The VLW Blog

What part of “not to be presumed reasonable” don’t you understand? That appeared to be the question the U.S. Supreme Court had for the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today in reversing and remanding a 360-month sentence imposed on a drug defendant. The case of Lawrence Nelson was one of those the Supreme Court [...]

[Read more →]

Everette Antwon Burrell caught a break with a boot-camp sentence early in his criminal career, but that sentence came back to haunt him years later. Burrell was sentenced to boot camp for a 1993 drug conviction. When he came up for sentencing in Richmond federal court for a later cocaine conviction, the district court said [...]

[Read more →]

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed last week a downward departure for a sentence that it likely would have found unreasonable before the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in Gall v. U.S. and Kimbrough v. U.S. on Dec. 10. Larry Pauley was convicted of one count of possessing child pornography and acknowledged that his [...]

[Read more →]

The U.S. Sentencing Commission decided this afternoon to make its reduction in the sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine retroactive. That typically would mean a reduction of about five years for a 20-year sentence and about two years for a 10-year term, according to Rob Wagner, an assistant federal public defender in Richmond. It also would [...]

[Read more →]

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday ruled that federal judges are note required to follow sentencing guidelines that permit harsher penalties for crack cocaine crimes than powder cocaine. In a case from Norfolk, the court, 7-2, reinforced the view that the federal sentencing guidelines are merely advisory rather than mandatory. Lawyers USA has the story.

[Read more →]

Maybe a defendant convicted of drug conspiracy deserves a break because most of his crack distribution occurred during the three-year period before he turned 19. But what if the defendant, “K-Smooth,” was one of the few members of the 30-odd defendants from Petersburg’s “Third Ward Gang” to go to trial in Richmond federal district court? [...]

[Read more →]

A criminal defendant whose character and connections generated more fan mail than an Alexandria federal judge has seen in 25 years won a reduction of his guidelines sentence for obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury and to an FBI agent about his activities in Pakistan and alleged contacts with a jihad training [...]

[Read more →]

Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., has vowed to abolish federal mandatory sentencing guidelines, reports The Daily Press. Scott, chair of the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, held hearings in Washington this past week. The leading witness was a federal judge from Utah who noted that he was compelled by the guidelines to give a first-time offender [...]

[Read more →]

A Richmond federal judge didn’t follow a stair-step approach in sentencing a felon with a firearm, so the defendant gets a second shot at sentencing. Earlier this week, the 4th Circuit released an unpublished opinion in U.S. v. Tinsley, vacating the statutory maximum sentence of 10 years that Zachary Tinsley got for the .25 caliber [...]

[Read more →]

Since federal sentencing guidelines became “advisory,” defense lawyers may be trying to track even unpublished 4th Circuit cases, just to see how a particular federal judge applies the guidelines to a given defendant. The defendant in U.S. v. Trent will get another shot at sentencing. A Newport News cop pulled Hakim Trent’s purple Ford Escort [...]

[Read more →]