Federal Criminal Practice Blog

The Second Circuit recently decided a case, United States v. Kumar, Nos. 06-5654-cr, 06-5482-cr (August 12, 2010), that implicates a basic principle of punishment: May a defendant’s sentence in a federal criminal case be increased based on sentencing guidelines that were created after the criminal conduct at issue? According to two members of the panel, [...]

A recent Tenth Circuit case, United States v. Speakman, No. 08-1332 (Feb. 2, 2010), presents an interesting question in federal criminal practice: May a district court order a defendant to pay restitution for the purpose of punishment even if the payment does not compensate the victim? According to the Tenth Circuit, the answer is no. [...]

Any time a federal court of appeals states that a district court is not required to consider evidence, without any qualifying statement concerning the reliability of that evidence, one tends to take notice. Earlier this week, the Eighth Circuit held (in a case involving grisly and heartbreaking facts) that a district court is not required even [...]

The Conrad Black case, now in the Supreme Court, has received a great deal of recent attention largely because the Court has agreed to revisit the scope of 18 U.S.C. § 1346 (which states that “the term ‘scheme or artifice to defraud’” as used in the mail and wire fraud statutes “includes a scheme or [...]

I considered various topics for my initial blog post and settled on the rule of lenity. The spirit of the rule of lenity – fundamental fairness – lies at the heart of a respectable criminal justice system. See McBoyle v. United States, 283 U.S. 25, 27 (1931) (the principle of “fair warning” motivates the lenity rule) [...]