Federal Crimes

The federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) could be considered a harsh law by any standards. For the offense of "accessing a computer and obtaining information," you could be sentenced to up to 5 years in federal prison on a first offense.Could you be sentenced...

Over the last year, the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica has published a series of articles that called into question whether some forensic techniques produce reliable results. One of the techniques questioned is the matching of wear marks along the seams...

The federal First Step Act was passed in late 2018 in an effort to reverse course on some overly harsh sentences that had been passed down over the last several decades. It also allowed for the early release of terminally ill people and passed a variety of reforms to...

Have you ever wondered if the government is monitoring your Facebook or Instagram? They are.According to the ACLU, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have been increasingly monitoring the social media of both Americans and non-citizens. The group filed a...

Do you know how many federal crimes are on the books? Neither do we. In fact, nobody does.In 1982, a group of Justice Department attorneys attempted to find out. After two years of reading countless federal statutes and regulations, the lawyers were only able to come...

There are approximately 1.16 million people labeled "known or suspected terrorists" on the FBI's terrorism watch list. While most of them are from foreign countries, about 4,600 people on the list as of 2017 were U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents -- and many...

The American Bar Association's (ABA's) House of Delegates and the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys (NACDL) have just passed a unanimous resolution urging Congress to fully fund the federal First Step Act and to make it retroactive.As we've discussed...

As we discussed on this blog last December, the First Step Act was a bipartisan reform law that promised relief for federal defendants and prisoners in several areas. The Act was expected to be especially helpful to minority defendants, as minorities have...

New data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the federal government has been prosecuting fewer white-collar crimes under this administration than it had done previously. Researchers from Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access...

The case involved South Carolina bank robbery. Witnesses were unable to ID the robber and the bank's surveillance video turned out to be too grainy to help. When the FBI finally arrived at a suspect, the man countered that the robber had been his brother. With only...