A decision this week out of the Court of Appeals of the Sixth Circuit has added fuel to a new front to the 2nd Amendment debate.  Under federal law, certain groups, or classes of people, are barred from owning a firearm. Those groups include convicted felons, fugitives and people with a prior history of domestic batteries.  The case decided this week in the Sixth Circuit deals with a provision in the law which bars people who have been committed to a mental institution from owning a firearm.  The law allows an individual to appeal for relief from the prohibitions imposed by this law to the Attorney General of the United States. The Attorney General has delegated the authority to investigate such petitions to the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.   This appeal process is called the “relief from disabilities program.”  The law is pretty detailed about what an individual is required to provide in such a petition to the director of the ATF.  The law requires that t...

On July 27 we reported that the DEA was considering reclassifying marijuana from a Class 1 Drug to something less.  Advocates for the legalization of marijuana were looking at this possibility as an important step to the possible legalization of marijuana.  On Wednesday the DEA made it’s decision public, and the decision did not make marijuana legalization advocates happy.  The DEA decided to keep marijuana in Class 1, which is the most serious classification of illegal drugs.  But what is especially troubling was the reason given by the DEA for denying the application to remove marijuana from the Class 1 category.  The DEA found that there is no accepted medical benefit for the use of marijuana and that it is highly vulnerable to abuse.  The DEA found that marijuana is not a safe and effective medicine.  This decision flies in the face of 42 states, and the District of Columbia, which allow for some form of medical marijuana use. Today, sources are reporting that as early as today,...

On Friday, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner signed a bill into law which requires law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant before deploying a stingray device to intercept a person’s cell phone communications to determine their location. A stingray device is basically a cell phone simulator which intercepts the transmission from cell phones without anyone’s knowledge or consent.  In some cases the stingray can intercept actual phone calls and text messages.  The stingray tower will fool the cell phone into thinking it is communicating with the cell phone carrier’s cell phone tower when it is actually communicating with a tower that is being run and monitored by law enforcement agents.  The stingray tower doesn’t just target one device.  It will intercept the cell phone transmission of all the cell phones in a particular location.  Unknown to anyone, law enforcement officials are listening to the conversations and intercepting text messages and other data c...

As part of the 2017 budget process, the Kane County Board held a hearing in which the Kane County Public Defender, Kelli Childress, asked for more money to hire 2 more attorneys for her office.  Childress testified that the cost to add 2 attorneys will be $72,000 a year.  In the hearing, Childress claimed that the attorneys in her office have a higher average caseload per attorney than any other neighboring county.  She presented the board with statistics which show that attorneys in her office in Kane County are only able to spend less than 3 hours on each misdemeanor case they are handling.  She said that the high average caseload along with a lack of investigative resources raises questions about the quality of the legal defense services that her office can provide indigent criminal defendants.  She went on to further state that the lack of resources could cause her attorneys to put pressure on their clients to plead guilty and avoid fighting their cases.  This lack of resources ...

We are being inundated with news stories about Donald Trump claiming that a Federal Judge of Mexican heritage presiding over a fraud case involving him should recuse himself from hearing his case because of his ethnic background.  This story is dominating the news and sparked a partisan debate over when a judge should recuse himself. Well, the United States Supreme Court just decided a case involving when a Judge should recuse himself.  In 1986, Ronald Castille was Philadelphia’s District Attorney.  Terrance Williams and a friend, both 18 years old, had been charged with murdering Amos Norwood with a tire iron.  The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office was considering whether to proceed with the Death Penalty against Williams.  A subordinate of Castille recommended that they proceed with the Death Penalty against Williams and Castille signed off on doing just that.  Williams was eventually convicted of Murder and sentenced to death.  Later on Ca...

This week the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a Minnesota DUI case that will further help define the parameters of the 4th Amendment.  The case involves a statute in Minnesota which makes it a crime to refuse to take a breathalyzer test when requested by the police.  In 2012 police were called to a boat launch where a car was stuck while trying to to take a boat out of a lake. They confronted 3 men. all of which smelled of alcohol but all 3 denied being the driver.  One man was in his underwear and was holding the car keys.  The man was arrested and taken to the police station.  He was asked to take a breathalyzer test and refused.  He was charged with refusing to take a breathalyzer test based on a Minnesota statute which makes it a crime to refuse to take a breathalyzer test when requested to take one by a police officer.  12 other states have similar laws.  Illinois is not one of those states.  It’s not as if Illinois does not punish drivers who refuse to submit to a b...

In an interesting case out of Florida, the public is getting detailed information about the secretive stingray fake cell phone tower which is being used by law enforcement officials to track particular cell phones.  Up until now, we have had general information about how these devices work.  However, a transcript released in a Florida case has provided us with the most detailed description of how this device works. On September 13, 2008 a Tallahassee woman was raped and her purse, which contained her Verizon cell phone, was stolen.  Detectives contacted Verizon and obtained real time ping information from Verizon.  That information gave the police general information about where that phone was located but the police needed detailed location information.  The thinking was that if they found the phone, they would find the rapist. The police obtained the unique IMSI identifier of the victim’s phone and started cruising the streets of the general area in which Verizon’s real time ping d...

In an interesting story, a Massachusetts woman was arrested by the police and charged with illegal wiretapping after she was caught secretly recording her own arrest. Under Massachusetts law, it is illegal to record the police unless if it’s in a public place and only if the police know of the recording.  In this case the police were called to a building for a tenant who was loud and causing a disturbance. The police encountered this woman and arrested her. As they were arresting her they discovered that she had placed her phone in her purse and it was recording the arrest.  After the cell phone was discovered the woman admitted that she placed it in her purse to record her arrest.  In 2011 a court in Massachusetts who filmed someone else’s arrest in public had her constitutional rights violated because it was obvious to the police that they were being filmed. Before you criticize Massachusetts, Illinois had a similar law on the books until March 20, 2014, when the Illinois Supreme ...

For the first time ever, federal prosecutors have disclosed that they intend to use evidence obtained through a wireless wiretap of a criminal defendant that they intend to use at trial. The disclosure of such evidence allows the attorneys for the defendant to file a motion in court to challenge the introduction of the evidence at trial.  This sets up a potential legal challenge to wireless wiretaps that could make it all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.  The case involves Jamshid Muhtorov who is charged with providing material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, a terrorist organization based in Uzbekistan.  Muhtorov is accused of travelling abroad and joined this organization.  How the disclosure came to be public is interesting.  In June, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, discovered that defendants in criminal cases had not been informed that communications they had were intercepted by authorities.  This was a big problem because last year, in a case before the Uni...