Source: http://www.nlrg.com/criminal-law-legal-research/page/2
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 18:17:01+00:00

Document:
In Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the residual clause of the Armed Career Criminal Act ("ACCA"), which defines a "violent felony" to include a felony that "involves conduct that presents a serious potential physical injury to another," 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(2)(B), was unconstitutionally vague. The Supreme Court subsequently announced that the rule in Johnson was "a new substantive rule that has retroactive effect in cases on collateral review." Welch v. United States, 136 S. Ct. 1257, 1268 (2016).
In Carpio v. United States, No. C16-0647JLR, 2016 WL 6395192 (W.D. Wash. Oct. 28, 2016), the court applied the holdings in Johnson and Welch to the defendant's claim, in a 28 U.S.C. § 2255 petition challenging his U.S. Sentencing Guidelines sentence, that the identically worded residual clause in U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a), defining "crime of violence," used to enhance the defendant's sentence, was unconstitutionally vague. The court in Carpio held that the Johnson holding applied with equal force to the residual clause in section 4B1.2(a) of the Sentencing Guidelines and, therefore, it was unconstitutionally vague.
In United States v. Lambis, No. 15CR734, 2016 WL 3870940 (S.D.N.Y. July 12, 2016), a federal court, apparently for the first time, suppressed evidence obtained as the result of the warrantless use of a cell-site simulator to locate a target's cell phone. The court explained that a cell-site simulator—sometimes referred to as a "StingRay," "Hailstorm," or "TriggerFish"—is a device that locates cell phones by mimicking the service provider's cell tower (or "cell-site") and forcing cell phones to transmit "pings" to the simulator. The device then calculates the strength of the "pings" until the target phone is pinpointed.
The court's holding relied mainly on Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), which held that a Fourth Amendment search occurred when government agents used a thermal-imaging device to detect infrared radiation emanating from a home. In Kyllo, the Supreme Court reasoned that "[w]here . . . the Government uses a device that is not in general public use to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a 'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a search warrant." Id. at 40.
According to research released by two Louisiana State University economists, juveniles who are sentenced by judges who are college football fans received longer sentences after the judge's team had an unexpected loss. The researchers examined juvenile court decisions involving first-time offenders over a period of more than 15 years. Their research focused on judges who are alumni of LSU and demonstrates that for those judges, where LSU lost games it was expected to win based on rankings, the judges issued harsher sentences in the week after the loss. Unexpected wins or losses when the games were expected to be close had no impact. The paper is available at the National Bureau of Economic Research: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22611?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw.
In Rodriguez v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 1609 (2015), the U.S. Supreme Court recently stressed that a seizure justified only by a police-observed traffic violation becomes unlawful if it is prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete the mission of issuing a ticket for the violation. The stop may not exceed the time needed to handle the matter for which the stop was made. In Rodriguez, the issue was raised in the context of whether the police unnecessarily extended the traffic-violation stop to conduct a dog sniff of the exterior of the vehicle for drugs.
Lower courts applying Rodriguez have had the difficult task of determining whether a vehicle stop for a traffic violation was unnecessarily and unlawfully prolonged by police so that they could pursue unrelated suspicions, usually related to illegal drugs. While the courts often observe that there is no rigid time limit for determining when a detention has lasted longer than necessary to effectuate the purposes of the stop, they nevertheless often look to the total time of the stop and the length of what is deemed the unnecessary delay in determining whether the police conduct was lawful.
In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court recently held in Ohio v. Clark, 135 S. Ct. 2173 (2015), that statements that children have made to teachers about possible abuse can be used as evidence at criminal trials arising from the alleged abuse, even if the children are not competent to testify in court.
The facts in Clark showed that the preschool teacher of a three-year-old boy had noticed bruises on his body, and when she asked him how he had gotten the bruises, he told her that his mother's boyfriend had hit him when his mother was not home. The teacher notified the police, and the boyfriend was ultimately charged with child abuse. At the boyfriend's trial, the State introduced into evidence the statements that the child had made to the teacher, but the child did not testify, because of a statute precluding the testimony of children under 10 years old if they "appear incapable of receiving just impressions of the facts and transactions respecting which they are examined, or of relating them truly." Id. at 2178 (quoting Ohio R. Evid. 601(A)). The trial judge determined that pursuant to this rule, the child was not competent to testify.

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