Federal Criminal Practice Blog

Eventually, the Supreme Court probably will need to decide whether sentences in criminal fraud cases involving publicly traded stock may be based on relatively crude estimates of shareholder loss. In civil cases, the Court already has spoken. In Dura Pharmaceuticals v. Broudo, 544 U.S. 336 (2005), the Court held in a case brought under [...]

The use of the term “willful” in connection with federal criminal statutes remains needlessly confusing and harmful to the fair administration of justice. A recent Fifth Circuit case offers yet another example. In United States v. Allen, No. 08-11041 (5th Cir., Oct. 28, 2009), a defendant was convicted of criminal contempt under 18 U.S.C. § [...]

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) [...]