Justia Constitutional Law Opinion Summaries

After a nine-day trial, a jury found that police officers carrying out a search warrant for narcotics did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they performed a no-knock entry into a residence and fatally shot a woman with a gun therein. The woman's family and estate alleged that a variety of instructional and other errors tainted that verdict. The court held that the charge provided a complete and accurate statement of the law and afforded plaintiffs ample latitude to argue their case. The court concluded that, over the course of a nine-day trial, capable attorneys on each side thrashed out the propriety of the officers' actions before the body duly constituted to assess them, and the district court properly instructed that body in terms of the applicable standard of reasonableness. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court finding no other reason for reversal where there was neither instructional defects nor any other error undermining the verdict.

In consolidated appeals, the issues before the court concern the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, specifically the civil commitment provisions codified in 18 U.S.C. 4248. Invoking these provisions, the government initiated proceedings in district court seeking the civil commitment of respondents, all prisoners in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons ("BOP"), because the government certified them as sexually dangerous persons. The district court collectively dismissed all nine proceedings under 18 U.S.C. 4241 and issued a dismissal order requiring the government first to release the prisoners from BOP custody, then obtain a commitment order under section 4241, and then finally seek a separate civil commitment order under the second category of persons eligible for certification under section 4248(a). The court held that the dismissal order approach to section 4248 was flawed where it departed from the plain meaning of section 4248(a); it erroneously read section 4248 in pari materia with section 4241; and erroneously invoked the canon of constitutional avoidance. Accordingly, and because the district court did not have the timely benefit of the United States v. Comstock and Timms v. Johns decisions, the court vacated the dismissal order and remanded for further proceedings.

Petitioner, a native of Jamaica, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus and a petition for review where the immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals ("BIA") agreed with the Department of Homeland Security ("DHS") that petitioner was removable because he was an alien who had committed a variety of gun and drug offenses. Petitioner claimed that he was a citizen under 8 U.S.C. 1432(a)(3). Petitioner also claimed that, because he was declared a United States citizen in a 1998 removal proceeding, DHS was precluded from litigating the issue of his alienage in later removal proceedings. The court held that, because 8 U.S.C. 1252(b)(9) and 1503(a) prohibited petitioner from obtaining review of his citizenship claims through a habeas corpus petition, the court affirmed the district court's jurisdictional dismissal of petitioner's petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The court also held that the BIA read section 1432(a)(3) in accordance with its unambiguous meaning and the statute passed constitutional muster where the statute automatically conferred citizenship on legitimate children when the parent with sole custody after a legal separation naturalizes and on out of wedlock children only when the mother naturalizes. The court further held that petitioner had not satisfied the requirements of issue preclusion, and even if he could overcome that obstacle, preclusion still would not apply given the criminal misconduct apparent in his case.

Defendant appealed convictions of separate counts of receipt and possession of child pornography and three counts of mailing child pornography where he was sentenced to 235 months imprisonment. At issue was whether the district court erred when denying defendant's motion to suppress evidence of child pornography obtained from a search of his residence. The court held that exclusion of the evidence obtained from the search was an appropriate remedy where it was unreasonable to believe that probable cause was demonstrated to search for evidence of the commission of a crime where the warrant application included scant indication that the crime had been committed and zero indication as to when it was committed.

Appellant appealed from a 151-month sentence based on his guilty plea arising out of a twenty-count indictment naming twenty-eight defendants with conspiracy to participate in a racketeering enterprise and conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute controlled substances. At issue was whether appellant's guilty plea was rendered involuntary by the district court's refusal of his request for substitute trial counsel and that, at sentencing, the district court likewise erred when it denied his renewed request for substitution. The court held that appellant had not made a substantial showing that his guilty plea was involuntary where the district court's refusal to appoint substituted counsel did not, under the circumstances, deprive him of the meaningful assistance of counsel. The court also held that the district court's subsequent refusal to grant appellant's request for substitution of counsel for purposes of the sentencing hearing did not violate his rights in light of all that had gone before its refusal and the circumstances of the sentencing hearing itself. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court.

Defendant was convicted of mail fraud, wire fraud, and attempted destruction of evidence where he was in the business of selling merchandise over the Internet and then pocketing the money without sending along the products. At issue was whether the district court violated defendant's Confrontation Clause rights by relying on out-of-court statements of people who did not testify, and were never cross-examined, in determining that defendant harmed more than ten victims and that he caused just shy of $200,000 in losses. The court affirmed the judgment and held that the Confrontation Clause did not apply at sentencing proceedings like defendant's. The court concluded that its holding respected the traditional distinction between trial and sentencing, the sentencing court's need to consider a wide variety of evidence in choosing an appropriate sentence, and the sentencing judge's ability to properly evaluate that evidence. The court also held that defendant failed to demonstrate that the district court's failure to explain sentencing factors affected his substantial rights.

