For years, it has been unsettled in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals whether a white-collar defendant may be held accountable for intended loss amounts during sentencing in fraud and other financial harm cases. Prosecutors...more
The Supreme Court of the United States issued three decisions today: Cantero v. Bank of America, N.A., No. 22-529: This case addresses the standard for determining when state laws that regulate national banks are...more
The Supreme Court of the United States issued three decisions today: Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, No. 22-807: This case concerns the interplay between allegations of racial and partisan...more
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas under the Gold Dome. December 25 may be nine months away, but Christmas trees are appearing everywhere. The most prominent bill so far passed out of the House Education Committee on...more
En el Comité de Diversidad e Inclusión de Holland & Knight hacemos constante seguimiento y estudio a los cambios normativos y jurisprudenciales relacionados con diversidad, equidad e inclusión (DE&I). Como parte de nuestro...more
The arraignment hearing holds immense importance within the criminal justice system, commanding the utmost seriousness. It represents the formal charging of a defendant with a criminal offense and sets the tone for subsequent...more
Today, the Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari in four cases: Coinbase, Inc. v. Bielski, No. 22-105: This case presents an issue of federal arbitration law. The question presented is: Whether a...more
On 24 May 2022, Glencore International AG announced a series of coordinated resolutions with various international enforcements agencies including the Department of Justice (”DOJ”), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission...more
This past month, federal sentencing statistics became even more important for defense lawyers. The U.S. Sentencing Commission released the Judiciary Sentencing INformation platform, or JSIN — a new data tool that provides...more
On January 17, 2020, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (“SFO”) published new guidance regarding how the office assesses the compliance programs of organizations that are under investigation. “Evaluating a Compliance...more
This past week, a court sentenced the last of seven Insys Therapeutics, Inc. executives for their roles in an opioid racketeering conspiracy. The court sentenced the company’s founder, John Kapoor, to a five-and-a-half-year...more
As the third in a triumvirate of releases on compliance programs, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division released its Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs in Criminal Antitrust Investigations(Antitrust...more
In recent weeks, courts in England and Hong Kong have taken the opportunity to set out the serious consequences that follow from deliberately breaching disclosure orders made in the context of freezing orders....more
The Second Circuit (Leval, Lynch, Droney) issued a decision reversing a mandatory life sentence, finding plain error because the district court failed to apply the categorical approach when considering whether the...more
On January 31, 2019, the Second Circuit issued a per curiam decision in United States v. Thrower (Wesley, Chin, and Cote, by designation) reversing a 2017 judgment from the Eastern District of New York that reduced the...more
In Shabazz v. United States, the Second Circuit (Katzmann, Leval, Berman by designation) again addressed the meaning of “violent felony” under the Armed Career Criminal Act (“ACCA”), this time under its “force clause.” As...more
In United States v. Pereira-Gomez, a panel of the Second Circuit (Cabranes, Carney, Caproni, D.J.) issued an opinion analyzing whether attempted robbery under New York law qualifies as a “crime of violence” for enhancement...more
In United States v. Djibo, the Second Circuit vacated and remanded a judgment of conviction entered in the Eastern District of New York (Johnson, J.) following the defendant’s trial on charges arising from an international...more
Update: The Second Circuit’s decision in United States v. Betts (No 17-231), which was initially released as a non-precedential summary order on February 5, 2018, was re-released as a published opinion on March 28, 2018. ...more
In United States v. Bordeaux, 17-486-cr (Cabranes, Raggi, Vilardo), the Second Circuit held that the defendant’s three prior Connecticut state convictions for first-degree robbery—all of which took place during a single...more
Bass, Berry & Sims attorney Chris Lazarini examined a case in which an indigent defendant sought to obtain Criminal Justice Act (CJA) funds to retain an expert. The court denied the defendant access to CJA funds because the...more
Yesterday the Second Circuit affirmed, in United States v. Ramirez (No.15-2570), the so-called “one-book rule”: if sentenced criminals want to seek a reduction in sentence based on changes in the Sentencing Guidelines, they...more
In United States v. Brown, No. 13-1706, the Second Circuit (Pooler, Sack, and Droney), withdrew the Court’s June 14, 2016 opinion, vacating Nathan Brown’s sixty year prison sentence on three counts of production of child...more
In United States v. Sawyer, No. 15-2276, the Second Circuit (Jacobs, Pooler, Crawford) vacated and remanded for resentencing a case involving a conviction for possession of child pornography. The decision rested on a finding...more