In United States v. Alexander, Appellant filed an interlocutory appeal from the District Court’s order denying various pretrial motions to dismiss the original and superseding indictments against her on the ground that a victim of one of the charged crimes served on the grand jury that returned the original indictment. (Subsequent to learning about the … Read more
Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Comm’n v. Sec. PA Dep’t Labor and Indus. was a dispute about an interstate compact between PA and NJ that created the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission. The Commission obtained a declaratory judgment that prohibited the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry from regulating aspects of … Read more
In Commonwealth v. Smith, the defendant was convicted of robbery and related offenses. After the Superior Court affirmed the convictions, he sought allocatur. Before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on the petition, the defendant filed a PCRA petition. The PCRA court acknowledged that the filing was premature but chose to accept it as of the … Read more
In Commonwealth v. Caviness, the Superior Court issued a predictable ruling in the face of a rather novel petition seeking the return of property. The defendant was charged with various crimes. And as part of the investigation, law enforcement seized laptops, tablets and other devices that families tend to have around the house. The return … Read more
In Calabretta v. Guidi Homes, Inc., the Superior Court quashed a home-builder’s appeal that challenged the trial court’s order denying (in part) the home builder’s motion for summary judgment. The home builder claimed that the suit was barred by the statute of repose, which typically protects home builders from suits more than 12 years after … Read more
In Hernandez-Morales v. Att’y Gen., the 3rd Circuit held that Hernandez-Morales was “dressing up” discretionary rulings made by an immigration judge as well as the Board of Immigration Appeals as constitutional claims in order to merit review. However, the 3rd Circuit did not bite and held that it did not have jurisdiction to review the … Read more
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Commonwealth v. Small overruled its prior precedent and tossed the “public record presumption.” Traditionally, a defendant, who filed a PCRA petition, could circumvent the statutory one-year filing deadline by proving they had uncovered a newly-discovered fact. But if that newly-discovered fact was a matter of public record, then a presumption existed … Read more
In El v. City of Pittsburgh, the 3rd Circuit confronted two brothers’ Section 1983 actions against three Pittsburgh police officers. What started as an investigatory detention over the possibility that one brother might have purchased tobacco underage (he didn’t) ended with one brother tasered, and the other brother slammed against a wall. The Court reiterated … Read more
In Tazu v. Att’y Gen. United States, the 3rd Circuit held that 8 U.S.C. §1252(g) stripped the district court of jurisdiction to hear a habeas petition in which the petitioner sought to stop the Attorney General from executing a valid removal order while the petitioner tried to reopen his removal proceedings in the Second Circuit.
The 3rd Circuit held in Gentile v. S.E.C. that the Administrative Procedure Act did not waive sovereign immunity to an administrative agency’s decision to investigate.