February brought a handful of cases potentially relevant to our practice:
United States of America v. Kendrick A. Frazier and Kenwyn Frazier, No. 23-2641 & 23-2642: In this appeal, the Court confronts an interesting Sixth Amendment claim, as both brothers wanted to be represented by the same attorney. The district court disallowed the joint representation based on its belief that there was a serious potential for conflict based on the facts of the underlying case. The Court discusses and applies SCOTUS’s precedent in Wheat v. United States and concludes that the district court conducted a suitably adequate inquiry and made sufficient findings to support its decision to deny counsel of choice under these circumstances.
United States of America v. Martin Devalois, No. 24-1787: Yet another appeal seeking to find a violation of SCOTUS’s dog-sniff rule as articulated in Rodriguez v. United States, here, the Court finds that the officer did not deviate from the “mission” of the stop and that a dog sniff did not unconstitutionally prolong that encounter. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the case concerns an argument that the officer who initiated the stop unduly prolonged the seizure when he handed off the writing of the ticket to another officer, an act which necessitated a brief “officer-to-officer conference.” At least under the facts of this case, the Court finds no constitutional act and affirms.
United States of America v. Shamond Jenkins, No. 22-2800: This is an interesting appeal centering on the use of face coverings during the height of COVID. Jenkins makes two arguments. First, he alleges that a requirement that he wear a facemask during the trial rendered his in-court identification unduly suggestive, as the blue facemask he was issued was the same as the facemask worn by the suspected robber. The Court rejects this argument, in part because of the widespread use of masks during the pandemic, meaning the mask was not a “particularizing trait” that rendered the procedure suggestive. Second, Jenkins makes an intriguing argument that his Sixth Amendment right to confrontation means he was entitled to a face-to-face confrontation, unmediated by any protective facemask. The Court rejects this argument, holding that the essential requirements of the Confrontation Clause were adhered to.
United States of America v. Michael Malinowski, No. 24-1831: This appeal caught our eye because of an issue on which the Government conceded error. Under the Seventh’s precedent, “a broad supervised release condition ‘prohibit[ing] viewing or listening to sexually stimulating material’ is unconstitutional.”
