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, [...]

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 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) [...]

This blog is devoted to federal criminal practice issues. My plan is to address significant topics in some depth on a periodic basis without getting into article-length commentary. My hope is that lawyers and other interested people will find these thoughts useful in their daily work.
—Gregory L. Poe