Criminal Law eNews

The right to trial by jury provides a body of impartial community members to evaluate the evidence and decide questions of fact in a criminal prosecution. It is a constitutional right guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment (and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment) that 12 jurors sit in any case where the penalty exceeds six months of incarceration. Similarly, Article 1, Section 16 of the California Constitution requires that a criminal jury in a felony case consist of 12 jurors, and that a jury in a misdemeanor criminal case or civil case consist of twelve jurors or a "lesser number agreed upon by the parties in open court." Read more

Two recent appellate opinions show that California courts are beginning to explore the scope of the state's Racial Justice Act, a law that took effect in 2021 aiming to help eliminate the influence of racial discrimination in criminal convictions. The very different outcomes in the two cases show that bringing a successful claim under the RJA is straightforward in some cases, but far more complex in others. Read more

We have included links to SCOTUSblog in case you want to learn more about these cases. Read more

Ciminelli v. United States, No. 21-1170 Issue: Whether the Second Circuit’s “right to control” theory of fraud—which treats the deprivation of complete and accurate information bearing on a person’s economic decision as a species of property fraud—states a valid basis for liability under the federal wire fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1343. Read more

The United States Sentencing Commission has recently introduced a significant adjustment for zero-point offenders through a newly created Section 4C1.1 of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines that would go into effect on November 1, 2023. This adjustment acknowledges that defendants with no criminal history points (zero-point offenders) should be treated differently during sentencing. Read more

Issue: Whether the Arizona Supreme Court’s holding that Arizona Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.1(g) precluded post-conviction relief is an adequate and independent state-law ground for the judgment.Holding: The Arizona Supreme Court’s holding below — that Lynch v. Arizona did not represent a “significant change in the law” for purposes of permitting John Montenegro Cruz to file a successive petition for state postconviction relief under Arizona Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.1(g) Read more

We’ve just read the opposition brief in our big case. Now we are considering drafting our reply brief without including the four-letter words that recently echoed from our office walls. Read more

 The U.S. Supreme Court's current ideological divide may be the sharpest we've seen in a long time. Yet the justices do unite in one key respect: The current court boasts some of the best opinion writers in American legal history.  Read more

Todd Bequette has been a criminal defense attorney in Alameda County for over 25 years. He was born and raised in Gridley, a small town in Northern California. He attended Georgetown Law and received his undergraduate degree from the University of the Pacific. He’s also serves annually on the faculty of the Stanford Law School Trial Skills Workshop. He represents clients in some of the most serious criminal cases in Alameda County, and is frequently in trial on homicides. Read more

Brown v. Davenport, No. 20-826 Issue: Whether a federal habeas court may grant relief based solely on its conclusion that the test from Brecht v. Abrahamson is satisfied, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit held, or whether the court must also find that the state court’s application of Chapman v. California was unreasonable under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1), as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 3rd, 7th, 9th and 10th Circuits have held. Read more