The 9th Circuit has ruled that a "Knock and Announce" warrant means cops can announce and skip the knock. The case is U.S. v. Combs, available here. (pdf) CrimProf blog has the details, and some criticism of the decision.

Rather than knock, the officers loudly announced their presence and their possession of a search warrant from the street via the patrol car's loudspeaker. When no one came to the door, they broke the door down with a battering ram and found the defendants and a meth lab inside. The officers justified their failure to knock, in essence, by explaining that active meth labs can explode, and they did not want to position officers close to the house any longer than they had to.

After analyzing the opinion, Prof. Mark Godsey says,

The Florida Supreme Court is weighing a challenge to the reliability of a drug-detecting dog. CrimProf blog aptly notes:

I always tell my Criminal Procedure class that narcotics-sniffing dogs should be subjected to the same 4th Amemdment reliability standards as other "tipsters." A dog who has consistently falsely alerted in the past should be considered like an informant whose tips have repeatedly not panned out. The Supreme Court of Florida is considering this issue currently, as a defendant is arguing that the narcotics that a canine named "Razor" found on him should be suppressed on the ground that Razor has been so unreliable in the past that his "alert" with respect to the defendant did not give rise to probable cause for the search. Currently, no national standards exist to measure canine competence.

The Supreme Court today issued an important decision upholding the rights of immigrants who have been ordered excluded from the U.S. but whose home country won't take them back. It rejected the Government's arguments that it could detain them indefinitely. The ACLU, which filed an amicus in the case, has more:

The Supreme Court today ruled 7-2 that the government violated the law by indefinitely detaining “Mariel” Cubans who cannot be deported because Cuba will not allow their return.

“Once again, the Court has rebuked the administration for claiming the authority to indefinitely imprison immigrants,” said Judy Rabinovitz, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and an author of the ACLU’s friend-of-the-court brief who has successfully argued against such policies in the lower courts. “Today’s ruling is a vindication of the ACLU’s position that the government has been violating immigrants’ rights in disregard of the Supreme Court’s 2001 decision prohibiting indefinite detention.”

Bad news, the Supreme Court ruled today in Whitfield v. U.S. that the Government does not need to prove an overt act in furtherance of a money laundering conspiracy.

The Court's decison on the federal sentencing guidelines, in the Booker and Fan Fan cases, likely will be released tomorrow.

Stay with Scotus Blog, How Appealing and Sentencing Law and Policy for the latest news.

More from Scotus on the money laundering decision. The Court likened it to the federal drug crime conspiracy statute which makes no mention of an overt act.

Oscar Jones is a sex offender who completed his criminal sentence but is being held pending a decision on whether California can continue to hold him as a sexually violent predator under California's civil commitment laws. He filed suit to challenge the conditions of his confinement. The 9th Circuit ruled this week Jones can bring his lawsuit. In so ruling, the Court noted, "Purgatory cannot be worse than hell."

With his hearing pending, Jones charged, among other things, that he was strip-searched unreasonably, blocked from practicing his religion and denied access to the courts. The case was tossed in September 2002 on the grounds Jones was late in filing his lawsuit.

In its ruling Monday, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that a "civil detainee" such as Jones who exhibits a good-faith pursuit of his claims, as a matter of fundamental practicality and fairness, isn't barred by the statute of limitations.

by TChris

Abu Ali, a 23-year-old American citizen, has been held in Saudi Arabia for 18 months on suspicion of terrorist activities. No charges have been filed.

Federal courts are generally powerless to force the release of a prisoner held by a foreign sovereign, but Ali persuaded U.S. District Judge John Bates to ask whether the United States played a role in Ali's detention.

[Judge Bates] ordered the Justice Department to produce documents establishing what role, if any, U.S. officials played in the arrest of Ahmed Abu Ali of Falls Church, Va. He was taken into custody in June 2003 in Medina, Saudi Arabia, while taking a final exam at his university.

Ali has been interrogated repeatedly by the FBI, suggesting that the United States may have de facto control over Ali's custody. Predictably, the Justice Department argued that Ali is beyond the jurisdiction of an American court, but Judge Bates isn't ready to buy that argument. The Department didn't refute the allegation that the United States controls Ali's continuing imprisonment. Recognizing that American involvement is plausible, Judge Bates concluded that the constitutional issues at stake deserved further investigation.

"There is no principle more sacred to the jurisprudence of our country or more essential to the liberty of its citizens," he wrote, "than the right to be free from arbitrary and indefinite detention at the whim of the executive. ... The court concludes that a citizen cannot be so easily separated from his constitutional rights[.]"

by TChris

Judges who impose sentences should be dispassionate and impartial. Sentences are imposed by judges, rather than victims, because a judge who has no personal stake in the outcome is presumed to be motivated by reason, not by a personal desire for vengeance.

