadyrbayev told authorities the three men then "collectively decided to throw the backpack and fireworks into the trash because they did not want Tsarnaev to get into trouble."

Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev have been held in jail for more than a week on allegations they violated their student visas while attending UMass, The Associated Press reports.

A criminal complaint against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, has been filed in federal court. In charging Tsarnaev with using a "weapon of mass destruction," he would not be tried before a military tribunal as an "enemy combatant."

If convicted, Tsarnaev could face the death penalty, a Justice Department news statement said. The complaint said he had his initial court appearance Monday from his hospital room, where he is currently being treated for wounds sustained before his capture on Friday.

The Justice Department unsealed the attached criminal complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. It said he is "specifically charged with one count of using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction (namely, an improvised explosive device or IED) against persons and property within the United States resulting in death, and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death." The bombings resulted in the deaths of three people and injuries to more than 200, the department's news release said.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said that under U.S. law, American citizens such as Tsarnaev cannot be tried by before military commissions.

"[Tsarnaev] will not be treated as an enemy combatant," Carney said at a White House news briefing. "We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice. Under U.S. law, United States citizens cannot be tried in military commissions."

The FBI has released images of two men who are suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings.

For the first time, the agency made public a video (attached below) and 8 photographs of the men who were seen in the vicinity of the attack that killed three people and injured about 180.

Investigators have asked for the public's help in their search for suspects. Anyone with any information, no matter how small, is urged to contact the FBI.

"Somebody out there knows these individuals as friends, neighbors, co-workers or family members of the suspects," FBI Special Agent Rick DesLauriers told a packed press briefing in Boston on Thursday. "And though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those with information to come forward and provide it to us."

Police usually must try to obtain a search warrant before ordering blood tests for drunken-driving suspects, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

The justices sided with a Missouri man who was subjected to a blood test without a warrant and found to have nearly twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood.

The high court struck down Missouri's guidelines giving police broad discretion to forego getting a judge's prior approval before executing a search.

"We hold that in drunk-driving investigations, the natural dissipation of alcohol in the bloodstream does not constitute an exigency in every case sufficient to justify conducting a blood test without a warrant," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the Court.

The U.S . can lawfully kill an American citizen overseas if it determines the target is a "senior, operational leader" of al-Qaeda or an associated group and poses an imminent threat to the country, according to a Justice Department document published by NBC News.

The document defines "imminent threat" expansively, saying it does not have to be based on intelligence about a specific attack since such actions are being "continually" planned by al-Qaeda.

"In this context," it says, "imminence must incorporate considerations of the relevant window of opportunity" as well as possible collateral damage to civilians. The document also provides a legal rationale behind the Obama administration's use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects.

Exactly what constitutes an "imminent" threat is not specifically defined, however.

Indiana can't ban all registered sex offenders off instant messaging services, chat rooms or social networking sites like Facebook, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

Indiana passed a law in 2008 that was aimed at keeping predators from trolling the Internet for new victims. But the law "broadly prohibits substantial protected speech rather than specifically targeting the evil of improper communications to minors," the three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit ruled.

State courts can impose limits on social media as a condition of a sex offender's probation or parole, but a "blanket ban" on Internet use violates the First Amendment's guarantee of free expression, the judges concluded.

The DEA has long designated marijuana as a Schedule I drug, the Administrations’ most-restrictive category. It found that pot “has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.”

Advocates of looser federal restrictions on marijuana suffered a major legal setback Tuesday, when a panel of three judges found that the federal government acted properly in refusing to loosen restrictions on pot.

Pro-marijuana groups and a disabled veteran who said it improves his medical condition argued the agency was ignoring a growing body of scientific evidence that it has some medical benefits. When the DEA refused, they sued.

But by a 2-1 vote, a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the DEA did consider all the available information.

A defendant who told police that the woman he awakened for sex likely mistook him for her boyfriend is not guilty of rape, a California appeals court ruled.

California's Second District Court of Appeal ruled sex by impersonation is not rape when the woman is unmarried. The court outlined the issue this way:

"A man enters the dark bedroom of an unmarried woman after seeing her boyfriend leave late at night, and has sexual intercourse with the woman while pretending to be the boyfriend. Has the man committed rape? Because of historical anomalies in the law and the statutory definition of rape, the answer is no."

George Zimmerman has sued NBC for editing a 911 tape to make him sound like a racist.

Zimmerman's lawsuit states: "NBC News saw the death of Trayvon Martin not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to increase ratings, and so set about to create the myth that George Zimmerman was a racist and predatory villain."

He is suing for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and seeks unspecified damages as well as a trial by jury.

NBC apologized for the editing back in April after the segment ran.

Zimmerman announced back in October plans to sue the network for allegedly editing a 911 tape to make it appear the former neighborhood watchman went after Trayvon Martin because he was black.

Now his legal team has filed suit.