In a very strange claim, a pilot of a drug boat that sought to evade the U.S. Coast guard is appealing the forfeiture of over $8 million in cash that was thrown overboard as he and his companions were fleeing capture.

Petitioner Robert Hovito Von Bommel Duyzing (Van Bommel), a now-deported Columbian national, appealed to the First Circuit after his claim of standing for money that was seized by law enforcement following his arrest was denied.

This raises the question: do criminals have standing to ask for their ill gotten gains?

The James “Whitey” Bulger trial proceeded on Wednesday with opening statements from the prosecution and Bulger’s attorney, J. W. Carney Jr., including two varied accounts of the reputed mobster’s life and criminal career.

Bulger’s attorney made a case that the infamous Bostonian could not have been an informant because that would be “the worst thing an Irish Person could consider doing,” reports The New York Times.

Despite the early stages of the trial, both sides have managed to get into legal spats about these opening statements.

In a decision penned in late May, the First Circuit ordered the release of a limited amount of interviews from the "Belfast Project" to the British authorities.

The "Belfast Project" is a Boston College compilation of personal interviews and testimonials from former Irish Republican Army members, and in 2011 the British government successfully subpoenaed BC for 85 of those taped interviews and transcripts for a criminal investigation.

The Court only released 11 of the interviews, in an interesting conflict of United States-United Kingdom treaty and academic integrity.

James "Whitey" Bulger may have ulterior motive in naming reporters who have covered his criminal career as defense witnesses, barring them from reporting on his case.

The infamous Bostonian gangster moved to exclude Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy and columnist Kevin Cullen from covering his case because Bulger might call the two as defense witnesses, reports Boston.com.

Will the court allow Bulger to sequester members of the media by naming them as witnesses?

The trial of the infamous James "Whitey" Bulger began with jury selection in Boston federal court on Tuesday, with both the prosecution and defense choosing jurors from a pool of 675 people.

Bulger's legendary status as a Boston mobster and crime boss will play a huge role in voir dire, asjurors are chosen to hear charges based on Bulger's decades of alleged killings and other misdeeds, reports USA Today.

What will the prosecution and defense focus on to ensure a proper jury for the infamous 83-year-old?

A former lawyer in Pakistan who overstayed his U.S. visa was denied his political asylum petition for withholding of removal and his Convention Against Torture petition by both an immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals. The First Circuit granted, in part, his petition for witholding of removal and remanded it to the BIA for further proceedings. However, his CAT petition was denied for lack of evidence of torture.

Mohammed Ilyas Javed was a lawyer in Pakistan representing a local political party, the Hunj group. Some members of the group were injured in a shooting involving another local party, the Batore group. These groups were subsidiaries of the ruling national Pakistan party. The two groups were in a dispute over a supposed rigged election. Javed soon experienced threats and harm based on the mistaken affiliation to the Hunj group.

Seized cell phones are safe from a warrantless search by police, the First Circuit recently held. The court ruled that a police cell phone search for data is not constitutional when a person is arrested unless officers get a warrant first.

For Brima Wurie, his cell phone was the one important item that was searched by police officers the evening he was arrested for possessing crack cocaine. Because police looked through his seized cell phone without a warrant, they knew to search Wurie's house, where they found 215 grams of cocaine -- a huge difference from the 3.5 grams found in his possession.

Imagine being called into a jury and then being asked to submit your fingerprints or social security for your jury background check. Who…me?

Is this an government overreach for people merely serving on a jury? The federal prosecutors against notorious ex-mobster James “Whitey” Bulger don’t think so. They want juror background checks to be done.

The years of automatic rent payment increases may be over for landlords. With the last housing market collapse, landlords may be denied their annual rental payment increases for their Section 8 housing units. Even though their contract with MHA may state they will get these increases automatically every year, the contract may have a limitation clause within it that allows MHA to deny increases should it lead to a windfall for landlords.

This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has affirmed that MHA properly denied landlords their "otherwise-automatic" annual payment increases. It's all written in their housing assistance payment contracts with the landlord plaintiffs.

In 2003, Gary Lee Sampson was convicted of killing three people in Massachusetts and sentenced to death under a federal carjacking law. Before the execution could take place, however, a Massachusetts federal district court ordered a new sentencing trial based on evidence that a juror had lied during the selection process. Federal prosecutors appealed.

On Wednesday, prosecutors went before a First Circuit panel, arguing that the juror's potential bias is not enough to void Sampson's death sentence, The Boston Globe reports. While questions of jurisdiction were raised, the panel members indicated that they might invoke their authority to hear extraordinary cases under advisory mandamus in order to settle the matter.