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On February 21, 2017, the ºìÐÓÊÓƵ, the ºìÐÓÊÓƵ of Wisconsin, and the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP filed a class-action lawsuit against the City of Milwaukee in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. This lawsuit challenged the Milwaukee Police Department’s unconstitutional stop-and-frisk program that targeted tens of thousands of people without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, primarily driven by racial profiling.

This case concerns the First Step Act of 2018, in which Congress made major reductions to the mandatory minimum sentences for certain federal drug and firearm offenses. These changes result in sentences many decades shorter than were required under the previous laws. The question in this case was whether people who were initially sentenced prior to enactment of the First Step Act, but whose sentences were vacated and remanded for resentencing after enactment of the law, can benefit from its major reductions in applicable mandatory minimums. For defendants like Mr. Carpenter, who was originally sentenced to a draconian 116 years in prison as a result of the pre-First Step Act mandatory minimums, applying the First Step Act can mean the difference between dying in prison and having the opportunity to eventually go free. Unfortunately, although there is a split among federal courts of appeals on this question, the Supreme Court denied cert in this case in February 2024.

Abdullahi Khalif Noor is a Somali refugee, who was a cab driver living in Seattle when convicted of rape and assault, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He has always maintained his innocence. He challenged his convictions in Washington state courts, arguing that prosecutors had suppressed evidence of his innocence in violation of due process and Brady v. Maryland.   Unsuccessful in the Washington state courts, he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court. He was again unsuccessful, and sought to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Ordinarily, when a party loses in federal district court they can immediately appeal the decision. But Mr. Noor was barred from doing so because he had not obtained a document Congress has required habeas petitioners receive from federal courts before they can appeal since 1908 — then called a certificate of probable cause, but now called a certificate of appealability (COA).

Whether the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation right permits the prosecution in a criminal trial to present testimonial statements of a non-testifying laboratory analyst through an expert who relies on the non-testifying expert’s statement to reach their conclusions.