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How Much is Too Much? – Second Circuit Establishes Guardrails for Sentencing Hearings
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June 22, 2026
How Much is Too Much? – Second Circuit Establishes Guardrails for Sentencing Hearings
By: James Trusty
As any federal criminal practitioner can attest, judges holding a sentencing hearing are privy to an intentionally wider universe of information about the defendant than a jury would have heard about at trial. We want judges to consider all sorts of things about the offender and the offense, beyond just the facts establishing the crime – social background, employment history, criminal record, substance abuse history, mental health issues, and more. Particularly in federal proceedings, a lot of ink, angst, and argument is devoted to addressing thorny issues of unadjudicated “relevant conduct” and “jointly undertaken criminal activity.” In many cases, these expansive concepts can lead to a tax case having the same penalty as a murder prosecution (“Al Capone sentenced for tax evasion”) or a judge holding defendant…
Robotic Risk—but Is the Ultimate Answer Still a Human One?
May 26, 2026
Robotic Risk—but Is the Ultimate Answer Still a Human One?
By: Lauren Scribner
It now goes without saying that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a convenient solution for accomplishing certain tedious tasks, such as planning an upcoming trip, figuring out what to make for dinner with ingredients already on hand, or adding some professional flare to an email. But when it comes to some of the more high-stakes areas of life, such as obtaining financial, medical, or legal…
Murdaugh She Wrote
May 21, 2026
Murdaugh She Wrote
By: James Trusty
As the information regarding Alex Murdaugh’s conniving, murderous ways began to spread far beyond the Lowcountry of South Carolina and into the cable and social media airwaves, a curious and ominous thing took root. The temptation of star power and riches slumped stealthily behind the public face of the proceedings, causing a low-level bureaucrat to destroy the notion of an impartial jury in one of…
Virtual Reality Creating Jury Reality
January 7, 2025
Virtual Reality Creating Jury Reality
By: James Trusty
A Florida Judge may have unwittingly ushered in a new age of criminal justice, where slickly made virtual reality (“VR”) presentations turn judges and jurors into witnesses, and VR headsets provide subjective “testimony” in a powerful and difficult to challenge manner. Broward County Judge Andrew Siegel agreed to don a virtual reality headset in a preliminary proceeding[1] where the defendant was accused of aggravated assault….
How Thick is the Blanket? – Preemptive Pardons as a Presidential Power
December 6, 2024
How Thick is the Blanket? – Preemptive Pardons as a Presidential Power
By: James Trusty
As the presiding judge scolded Hunter Biden’s attorneys this week, “The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.”[1] But what exactly is that history he claims is being re-written? Judge Scarsi was challenging…
Supremely Improbable
July 30, 2024
Supremely Improbable
By: James Trusty
President Biden’s pronounced objectives for Supreme Court “reform” are improbable, politically lifeless under a particularly lame duck presidency, and motivated by transparently November-driven calculations. But even if the proposed changes are doomed from the start, they push public discourse on a couple of issues that are red meat for the democrats. The stated reforms are superficially simple ones: 1) to “clarify” that “there is no…
Presidential Immunity Ruling Stirs Sound and Fury
July 5, 2024
Presidential Immunity Ruling Stirs Sound and Fury
By: James Trusty
The immediate and eventual impact of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision in Trump v. United States is both considerable and dramatically misrepresented. The initial consequences include likely delay to the January 6 prosecution out of D.C. and the setting of hearings—in D.C., Georgia and south Florida—where the judges will be required to make factual findings as to whether the evidence supporting the indictments reflect “official…
The Challenging Terrain of White-Collar Sentencing
June 3, 2024
The Challenging Terrain of White-Collar Sentencing
By: James Trusty
Federal judges are required to balance a number of factors whenever imposing sentence, including specifically enumerated areas that largely stem from the broader philosophical categories of General Deterrence, Specific Deterrence, Retribution/Punishment, Restitution and Victim Impact, and Rehabilitation. In determining the presumptively reasonable range of potential sentences, federal practitioners consult their always-handy U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, which create a sentencing range grid based upon the offense characteristics…
