Justia Criminal Law Opinion Summaries

After a jury trial, Defendant was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm. The district court sentenced Defendant to seventy-four months of imprisonment. Defendant appealed, challenging primarily the denial of his pretrial motion to bar a government witness from identifying him at trial. The Supreme Court affirmed the conviction but vacated the sentence, holding (1) the admission of the identification evidence did not violate Defendant’s due process rights, as the existence of the video recording of the witness’s pretrial identification of Defendant in a photo array guarded against the harm that the district court might have otherwise guarded against by excluding the identification; (2) the record is not fully developed to establish Defendant’s claim of ineffective assistance in relation to sentencing, and so Defendant’s sentence must vacated to allow consideration of the Stickland v. Washington issue on remand; and (3) there was no merit to Defendant’s remaining claims. View "United States v. Constant" on Justia Law

Appellant pleaded guilty to one count of possession of child pornography. Appellant was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment followed by fifteen years of supervised release. The terms of Appellant’s supervised release included multiple conditions. Appellant did not object to any of these conditions at the sentencing hearing. Appellant appealed, arguing that the waiver of appeal provision in his plea agreement did not cover an appellate challenge to his supervised release conditions, and challenging four categories of his supervised release conditions. The First Circuit vacated one condition and affirmed the rest, holding (1) this appeal falls within the scope of Appellant’s waiver, and the waiver is valid; and (2) the condition that subjects Appellant to penile plethysmograph testing is plain error, but the remainder of the conditions challenged on appeal are affirmed. Remanded. View "United States v. Velez-Luciano" on Justia Law

Defendant pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import a hundred grams or more of heroin. At the time, Defendant had pending criminal charges in the Northern District of Georgia. The district court in Puerto Rico sentenced Defendant to 120 months of imprisonment, to be served consecutively to the anticipated Northern District of Georgia sentence. Defendant filed a motion for reconsideration seeking to eliminate the portion of the sentence ordering his term of imprisonment to be consecutive to the sentence in the pending case. The district court denied the motion. Defendant appealed. Defendant subsequently pleaded guilty in the North District of Georgia to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. The North District of Georgia sentenced Defendant to eighty-seven months of imprisonment to be served concurrently with the sentence at issue in this case. The First Circuit reversed, holding that, under 18 U.S.C. 3584(a), a federal sentencing court does not have the authority to determine that a sentence should be consecutive to a federal sentence that has not yet been imposed. Remanded for resentencing. View "United States v. Almonte-Reyes" on Justia Law

Defendant was indicted for failure to register as a sex offender. Defendant filed a motion to dismiss the indictment, claiming that Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act was unconstitutional (the SORNA motion). No hearing was requested on the motion, and none was held until after Defendant had filed a second dismissal motion in which he asserted a violation of the Speedy Trial Act (the STA motion). After a hearing, the district court denied both the SORNA motion and the STA motion. Defendant pleaded guilty, reserving his right to appeal the denials of both motions. The First Circuit (1) summarily affirmed the district court’s rejection of the constitutional challenges to SORNA; (2) held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in determining that a hearing on the SORNA motion was required; and (3) affirmed the dismissal of Defendant’s STA motion. View "United States v. Ibrahim" on Justia Law

Defendant was arrested for driving under the influence. Shortly after he was brought by Puerto Rico Police Department officers to the police station, he died in a holding cell. Defendant’s family members and estate filed suit, alleging that Defendants - Officer Perez, Sergeant Rodriguez, and Superintendent Toledo - used excessive force against Defendant and denied him needed medical care in violation of 42 U.S.C. 1983. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of Defendants on the grounds of sovereign immunity and insufficient evidence. Plaintiffs appealed, challenging only the district court’s decisions on the excessive force and denial of medical care claims and supervisory liability. The First Circuit (1) reversed and remanded for trial Plaintiffs’ claims against Perez and Rodriguez, holding (i) Perez and Rodriguez were not entitled to qualified immunity on the excessive force claim or the denial of medical care claim; and (2) affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment on Plaintiffs’ claims against Toledo, holding that Plaintiffs did not adequately plead facts going to Toledo’s liability. View "Miranda-Rivera v. Toledo-Davila" on Justia Law

