Recently in Criminal Law Category

Lawyers have a love-hate relationship with mandatory minimum sentencing: Prosecutors love it, and defense attorneys hate it. But mandatory minimum sentencing isn’t entirely rigid; there is a safety valve statute that lets courts give an offender less time in prison than the mandatory minimum requires.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals interprets the safety valve statute strictly, noting that “by its terms, the safety valve provision applies only to convictions under five specified [drug] offenses:”

The Eleventh Circuit tossed a Miami woman's life sentence in a high-profile witness-tampering case last week, finding that the woman had received ineffective counsel a decade ago during the plea bargaining process for her case.

Based on the Supreme Court's Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper opinions, the Eleventh Circuit ordered that Yuby Ramirez be released from custody.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that forced decryption is self-incrimination.

The Justice Department must have found the Atlanta-based appellate court’s ruling thoughtful and compelling, because a DOJ spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday that the Department will not appeal the ruling, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that a child pornography suspect appearing before a grand jury is allowed to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refuse to decrypt the contents of his computers.

John Doe, the suspect at the center of the controversy, was served with a subpoena duces tecum, requiring him to appear before a grand jury and produce the unencrypted contents from his laptop computers and five external hard drives. Doe informed the U.S. Attorney that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refuse to comply with the subpoena.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a Florida district court's dismissal of a False Claims Act lawsuit this week, finding that the relators bringing the case had sufficiently stated a claim upon which relief could be granted.

Lucas Matheny and Deborah Loveland brought a qui tam action against their employer's parent company, Medco Health Solutions, Inc. (Medco) and its subsidiaries, alleging violations of the reverse false claim provision of the False Claims Act.

This week, a defendant prevailed in his appeal to dismiss an indictment charging him with one count of illegal reentry by an alien.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Emiliano Valdiviez-Garza that the indictment must be dismissed based on collateral estoppel, and reversed and remanded the case with instructions to dismiss the indictment.

The Supreme Court reversed the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals’ Maple v. Thomas decision this week in a 7-2 vote.

The Nine, in an opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, decided that defendant-appellant Cory Maples had demonstrated the requisite cause to overcome procedural default, and was entitled to further review of his ineffective counsel appeal.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed former Jefferson County Commissioner Gary White's sentence this week, finding that there was sufficient evidence to support White's corruption conviction, and that the corresponding prison sentence was reasonable.

Eleventh Circuit Judge Earl Carnes started the court's decision on White's appeal with a definition of "kleptocracy." While that signaled bad news for White, it was good news for those of us who delight in unusual vocabulary lessons in court opinions. (Thanks, Judge Carnes.)

These are not new ideas: a criminal defendant has the right to remain silent, both in questioning and at trial. The prosecutor isn’t allowed to encourage a jury to infer guilt from a defendant’s silence. Such assertions will end in a mistrial.

But what if the prosecutor doesn’t explicitly state, “he-didn’t-testify-so-he-must-be-guilty?” According to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, a petitioner is not entitled to relief for prosecutorial innuendo. This week, the Eleventh Circuit rejected an appeal to re-hear Mark Duke’s case. Duke had appealed for a new trial after a prosecutor allegedly inferred that he should have testified.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Georgia’s “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for proving mental disability in capital crime cases on Tuesday.

In a 110-page opinion, the divided circuit reasoned that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act required the court to affirm the Georgia death penalty standard - even if the court believed the standard was “unwise or incorrect - because there is no “clearly established” standard in Supreme Court precedent or federal law regarding the burden of proof for mental retardation claims.