Charlotte Criminal Lawyer Blog
Attorney J. Bradley Smith answering the question: “If I simply intend to plead guilty, why do I need a lawyer?”
A divided Supreme Court ruled in an important case last week that it is unconstitutional for judges to use current federal sentencing guidelines if they contain harsher penalties than the sentencing guidelines in place at the time the original crime was committed.
The case before the Court dealt with whether current discretionary sentencing guidelines have enough force to put criminal defendant at risk of unconstitutional additional punishment. The question the justices tackled was whether current, harsher guidelines have enough weight with judges that even considering them harms the freedom of defendants whose crimes were governed by earlier sentencing guidelines. Specifically this issue concerns the ex post facto clause of the Constitution which prohibits retroactive punishment.
The case, Peugh v. United States, concerned a man who committed bank fraud back in the late 1990s. It took a long time for his case to be tried and for a sentence to be handed down, more than 11 years in fact. By 2010, a new round of sentencing guidelines had been issued which contained a suggested sentencing range of between 70 and 87 months for Peugh’s crime. The issue was that at the time the crimes were perpetrated, the sentencing range was dramatically more lenient, only 30 to 37 months. The judge who heard the case ultimately chose a 70-month sentence, something that many believed was clearly influenced by the new guidelines.
The arrests were the result of a four-year undercover investigation into illegal hunting practices known as Operation Something Bruin. Officers with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and the U.S. Forest Service worked together using social media to infiltrate poaching circles and record legal violations. The investigators created fake social media profiles and found out about illegal organized hunts on federal land.
The case involves a horrible 1992 Texas double murder case where the suspect voluntarily answered police questions for nearly an hour. However, as the police asked more incriminating questions about shotgun shells found at the scene, the suspect stopped talking. Prosecutors later used Salinas’ silence against him and portrayed it as evidence of his guilt. The strategy worked like a charm for prosecutors and Salinas was found guilty.
Surprisingly, Bynner is the third person to be charged with crimes against nature in North Carolina since March. Just last month, a 21-year-old man from Wake County was arrested and charged with four felony counts of crimes against nature. The man, Seadon Collins Henrich was a volunteer at the Wake County animal shelter and was also charged with three felony counts of disseminating obscenity. Police say Henrich abused several dogs in his care and then took photographs of the incidents.
Testimony presented at trial revealed that the robbers would enter stores wearing bandanas, gloves, hats and dark clothes to obscure their identities. One of the men would then point a gun at a clerk while the others grabbed the cash drawer from the register or safe, whichever was most easily accessed.