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A Colorado state trooper stopped Melissa Sotelo for driving too slowly in the left-hand lane. Sotelo was driving a car rented from Hertz by Patrick Schooler, but there were no other authorized drivers listed. The car wasn’t stolen, and Schooler was a friend of the passenger, Janelle Mireles. Hertz asked the police to impound the car. Before they did, they conducted an inventory search and found three gift-wrapped boxes in the back seat....

Conviction and sentence for possession of child pornography is affirmed where: 1) defendant’s guilty plea waived his challenge to the jurisdictional element of his conviction, and evidence was sufficient to establish a factual basis for the jurisdictional element of his offense; 2) the district court did not err in increasing his sentencing guidelines range after finding that the offense involved more than 600 images of child pornography as the visual inspection of the images was sufficient to find that they were images of actual minors and not virtual ones; and 3) defendant’s argument that the Sixth Amendment requires a jury and not the district court to determine contested factual issues at sentencing fails as defendant was sentenced below the statutory maximum for his offense....

Defendant’s firearm possession conviction is affirmed where the district court properly denied defendant’s motion to suppress the firearm at issue because the area in which the police officers discovered the incriminating evidence immediately adjoined the place of arrest, and thus the officers were justified in conducting a search of that area without either probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Read US v. Lemus, No. 08-50403 Appellate Information Submitted June 1, 2009...

Defendant’s motion for a certificate of appealability of the district court’s denial of his 28 U.S.C. section 2255 motion to vacate defendant’s sentence is denied where: 1) the court had ample evidence before it both of defendant’s history of emotional problems and his competency as of the date of the plea colloquy; and 2) when a habeas petitioner claims ineffective assistance of counsel, he impliedly waives attorney-client privilege with respect to communications with his attorney necessary to prove or disprove his claim....

The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to Virginia’s court-imposed redistricting yesterday, ruling that three Virginia Congressmen could not show that they were harmed by the new plan. The ruling brings an end to a long-standing dispute over Virginia’s congressional districting which arose after a federal district court ruled in 2012 that the state’s redrawn congressional map relied too heavily on race, segregating black voters into already majority-African American district. Representatives Randy Forbes, Robert Wittman, and David Brat, all Republicans, sought to challenge that ruling....

Just about all of us have been nailed by overdraft fees once or twice. If that check doesn’t clear in time, that $5 fast food lunch could really foul up your finances by be racking up some fat fees. In 2009, the Federal Reserve passed a rule limiting the ability of financial institutions to assess overdraft fees for paying ATM and one-time debit card transactions that overdraw consumers’ accounts without consumers’ consent....

The most recent Democratic-backed voting rights plan in Congress combined two pre-existing bills: The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. Both stood to make significant changes to voting procedures across the U.S., but their recent failure to advance in the Senate has proponents reevaluating how they can accomplish their goals. Reinstating Preclearance Requirements for Some States The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act aimed to reinstate provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that were struck down by the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v....

The Supreme Court made it easier for property owners to challenge Clean Water Act protections yesterday. A unanimous court ruled that a “jurisdictional determination,” an agency decision that land contains waters protected by the act, is a final agency action that can be challenged in court. Will the decision launch an Armada of new CWA lawsuits? Or will it stop the use of jurisdictional determinations altogether? The Clean Water Act, one of America’s signature environmental laws, seeks to protect “the waters of the United States” by requiring federal permits for any pollutant discharged into those waters....

It’s not uncommon for men to interrupt and talk over their female colleagues, as many women can attest – when they can get a word in. There’s even a term for it: “manterrupting.” And the trend extends all the way to the highest court in the land, as a new analysis shows Justices Kagan and Sotomayor being interrupted much more frequently than their male colleagues. Let Me Mansplain Manterrupting for a Second Manterrupting is no new phenomenon....

The Tenth Circuit has ruled that, even without probable cause, the good faith exception applies to a search warrant. Julio Ponce appealed the Oklahoma district court’s denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained pursuant to a search warrant that Ponce alleges was issued without valid probable cause. A Tulsa police officer submitted an affidavit for a search warrant to search Ponce’s residence in 2011. After he’d received information from an informant that Ponce was selling meth from his home, the officer verified this information by conducting his own surveillance....

