U. S. Supreme Court Happenings and Favorable Federal Circuit Opinions for the Week of August 12-16, 2024--

U. S. Supreme Court Happenings– Week ending August 16, 2024 –

The Court is currently in summer recess. The new term will begin in October, 2024. Summer order lists are scheduled to be issued on Monday, August 19; and Friday, September 6, 2024. Summer order lists usually consist of actions taken by the Court on motions in pending cases, petitions for rehearing, and other miscellaneous matters. Emergency orders, such as in applications for stays, will continue to be released as required.

Favorable Federal Circuit Opinions for the Week of August 12-16, 2024 –

6th Circuit

United States v. Ralston, (No. 23-3651)(6th Cir. August 12, 2024)– After a four-day jury trial, Gregory D. Ralston was found guilty of distributing and possessing with the intent to distribute a fentanyl-containing substance. He was, however, acquitted of causing the serious bodily injury of another by distributing the fentanyl. Ralston challenged the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress evidence without holding an evidentiary hearing, the court’s limitation of his cross-examination of two government witnesses under the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment, and the procedural and substantive reasonableness of his 180-month sentence. But because of an intervening amendment in the Sentencing Guidelines during the pendency of this appeal, the Court remanded the case to the district court for consideration of whether Ralston is entitled to a sentence reduction under 18 U.S.C. § 3582©. Amendment 821 changed how “status points” are allotted in calculating a criminal defendant’s Guidelines sentence. See U.S.S.G. § 4A1.1 amend. 821. The government acknowledged that Amendment 821 has been given retroactive effect.
When an amendment to the Guidelines applies retroactively, the Court may “affirm the sentence [and] remand for consideration of whether the prisoner is entitled to a sentence reduction under [18 U.S.C.] § 3582(c).” United States v. Poole, 538 F.3d 644, 646 (6th Cir. 2008). The Court took that action here and remanded this case to the district court “without the necessity of [Ralston] filing a motion pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c).” See United States v. Jackson, 678 F.3d 442, 445–46 (6th Cir. 2012).

9th Circuit

Chong v. United States. (No. 23-55140)(9th Cir. August 14, 2024)– The panel reversed the denial of Harson Chong’s § 2255 motion, and remanded for the district court to grant Chong § 2255 relief. Chong alleged that he received ineffective assistance of counsel because his counsel failed to object to the search of Chong’s home on Fourth Amendment grounds. He claimed that a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy entered the curtilage of Chong’s home without a warrant or other proper justification. And because trespassing the curtilage led to spotting co-defendant Tran with a baggie of drugs and the eventual discovery of guns, money, and more drugs in the home, they asserted that all the evidence should have been suppressed. Whether he was right depended on where the sheriff’s deputy was standing when he saw the drugs in the garage. On remand from this Court, the district court found that the deputy was standing just one foot from the home. The panel concluded that, at that distance, it had no doubt that the deputy physically trespassed onto the curtilage. And the deputy’s unconventional manner of entry onto the property objectively manifested his investigatory purpose, confirming that this trespass was unlicensed. The panel held that without a warrant, consent, or other exigency, this was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment under both the common-law trespassory test and the reasonable expectation-of-privacy test, and the unreasonableness was obvious, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s seminal curtilage decision in Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. 1 (2013). The panel further held that the search could not be justified under the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule. For no strategic reason, defense counsel failed to make this clearly winning Fourth Amendment argument. Accordingly, Chong’s counsel was ineffective in failing to move to suppress the evidence found in his house. The Court reversed the denial of Chong’s § 2255 motion and directed that it be granted.

10th Circuit

United States v. Manzano, (No. 23-6073) (10th Cir. August 13, 2024)– Julian Manzano pled guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). During sentencing, the district court ruled that Manzano’s prior Oklahoma conviction for second-degree murder qualified as a “crime of violence” under § 4B1.2(a)(2) of the United States Sentencing Guidelines (“U.S.S.G.”) and, accordingly, applied a higher base offense level. On appeal, Manzano challenged that ruling. Because Oklahoma second- degree murder does not categorically match generic “murder” under the Guidelines. Because Oklahoma second-degree murder is a categorial mismatch with our circuit’s definition of generic murder, it was error for the district court to construe Manzano’s conviction as a “crime of violence” under U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a)(2) and apply its correspondingly higher base offense level. The Court therefore reversed and remanded for resentencing.

Latest Bureau of Prison’s Statistics (From BOP Website):

Fair Sentencing/Retroactive Sentence Reductions 4,146 Orders Granted to date.
Elderly Offender Home Confinement 1,246. Approved to date.
First Step Act Releases 36,392 granted to date.
Compassionate Releases/Reduction in Sentences 4,740 granted to date.
Population in RRC’s 8,431.
Population in Home Confinement 4,864.

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