Justia U.S. D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

Appellant appealed his conviction and sentence on two counts of attempted tax evasion. Appellant argued that the government failed to prove the element of tax loss because it relied upon a flawed calculation under the "cash method of proof" and attributed to appellant $1.9 million of alleged gain when those funds, as a matter of law, belonged to his two corporations. Appellant challenged his sentence to the extent it rested upon the allegedly incorrect calculation of tax loss. The court found no error in the district court's denial of defendant's motions for judgment of acquittal. The court also held that, because a rational trier of fact could find beyond a reasonable doubt a tax was due and owing on $300,000 of income, the court left for another day how best to interpret the dictum in James v. United States. The court affirmed the sentence because the district court made sufficient factual findings at sentencing to support the inclusion of the $1.9 million in the calculation of tax loss. View "United States v. Khanu" on Justia Law

This case stemmed from the District's adoption of the Firearms Registration Amendment Act of 2008 (FRA), D.C. Law 17-372, which amended the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975, D.C. Law 1-85. Plaintiffs challenged, both facially and as applied to them, the provisions of the District's gun laws, new and old, requiring the registration of firearms and prohibiting both the registration of "assault weapons" and the possession of magazines with a capacity of more than ten rounds of ammunition. Plaintiffs argued those provisions were not within the District's congressionally delegated legislative authority or, if they were, then they violated the Second Amendment. The court held that the District had authority under D.C. law to promulgate the challenged gun laws, and the court upheld as constitutional the prohibitions of assault weapons and of large-capacity magazines and some of the registration requirements. The court remanded the other registration requirements to the district court for further proceedings because the record was insufficient to inform the court's resolution of the important constitutional issues presented. View "Heller, et al. v. District of Columbia, et al." on Justia Law

Plaintiffs brought this action against the Department of Justice under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. 552, seeking to obtain documents relating to the government's use of cell phone location data in criminal prosecutions. The district court directed the release of certain specified documents and upheld the Department's decision to withhold others. The court affirmed the district court's order requiring the release of the specified documents. The court held, however, that because there were too many factual uncertainties regarding the remaining documents, the court vacated the balance of the district court's decision and remanded the case for further development of the record. View "American Civil Liberties Union, et al. v. Dept. of Justice" on Justia Law

Appellant, a detainee at the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appealed the denial of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. At issue was whether the district court erred in concluding that intelligence reports offered by the government to prove his membership in the Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) cell were reliable. The court held that there was no error in the district court's careful consideration of the evidence and affirmed the denial of appellant's petition. View "Khan v. Obama, et al." on Justia Law

Appellant, a former official of the District of Columbia Office of the Inspector General (OIG), claimed that he was fired in retaliation for exercising his First Amendment rights by refusing to sign an affidavit his employer drafted for him in response to a former subordinate's employment discrimination claim and instead, appellant rewrote the affidavit in a manner critical of the OIG's decision to terminate the subordinate. The court affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the OIG on the First Amendment retaliation claim and appellant petitioned for rehearing. The court held that because appellant spoke as a government employee, the district court rightly granted summary judgment in favor of appellant's employer on this retaliation claim. Therefore, the petition for rehearing was denied. View "Bowie v. Maddox" on Justia Law

Appellant, as personal representative of her brother's estate, sued to recover damages for the shooting death of her brother by a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detective and contended on appeal that she did not receive a fair trial. The principal issue concerned the district court's rulings on the inadmissibility of portions of an internal MPD report regarding the altercation between the detective and appellant's brother. A related issue involved a violation of the pretrial disclosure requirements of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26. The court held that there was no abuse of discretion by the district court. The record revealed that the district court properly excluded those parts of the report likely to confuse the jury and unfairly prejudice the government. The court held that the government failed to comply with Rule 26(a)(2)(E) by not supplementing the medical expert's disclosure to reflect an interview with the detective on which the expert intended to rely at trial, but that the violation was harmless and so the district court's refusal to strike the expert's testimony was not an abuse of discretion. Accordingly, because appellant's other claims of error and her bias claim were unpersuasive, the court affirmed the judgment. View "English v. District of Columbia, et al." on Justia Law

