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This was a quiet July week in during a lazy summer in the Second Circuit with only a single precedential decision and a single summary order in a criminal case. Khorchevsky is an interesting read more for the audacity of the criminal conspiracy than any of the legal...
The Second Circuit had an unusually unusually busy week, resulting in six published opinions covering a diverse range of topics. Moyer-Hernandez, which held that the district court need not consider the § 3553(a) factors when deciding a First Step Act sentence...
We’ve witnessed an interesting dodge by CA2 this week in Kassir, where CA2 avoided tackling the question of whether the Supreme Court’s crime-of-violence jurisprudence applied on collateral review to a claimed violation of 18 U.S.C. § 842(p)(2)(A) and its...
Two important decisions were published this week, one by the Second Circuit; the other by SCOTUS. In Garlick, the Circuit granted a New York State defendant’s habeas petition, finding that the admission of an autopsy report violated the Confrontation Clause, because...
The Second Circuit’s decision in Trimm addresses, in depth, the authority of a district court to override the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s decision not to file a § 3553(e) motion, where the parties agree that defendant provided “substantial assistance” but disagree...
While the Second Circuit published many summary orders this week, there were no precedential decisions, and the summary orders dealt mainly with relatively mundane sentencing issues. If CA2’s decisions this week show anything, Vasquez and Moore demonstrate that,...
The headline this week was a rare en banc decision from the Circuit in Scott, holding that New York’s first-degree manslaughter is a crime of violence under the ACCA and the Career Offender Sentencing Guideline. This decision will have significant ramifications on the...
Another quiet week in the Circuit. The summary order in United States v. Rosario is a good example of how a criminal defendant can win a case on appeal and still get no relief. CA2 had previously vacated defendant’s § 924(c) brandishing conviction after the Supreme...
In a highly unusual set of circumstances, in United States v. Stillwell, et al., CA2 remanded for further inquiry defendants’ claims that the DOJ had withheld Brady material under grant of an ex parte protective order. Because that evidence remains sealed to the...
The Circuit released no precedential opinions in criminal cases this past week, but its decision in Minaya, presents an interesting snapshot of where the law stands on 924(c) predicate offenses in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v....