Petitioner’s Brief in Burgess v. United States
We filed this brief on behalf of the petitioner in Burgess v. United States, No. 06-11429, on Tuesday. The case presents the question whether the 20-year mandatory minimum sentence imposed under 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(A) – which applies to individuals convicted of certain federal drug offenses who have a prior “felony drug offense” conviction – applies to a defendant who was previously convicted of a state drug offense classified by the state as a misdemeanor by punishable by more than a year’s imprisonment. The brief was prepared with the assistance of three students from our Winter Term Supreme Court Litigation class at Harvard: Nicholas Barnaby, Catherine McCaw, and Elyse Schneiderman.
Thank you but where is the brief?
Comment by Sidney Gendin — January 25, 2008 @ 9:05 am
Would it not have been newsworthy (and gracious) to note on the blog that much of the original work on Burgess was done by a jail house lawyer, if this report is correct?
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202211781024
Comment by Eric E. Sterling — February 7, 2008 @ 11:57 am
I don’t think they should career a person out due to a prior state case and I don’t think it’s fair that the new sentence reduction laws does not apply to that prior conviction with it being their first time federal offense
Comment by Alicia Randle — March 22, 2008 @ 8:45 pm