Defendant appealed his conviction for attempted enticement of a minor and for traveling across state lines with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct. At issue was whether the evidence was sufficient to support his convictions; whether his counsel provided constitutionally ineffective assistance of counsel; and whether the conditions of supervised release the district court imposed were erroneous. The court held that there was sufficient evidence for the jury to find the necessary intent beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant committed the crimes. The court remanded defendant's ineffective assistance claims for analysis by the district court in the first instance. The court further held that defendant's challenge to the condition that restricted his loitering in arcades and parks and on possessing a camera were foreclosed by United States v. Love where the Love court withheld the same conditions on plain error review. The court also held that the computer-related conditions of supervised release were not plainly erroneous.

In 1988, defendant was convicted of assault with intent to commit rape while armed; assaulting, resisting or interfering with a police officer with a dangerous weapon; and two counts of first-degree burglary while armed. Defendant was sentenced to prison for 18 years to life and while defendant was in prison, the District of Columbia enacted the Sex Offender Registration Act (SORA), D.C. Code 22-4001 to -4017. Defendant challenged SORA under various provisions of the U.S. Constitution, most notably the Ex Post Facto Clause. The court held that, like the sex offender registration requirement in Smith v. Doe, SORA's registration requirement did not violate the Ex Post Facto Clause where neither the Council of District Columbia's intent nor SORA's effects were so punitive as to render SORA a form of punishment. The court also held that defendant failed to show that he was entitled to relief in regards to his Fifth Amendment claims. The court further rejected defendant's Eighth Amendment and equal protection claim and defendant's claim under the D.C. Human Rights Act. Accordingly, the judgment of the district court was affirmed.

Petitioner was incarcerated when he petitioned the court for writs of mandamus to prevent the district court from transferring two of his civil cases to the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. The court had recently held that the filing fee provision of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 38 U.S.C. 1915(b), applied to a prisoner who filed a petition for writ of mandamus in connection with an underlying civil case. At issue was whether the PLRA's three-strikes provision, section 1915(g), likewise applied to a mandamus petition in an underlying civil case. The court held that petitioner's mandamus petitions were subject to the PLRA's three-strikes provision and consequently, petitioner was barred from proceeding in forma pauperis where the underlying actions, which the district court ordered to be transferred to Maryland, were civil in nature. Therefore, the court denied the motions for leave to proceed in forma pauperis and ordered petitioner to pay the full fee in each case before the court would consider his petitions.

Petitioner petitioned the court on July 14, 2010, for a writ of mandamus to compel the district court to grant him in forma pauperis status and permit him to file his civil rights damages suit pursuant to 42 U.S.C. 1983. At issue was whether a dismissal of a complaint for failure to state a claim based on Heck v. Humphrey counted as a "strike" under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 38 U.S.C. 1915(g). The court concluded that it did and joined the Fifth and Tenth Circuits in holding that in the absence of proof "that the conviction or sentence ha[d] been reversed on direct appeal, expunged by executive order, declared invalid by a state tribunal authorized to make such determination, or called into question by a federal court's issuance of a writ of habeas corpus," the petitioner failed to state a claim for purposes of section 1915(g). Accordingly, because petitioner, while incarcerated, had filed at least three civil actions that were dismissed on the ground that they were frivolous, malicious, or failed to state a claim, and he had neither offered any valid reason as to why he should not be required to pay in full the appellate filing fee before the court would consider his mandamus petition, nor claimed he was in imminent danger within the meaning of the exception under section 1915(g) of the PLRA's three-strikes provision, the court denied petitioner's motion for leave to appeal in forma pauperis and ordered him to pay the full fee before the court would consider his petition.