Michigan Supreme Court Blog

"Today, there are roughly 4,500 federal crimes on the books.  And still many more regulations and rules that, if not abided by, result in criminal penalties, including incarceration.  Many of these laws impose criminal penalties – often felony penalties – for violations of federal regulations.   Americans are expected to know it is wrong to commit murder or burglary or engage in an act of terrorism, regardless of what the law says.  But today Americans must contend with literally thousands of obscure and cumbersome federal regulations, a simple misreading or ignorance of a regulation can land a person in prison."   Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Chairman of the C rime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations Subcommittee and head of Congress' Over-Criminalization Task Force. Though Congress appears to be taking steps to reduce the explosion of the enactment of federal criminal statutes undertaken in the past 25 years, yesterday's opinion from the Michi...

On Friday, in an interesting opinion written by Justice Michael F. Cavanagh , the Michigan Supreme Court overturned the conviction of John Musser, finding that the trial court erred in allowing all portions of the defendant's videotape recorded interrogation to be played for the jury. In People v Musser, Docket No. 145237 , the problem rested in the officer's repeated assertions during the interrogation of his opinion that the complainant, an 11-year-old girl, was credible.  Statements of the officer in charge were admitted at the defendant's trial such as, "Again, if there’s no reason for her to make this crap up, why would she say it? This is the last thing . . . she wanted to do was talk to a total stranger about something like this. Why? Why is she gonna put herself through that if it didn’t happen? We can’t find anything. Kids don’t lie about this stuff."   Additionally, the officers stated, "But if she’s saying you touched her breasts—I wasn’t there...

Last week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a somewhat surprising opinion suppressing evidence in a federal drug case and reversing the defendant's conviction, finding the search warrant invalid because it lacked probable cause and the good faith exception did not apply.  Though the opinion, authored by Judge R. Guy Cole , is unpublished, it provides a very good analysis of search warrant jurisprudence, citing many published opinions that may be of use to criminal defense practitioners. In United States v Buffer , Docket No. 12-5052 , Memphis police received an anonymous tip that drugs were being sold from a residence.  Four days before the execution of a search warrant, the affiant observed "several visits" to the home that lasted approximately one to three minutes each.  The affiant did not specify the exact number of visitors nor the span of time within which he made these observations.  On the same day, the affiant stopped one of the visitors wh...