The most recent verdict, issued this morning, D.C. v. Heller, strikes down a 32-year-old ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., ruling that the ban is unconstitutional according to the Second Amendment.  The 5-4 ruling was the first broad interpretation of the Second Amendment’s provision that citizens have “the right to bear arms” since its ratification in 1791.  The majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia stated that the Constitution does not provide for “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”

A verdict yesterday touches on a still-more controversial issue, that of child rape.  In another 5-4 decision, the court overturned a death penalty in Louisiana given to a man who was convicted of raping his 12-year-old stepdaughter.  The majority of justices ruled that the despite the awfulness of the crime, it does not warrant capital punishment.  The court interpreted the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” to include death penalty in the case of rape in a ruling in 1977, and the recent decision clarifies this precedent in the case of children.

For more analysis of Supreme Court decisions past and present, visit the Total Criminal Defense article section.

The school requested that the police force be brought in to deal with what it deemed was excessive disruption in previous graduation ceremonies.  However, it seems that instead of hewing to their role as intimidating discouragers, the officers chose instead to arrest the offending parties.  Those arrested face up to 30 days in prison and a $1,000 fine on charges of disorderly conduct.

One of those arrested wanted to cheer because, according to him, “it was like a funeral in there.”

Defense attorney for Kelly were apparently able to successfully convince the jury of Kelly’s claims that he was not the man who appears in the video—questions were also raised about the identity and age of the female, since the alleged victim denies that the girl in the tape is her.

Neither Kelly nor the victim testified in the trial.

David Hinkson was in big trouble with a slam-dunk case against him in a murder-for-hire trial—that is, until Elven Joe Swisher, a key witness against him, was found guilty of perjury at trial: Perjury Botches Murder-for-Hire Trial.

Police are contending with new technology as they try to chase down scofflaw drivers: Drivers Use Technology and a Social Network to Dodge Cops.

Curious about gun laws in your state?  See our new guide to common State Gun Laws.

Also, don’t forget to check out our Celebrity Criminal Update!

During a domestic violence trial in his courtroom, Restaino heard someone’s phone ring and became infuriated when no one would admit that it was their phone.  Since he could not find the one person who should have been punished, Restaino went berserk and had everyone in the courtroom taken to jail.  He ordered their release after he cooled down later that day.

Restaino had no prior record of improper behavior in the courtroom and told the commission and Court of Appeals that he was under a lot of personal stress at the time of the incident and that he knew he was wrong and that it would never happen again.  He was right - it won’t happen again because the state Commission on Judicial Conduct voted 9-1 for his removal in November and the New York Supreme Court has unanimously upheld that decision according to a report by the Associated Press.

In a company notice, Faceparty acknowledges that only a minority of users older than 36 are sex offenders, but that because of new legislation requiring social networking sites to check users’ email addresses against those of registered sex offenders, they had to delete all over-36 accounts. It seems Faceparty doesn’t have an email-verification policy, and the mass deletion was the only way to be safe.

Except that the “new legislation” mentioned in the notice is actually only a proposal. Faceparty executives have insisted that their move was not “ageist,” despite the fact that it was based solely on the ages of users.

But the bigger question seems to be what’s so magical about 36? Does this mean some otherwise harmless, law-abiding citizens magically become sex offenders on their 36th birthdays? Either the coordinators of Faceparty are following some abstruse logic or they’ve made a bizarre and arbitrary decision about their users.

New Jersey passed legislation early this year banning sex offenders from social networking sites.

One of the points of contention in the case was the nature of child pornography covered, which, in the interpretation made by the Supreme Court, could include adults portraying minors engaged in simulated intercourse in Hollywood movies such as Titanic or Traffic, or even pictures of nude children sent to grandparents of even descriptions of pictures that may be interpretable as pornographic.

Critics of the decision, which had been reversed by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals prior to being taken on by the Supreme Court, believe that there is too much leeway in the definition established and that it could result in prosecutions of innocent activities.

The eight men indicted allegedly would meticulously plan their abductions and conduct full-scale police raids as New York City police officers, then detain the dealers as well as family members for up to weeks at a time, torturing the dealers with techniques such as waterboarding while they sold the drugs they confiscated on the street themselves. According to news reports, they conducted up to 100 of these raids in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida. They reportedly also stole around 1,650 pounds of cocaine worth $20 million as well as $4 million in cash.

For more on drug crimes, visit Total Criminal Defense.

To an American, a jail term shorter than the amount of time Fritzl held his daughter prisoner hardly seems fair. In fact, overcrowded prisons and world-record high incarceration rates act as proof that those of us stateside are accustomed to seeing serious criminals handed serious sentences.

But the penal systems in many European countries act differently. Few criminals receive life sentences (even for serial murders), and those who do rarely serve them completely. European systems tend to emphasize rehabilitation of criminals over punishment. As a result, European countries have much lower incarceration rates than the United States.

The recent passage of the Second Chance Act marked a slight shift in U.S. criminal corrections: for the first time since the enactment of “get-tough” sentencing laws in the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government is beginning to focus more on rehabbing criminals it has traditionally only punished.

The case in question, Baze v. Rees, was filed by death-row inmate Ralph Baze and fellow inmate Thomas Bowling.  The target of their lawsuit was Kentucky’s three-drug lethal injection procedure, and they claimed that the process ran the risk of causing the men an unnecessarily extreme level of pain that would reach the level of “cruel and unusual punishment.”  The center of their argument was the description of a hypothetical scenario in which the procedure was botched, and the prisoner would appear to be unconscious but would in reality be in agonizing pain.

In the plurality opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts indicated that state executions do not have to be completely pain-free, and that in order for the prisoner’s stay of execution to be granted, it must be proved that “the state’s lethal injection protocol creates a demonstrated risk of severe pain.”  The state had taken safeguards to protect against that hypothetical scenario, and without proof that the procedure would entail that result, Roberts and others upheld the method as constitutional.