Maryland Criminal Attorney Blog

I recently won a significant victory for a federal criminal client in United States District Court for the District of Maryland in a re-sentencing under Booker. http://www.mdattorney.com/lawyer-attorney-1301200.html In the Booker case, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the federal sentencing guidelines that apply to all criminal cases prosecuted in federal courts were no longer mandatory. The Court in Booker held that federal judges should consider the sentencing guidelines in fashioning a sentence, but that the guidelines were just one of many factors to be weighed in sentencing. These factors are laid out in federal law at 18 U.S.C.§3553(a) & (b). They include the nature and circumstances of the person, the need to protect the public from further crimes by the defendant, as well as the nature and circumstances of the offense.

While the Court’s decision in Booker was not retroactive, the case does apply to cases that were on appeal at the time of the decision. In my recent case, the client had been convicted prior to Booker and sentenced to 174 months incarceration for being part of a multi-state drug conspiracy. The client’s trial defense attorney did not ask the federal appeals court to remand the case for a new sentencing in light of the Booker decision. I represented the client in a federal habeus suit in Maryland seeking that the client be re-sentenced.

In that case, the Chief Judge Legg agreed with our argument that the prior counsel’s failure to raise the Booker issue on appeal constituted ineffective assistance of counsel. He set the case in for a new sentencing hearing.

At the re-sentencing, the Assistant United States Attorney argued that the Court should re-impose the same 174 month sentence on the client. We convinced Judge Legg to reduce the client’s sentence by over four years, over the objection of the federal prosecutor. A large part of our case at re-sentencing concerned the strides that the client had made during the two year period after the original sentencing hearing. The client had successfully completed drug treatment, accounting, business, and other academic classes while in federal prison awaiting the re-sentencing. Chief Judge Legg ruled that the client’s exemplary behavior while in prison, coupled with the successful completion of class study at the facility was sufficient to grant a significant sentence reduction.

The victory in federal court meant that the client saved four years of his life. The lesson learned from this case is that the federal criminal defense attorney needs to be prepared to aggressively raise all legitimate bases for sentence reduction under the Booker case. While it may not seem like a big deal, small accomplishments like finishing a course in electronics or history while in federal prison can result in large reductions in a re-sentencing under Booker.

I have conducted hundreds of federal sentencing hearings in the District of Maryland and other federal districts and have been able to achieve very significant results for my clients. The federal criminal defense attorneys at Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin & White http://www.mdattorney.com are experienced in federal cases and can get the best possible results for our clients in all types of federal criminal cases. There is not an issue that we cannot handle.

The answer to the question is no. In fact the answer is that the police may not stop a person based on an anonymous tip in any state in the country because the law on this issue comes from a Supreme Court of the United States decision, as opposed to a state appellate court decision, and thus applies to all of the states. I used this issue to win a post conviction motion that I filed on behalf of a client in the Baltimore County Circuit Court. As some are aware, post convictions are rarely granted in Maryland, but this one was because, among other issues, the attorney who represented my client at trial had failed to raise this well settled issue in a case where it clearly applied.

The case that controls this issue is Florida v. J.L. In that case the police received an anonymous telephone tip that a young black male dressed a certain way and standing at a specific corner, was armed with a handgun. The police responded to the area and observed a young black male matching the description given by the anonymous tipster. The police stopped the young man (actually he was a juvenile, hence the use of his initials in the case in place of his name). In an extremely rare unanimous decision the Court ruled that the police had violated JL's Fourth Amendment rights and laid down the rule that an anonymous tip alone was insufficient to give the police probable cause to stop and search a person.

In the case I recently prevailed on post conviction, the facts were quite similar. As I said, the judge ruled that my client had received ineffective assistance of counsel because, among other reasons, he had failed to raise this obvious issue. Here is the brief that I filed. (I have redacted the names of my client and the attorneys to protect their privacy).

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