Brendan Dassey was convicted in 2007, alongside his uncle Steven Avery, of the rape and murder of Teresa Halbach. That conviction, however, was based on a confession a federal judge found to be coerced. Halbach’s murder, and the investigation that followed, were the subject of Netflix’s 2015 hit, “Making a Murderer” and Dassey’s manipulation by prosecutors, and by his own attorney, became one of the major stories to emerge from the film....

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Obama Administration to stop enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy against gays in the military. The Court of Appeals removed a stay of an injunction on the policy, earlier this week, in a panel consisting of Judges Alex Kozinski, Kim Wardlaw and Richard Paez. Earlier this week, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Pentagon to stop investigating and discharging military service members who violated the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy....

The Obama administration is getting “entangled” in the legislative prayer case. In a turn for the nearly apocalyptic, the Obama administration and the GOP have found some common ground. Both sides have filed amicus briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the right of local town boards to begin their meetings with a prayer. Here’s the low-down on what they’re arguing and how it particularly affects the Eighth Circuit: Last year, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the town of Greece, New York, crossed the line and violated the First Amendment’s ban on an “establishment of religion....

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (“CERCLA”) was enacted to provide a framework for the cleanup of hazardous waste, and to allocate the cost of cleanup to those who create or maintain hazardous conditions. The question before the Second Circuit was a novel one: whether CERCLA creates a subcontractor’s right of recovery against a landowner, when the landowner has already paid the contractor in full. The Cleanup Norampac discovered that the soil at the one of its sites was contaminated with lead, so Norampac contracted with AAA Environmental, Inc....

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals applied well worn copyright principals and ruled that yoga poses and breathing exercises are not entitled to copyright protection. More specifically, the court found that breathing and poses don’t even fall into the realm of things that are copyrightable. The issues in this case revolve around what practitioners have called the “Idea/Expression Dichotomy” – that is, an idea as opposed to the expression or manifestation of that idea....

In Chawla v. Holder, No. 05-74823, the Ninth Circuit granted a petition for review of the BIA’s decision affirming a denial of petitioner’s asylum application, holding that none of the reasons articulated by the Immigration Judge or BIA, considered either separately or in combination, provided a legitimate basis to question petitioner’s credibility. In US v. Dewey, No. 08-30450, the court of appeals affirmed defendant’s drug conspiracy sentence, holding that 1) the court generally did not review challenges to the effectiveness of defense counsel on direct appeal; 2) because defendant’s 1990 sentence was greater than one year and one month, and his date of last release from prison on that sentence was within the fifteen-year period, the trial court did not err in concluding that defendant qualified as a career offender; and 3) defendant’s within-guideline sentence could not be deemed unreasonable when his prior felony offenses brought him within the Guidelines as a career offender....

A divided panel of the Seventh Circuit found a school’s policy prohibiting boys from sporting long hair on the basketball court violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and was sex discrimination under Title IX, reports the ABA Journal. Long Hair Don’t Care The parents of A.H. sued his school district alleging violations of substantive due process, equal protection of the laws and Title IX regulations when A.H. was removed from the basketball team for not complying with the coach’s hair length policy promoting “team unity” and a “clean cut” image, reports The Indianapolis Star....

In Schaar v. Lehigh Valley Health Servs., Inc., No. 09-1635, the Third Circuit addressed a question of first impression of whether a combination of expert and lay testimony can establish that an employee was incapacitated for more than three days as required by FMLA regulations. In vacating the district court’s denial of plaintiff’s suit against her former employer for violation of the FMLA, the court held that an employee may satisfy her burden of proving three days of incapacitation through a combination of expert medical and lay testimony....

District court’s orders releasing defendant from prison and barring his reprosecution on the ground that the State took too long to conduct a second trial are reversed and remanded with instructions to dismiss the petition for lack of jurisdiction as no federal power authorized the district court to release the defendant from pretrial detention on a legitimate state charge, or to bar his reprosecution. Read Eddleman v. McKee, No. 08-1093...

After a federal district court upheld the University of Minnesota’s decision to move guest speaker Ben Shapiro from an on-campus to an off-campus venue because she found that school had legitimate safety concerns, the Eighth Circuit dismissed conservative student groups’ appeal, ruling that their constitutional claims were moot after the school replaced the challenged campus events policy. Read both opinions and thousands more with a free trial of WestLaw Edge....