by Richard Resch
Jake Laperruque of the Center for Democracy and Technology offered a blunt analogy in a March 2026 NPR interview. Imagine the police want to search your home but lack a warrant. Instead of going to a judge, they hand your landlord a hundred dollars for …
by Richard Resch
When the United States Sentencing Commission lowers a Guideline range, the revision ordinarily applies only to defendants sentenced after the effective date. For the thousands of people already serving sentences calculated under the old, harsher Guideline range, the change might seem irrelevant. But a motion …
by Richard Resch
The Supreme Court of the United States held that police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired a criminal suspect’s Google Location History data through a geofence warrant, concluding that individuals maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in records documenting their cellphone’s whereabouts. …
by Richard Resch
The Gold Standard That Isn’t
On the night of November 29, 2012, a group of men broke into a mansion in Monte Sereno, California, and killed its owner, Raveesh Kumra, a 66-year-old Silicon Valley investor. When the county crime lab processed evidence from the …
by Richard Resch
On April 16, 2026, the United States Sentencing Commission (“Commission”) voted to promulgate seven amendments to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines (“Guidelines”), all having a proposed effective date of November 1, 2026. These amendments span drug offenses, inflationary adjustments to monetary tables, a major overhaul of …
by Richard Resch
Resolving a circuit split, the Supreme Court of the United States held that when Congress declines to make a sentencing amendment retroactive, the resulting disparity between old and new sentences cannot serve as an “extraordinary and compelling” reason warranting a sentence reduction under 18 U.S.C. …
by Richard Resch
In December 2023, Google announced that Location History would be migrated from its servers to users’ devices, a change that would effectively end the company’s role as the principal recipient of law-enforcement demands for mass location data and render obsolete the centralized database (known internally …
by Richard Resch
Six years after Congress passed the First Step Act with rare bipartisan enthusiasm, the federal government’s own data offer a mixed picture of progress. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (“BJS”) March 2026 report, covering calendar year 2024, provides the most comprehensive look yet at who …
by Richard Resch
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for all individuals convicted of second-degree murder (felony murder) violates Article I, Section 13 of the Pennsylvania Constitution’s prohibition against cruel punishments. The Court determined that Pennsylvania’s …
by Richard Resch
The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously held that a plaintiff previously convicted of violating a city ordinance may proceed with a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 suit seeking only forward-looking relief – specifically, a declaration that the ordinance violates the First Amendment and an …
