Latest Case: United States v. Gomez (Criminal Law)

The Things That Are Caesar’s

SHERRY F. COLB

Cornell law professor Sherry F. Colb comments on the recent oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in Our Lady of Gaudalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, which raises the question how broadly to construe the word “minister” within the ministerial exception to anti-discrimination law required by the First Amendment. Colb explains where the ministerial exception doctrine might be headed and suggests that an exemption even for criminal misconduct against ministers might be within the existing doctrine.

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United States v. Gomez

Docket: 18-11578

Opinion Date: May 19, 2020

Judge: Higginbotham

Areas of Law: Criminal Law

The Fifth Circuit affirmed defendant's revised sentence imposed after he was convicted of drug trafficking and firearms offenses. The court rejected defendant's reading of the First Step Act of 2018 and joined its sister circuits in holding that section 403 of the Act affords no relief to defendants whose cases were pending on direct appeal on the law's December 21, 2018 effective date. The court explained that the date that matters in the section 403 inquiry is when the district court imposed defendant's sentence—not when defendant exhausted his appeals. The court applied the new Diggles framework and held that all four of the conditions of supervised release are discretionary under 18 U.S.C. 3583(d), and therefore they are all subject to the oral pronouncement requirement. However, defendant's challenge did not clear even the first of the four plain error hurdles for there was no error at all. In this case, the district court pronounced defendant's conditions of supervised release when it stated that his new term of supervised release would be subject to the same terms and conditions as previously stated in his first written judgment.