This past Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in an 8-1 decision, that now it’s possible for a police officer to stop your car based on a mistaken understanding of the law without violating the Fourth Amendment. Now watered down by Heien v. North Carolina, the Fourth Amendment to the…
A former Boca Raton, Florida resident, Ms. Annette Bongiorno, age 66, was sentenced in Federal Criminal Court in New York. U.S. District Court. Judge Laura Taylor Swain sentenced Bongiorno to six years in Federal prison saying Ms. Bongiorno’s decision to follow Bernard Madoff’s instructions to perpetrate one of the largest…
The arrest is where it begins. A Federal criminal arrest can often be an almost civil event between professional U.S. agents and the target. Once arrested you are brought before a Magistrate for arraignment. At arraignment the matter of reading the indictment, determination of counsel, and conditions of pre-trial release,…
Several women have accused entertainer Bill Cosby of rape. The victims who have come forward with rape charges allege criminal sex acts that were in past years. Florida’s statutes of limitations rules set a framework for what acts are time-barred and those that are not. What rules of law…
A recent New York Times article highlights 1,000 cases in which entrapment may see new life in courtrooms and legislatures throughout the United States. Entrapment laws go back to the 1930’s when the U.S. Supreme Court first put constitutional rights in play to restrain what the Justices called “outrageous government…
Rarely imposed since the 1940’s, quarantines are both: 1) Creatures of law, subject to constitutional muster and 2) Public health policy; based on the best current state of medical science: its understanding of the process by which infection works in its biological host, and the methods of transmission of communicable…
On Friday November 7, 2014, the United States Supreme Court announced that it would “consider” a new major legal challenge to the Affordable Health Care Act. This happened three days after voters in the United States voted in the “mid-term” election on November 4, 2014. Mid-Term because it is in…
Two governors, Governor Christie in New Jersey and Governor Cuomo in New York, both announced quarantine rules and were undercut by President Obama. The legal issue is whether a president can overrule a state governor on an issue such as quarantine. Ebola, the viral infection that has killed 4,941 people…
This past Wednesday, October 22, 2014, four former Blackwater contractors were convicted in the infamous 2o007 killings in Baghdad, by a federal jury. In 2007, at the height of the United States incursion in Iraq, seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed and eighteen wounded in a busy traffic circle in Bagdhad.…
Congressional Republicans have been vocal in demanding the United States impose travel bans from African nations where Ebola infection rates are high. Travel bans have a long history of being of dubious value, and a look at travel bans imposed on HIV victims is informative. The United States government has…