According to a Colorado appellate court, Judge Edward Colt crossed the line when he reflected on the crime's impact on his own life while sentencing Terry Lynn Barton to 12 years in prison for starting a wildfire in 2002.

[The court held that Judge Colt] had the "appearance of prejudice" when he spoke of spending a night in a hotel to escape the smoke and fire, helping dispense food to residents displaced by the blaze, and helping a court clerk and personal friend evacuate her home during the fire.

The appellate court said that a term of two to six years would have been appropriate. It ordered a new sentencing hearing before a different judge.

by TChris

In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court decided today that a lawyer in a death penalty case who concedes her client's guilt during the trial's guilt phase (at least when evidence of guilt is overwhelming) in order to preserve her credibility in making a case against death during the penalty phase does not automatically fail to provide the effective assistance of counsel required by the Sixth Amendment. A syllabus of the decision in Florida v. Nixon is here (pdf).

The Court also decided that the reasonableness of an officer's use of deadly force was sufficiently murky (in light of Fourth Amendment precedent in existence in 1999) to shield the officer from a lawsuit. The officer shot a man in the back as he was attempting to elude an arrest for drug offenses and property crimes. In a per curiam opinion, with only Justice Stevens dissenting, the Court held that the officer was immune from suit, regardless of whether the shooting was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment (a question the Court unhelpfully chose not to decide), because the law was insufficiently clear to place the officer on notice that he shouldn't have killed the fleeing man. The decision is here (pdf).

The Supreme Court Friday let stand a decision by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals allowing members of a New Mexico church to drink a hallucinogenic tea as part of its Christmas service.

The legal battle began after federal agents seized 30 gallons of the tea in a 1999 raid on the Santa Fe home of the church's U.S. president, Jeffrey Bronfman. Bronfman sued the government for the right to use the tea and the church won a preliminary injunction, which was upheld by 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

The Bush administration then took the case to the Supreme Court.

"They're delighted," attorney Nancy Hollander said of the church members she represented. "They're so thrilled that they can celebrate Christmas for the first time since 1998."

by TChris

In a battle between parental rights and civil rights, the Washington Supreme Court held that a mother violated state law by listening in on a telephone conversation between her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend. The court reversed a purse-snatching conviction that was based on the mother's testimony about admissions made by the boyfriend during the conversation.

Attorneys for the state argued that minors should have a reduced expectation of privacy because parents have an absolute right to monitor phone calls coming into the family home. ... "The Washington act, with its all-party consent requirement, contains no such parental exception and no Washington court has ever implied such an exception. We decline to do so now," wrote Justice Tom Chambers in the court's opinion.

by TChris

Defendants who have two prior felony convictions for drug crimes or crimes of violence are typically sentenced as "career offenders" under the federal sentencing guidelines. The "career offender" designation usually results in something close to a maximum sentence, regardless of the nature of the new drug crime or the characteristics of the offender.

Judge Gregory Presnell in Florida recently decided not to impose a sentence of at least 188 months (the minimum required by the guideline range) on a 24-year-old man afflicted with thyroid cancer. Torrey Williams was a "go-between" in a deal to sell about 10 grams of crack, and he sold another 2 grams to an undercover officer. The two transactions involved only $500.

Downward departures for ill health are rarely granted, but Judge Presnell couldn't stomach the result if he didn't give one to Williams. Judge Presnell imposed a 70 month sentence in an eloquent opinion (pdf) that includes the following passage:

A guideline sentence in this case starkly illustrates the problem of attempting to fit the human experience into a discrete mathematical matrix. It just can't be done, and this Court cannot in good conscience do it, because it offends the Court's concept of justice.

The short opinion is well worth reading for its criticism of the "war on drugs" and of the federal sentencing guidelines. Also worth reading is Prof. Doug Berman's excellent commentary and background information regarding the case.

by TChris

The Supreme Court today rejected a police officer's claim that his employer violated his right to free speech by terminating his employment after learning that he used the internet to sell "videotapes of himself stripping off his uniform and pretending to write tickets."

The court traditionally has been very protective of speech rights. But justices had no sympathy Monday for a former San Diego officer who uses the Internet name "codestud3," a play on words incorporating the term for an emergency police call.

The Supreme Court ruled against him without even hearing arguments. The justices issued an unsigned opinion that found his speech "was detrimental to the mission and functions of the employer."

The Court has generally applied a balancing test to free speech retaliation claims, weighing an employee's interest in speaking about a public concern against a public employer's interest in operating a government agency without disruption. The balance weighed against the cop who (at least in the Court's view) made a mockery of his employment by making and hawking the video. The threshold issue, however, is whether the speech addresses a matter of public concern. The Court viewed the officer's desire to sell his naughty videotapes as a purely private matter.