After a jury trial, Defendant was convicted of smuggling narwhal tusks into the United States, conspiracy to illegally import narwhal tusks into the United States, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. On appeal, Defendant argued that the district court erred (1) by allowing, then failing to cure, a series of comments and questions by the prosecutor, which Defendant alleged unconstitutionally drew the jury’s attention to his decision not to testify; and (2) in admitting records of vehicular border crossings between the United States and Canada, which the government used to establish that the illegally imported tusks had originated in Canada. The First Circuit affirmed, holding (1) the government’s comments and questions either constituted harmless error or did not result in plain error; and (2) the district court properly admitted the vehicular border crossings reports pursuant to Fed. R. Evid. 803(8) as admissible, non-adversarial public records. View "United States v. Zarauskas" on Justia Law

After a jury trial, Defendant was found guilty of two counts of possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance within one thousand feet of a school and one count of conspiracy to do the same. Defendant later filed a 28 U.S.C. 2255 petition for post-conviction relief, arguing that his trial counsel provided ineffective assistance at sentencing. The district court denied the petition. The First Circuit affirmed, holding that Defendant failed to established that his counsel’s failure to challenge the quantity determination in the presentence report resulted from an unreasonably deficient judgment. View "Vargas-De Jesus v. United States" on Justia Law

Defendant pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting murder and aiding and abetting in the carrying and use of a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence causing death. The district court imposed a high-end guideline sentence of 322 months, which was forty-six months longer than the term of imprisonment recommended by the parties in the plea agreement. The First Circuit affirmed, holding (1) the district court did not commit plain error in failing to apprise Defendant of the consequences of his guilty plea at the change-of-plea hearing; and (2) Defendant’s sentence was both procedurally and substantively reasonable. View "United States v. Rivera-Clemente" on Justia Law

Appellant was civilly committed as a sexually dangerous person. When a forensic psychologist concluded that Appellant was no longer sexually dangerous, Appellant moved for a hearing to determine whether he satisfied the criteria for release under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. After a hearing, the district court concluded that Appellant remained sexually dangerous and, thus, subject to continued civil commitment. At issue on appeal was whether the government or the committed person bears the burden of proof at a release hearing held pursuant to 18 U.S.C. 4247(h). The First Circuit affirmed, holding (1) the burden of proof rests on the committed person to show by a preponderance of the evidence that he has achieved the capacity to safely reenter the community; and (2) in this case, Appellant failed to carry his burden of proof. View "United States v. Wetmore" on Justia Law

Eurie Stamps, Sr., an innocent, elderly, African-American man, was shot by Paul Duncan, a local police officer, during a SWAT team raid executing a search warrant for drugs and drug-related paraphernalia belonging to two drug dealers thought to reside in Stamps’s home. The co-administrators of Stamps’s estate sued the Town of Framingham and Duncan, arguing that Duncan violated Stamps’s constitutional right against unreasonable seizure when he pointed a loaded semi-automatic rifle at Stamps’s head, with the safety off and a finger on the trigger, even though Stamps was compliant and posed no known threat to the officers. Duncan filed a motion for summary judgment, arguing that he was entitled to qualified immunity because the shooting was an accident and not a violation of clearly established law. The district court denied the motion, ruling that a reasonable jury could find that Duncan had violated Stamps’s Fourth Amendment rights and that the law was sufficiently clearly established to put Duncan on notice that his actions were not constitutionally permissible. The First Circuit affirmed, holding that Duncan, in the situation at issue, was on notice that his actions could be violative of Stamps’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force. View "Stamps v. Town of Framingham" on Justia Law