The Supreme Court recently held in Greenlaw v. United States that a court of appeals, acting on its own initiative, may not order an increase in a defendant’s sentence. The case reaffirms the proposition that federal criminal sentencing is an adversarial process. Michael Greenlaw was convicted of various offenses and sentenced to imprisonment for 442 months. He […]
Liz Ordonez-Dawes, an accomplished architectural photographer, was recently awarded $12 million in the United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, for copyright infringement of approximately 7 of her photographs. Ordonez-Dawes alleged that the defendants, Turnkey Properties, Inc. and Michael Friend, were provided several of her photographs for the limited purpose of use in advertising […]
The Supreme Court recently held in Giles v. California that the California Supreme Court’s theory of forfeiture by wrongdoing is not an exception to the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause because it was not an exception established at the nation’s founding. Dwayne Giles shot his girlfriend, Brenda Avie, outside the garage of his grandmother’s house. He […]