Defendant appealed from a judgment in which the district court found him guilty of four counts of aiding in the preparation of false tax returns in violation of 26 U.S.C. 7206(2). At issue was whether the district court unlawfully based its verdict on the guilty pleas of co-defendants, which were not evidence in the case, thereby depriving defendant of his due process right to a fair trial; whether the district court improperly credited testimony by the government's key witness that defendant contended was false; and whether the evidence was insufficient to prove that defendant knew that the tax returns he prepared were fraudulent and that he willfully violated section 7206(2). The court held that the district court's erroneous references to the unadmitted guilty pleas of his co-defendants constituted harmless error where the evidence overwhelmingly supported the conclusion that defendant deliberately avoided learning of materially false representations on the tax returns at issue. The court also held that the district court did not err in its consideration of a key witness' testimony where the the testimony was the product of reliable principles and methods. The court further held that the evidence was sufficient to support defendant's conviction where a reasonable trier of fact could conclude the defendant purposefully "closed his eyes" to large accounting discrepancies, which strongly indicated that the tax forms he prepared during the years in question contained materially false financial information.

The government filed a complaint for forfeiture of the money claimant consolidated into a single bank account at Bank of America pursuant to 31 U.S.C. 5317(2), 5324, after claimant made eight separate currency transactions at two banks and deposited a total of $79,650 in cash. At issue was whether the government was required to prove that claimant had actual knowledge of the banks' obligation to report currency transactions in excess of $10,000 to the government and whether the magistrate judge erred when it issued an order reducing the forfeiture amount on Eight Amendment grounds from $79,650 to $50,000. The court held that the totality of the circumstances, and in particular the compelling evidence of prior structuring activities, was more than sufficient to justify the court's findings in support of the section 5324 offenses. Therefore, the court rejected claimant's cross-appeal and affirmed the judgment that he committed the offense of currency structuring. The court vacated the order reducing the forfeiture judgment and remanded, holding that the magistrate judge's proportionality analysis was erroneously conducted where it predicated the proportionality analysis on an incorrect understanding that the authorized penalty was the advisory fine of $60,000 when the correct authorized penalty was the statutory maximum fine of $500,000.

Defendant appealed his conviction and sentence for possession with intent to distribute cocaine base ("crack") under 21 U.S.C. 841(a)-(b). At issue was whether the district court properly denied defendant's motion to suppress, whether the disparities in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine offenses violated the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses, and whether the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 ("FSA"), Pub.L.No. 111-220, 124 Stat. 2372, should be applied to defendant. The court held that the district court properly denied defendant's motion to suppress where, under the independent source doctrine, the police officers' search did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights. The court also held that the disparities between crack and cocaine sentences contained in 21 U.S.C. 841 did not violate the Equal Protection or Due Process Clauses where defendant had not identified any subsequent controlling precedent compelling the conclusion that the court's prior decisions upholding the sentencing disparities have been overruled. The court further held that the FSA did not apply retroactively and rejected defendant's claim that he was entitled to resentencing where the FSA plainly would not be rendered effective if it applied only prospectively.

Defendants appealed convictions on charges stemming from a 2007 conspiracy and murder of a witness to prevent him from testifying against the first defendant in an upcoming state murder trial. Defendants challenged several evidentiary rulings by the district court. The court held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in admitting testimony under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) that the first defendant shot a certain individual on the same street block where the witness was killed when, in light of the strong evidence that suggested that the first defendant planned the murder-for-hire against the witness, the court could say with "fair assurance" that the evidence of the individual's non-fatal shooting was harmless. The court also held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in permitting and failing to give a curative instruction regarding the witness' girlfriend's testimony that she warned him that his involvement as a witness would get him killed where, even assuming that the district court committed plain error, the error did not affect the first defendant's substantial rights given the volume of evidence supporting his convictions. The court further held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in permitting the government to call a certain rebuttal witness where, considering the overwhelming evidence of the second defendant's direct involvement in the plot to murder the witness, the testimony played no role in the outcome. The court finally held that the district court's denial of the second defendant's motion to suppress his post-arrest statements on involuntariness grounds did not violate his constitutional rights where there was no coercion.