News & Notes (UPDATED)

-- The JNC's interviews are open to the public today and tomorrow.  Anyone there and want to report back?

-- The ABA has listed its top blogs and twitter accounts.

-- Rumpole may want to pay attention to the 6th Circuit case in which the Court is considering outing the anonymous blogger.

-- James Gonzalo Medina was sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempting to attack an Aventura, Florida synagogue and attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.  

UPDATE -- Congrats to Ashley Litwin and Marc Seitles for their win in the 11th Circuit today.  Here's the opinion by Judge Rosenbaum, which starts off like this:

 Theodor Seuss Geisel (perhaps better known as Dr. Seuss) is said to have observed, “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”1 This is one of those times.
This direct appeal of Defendant-Appellant Edriss Baptiste’s sentence for access-device fraud and aggravated identity theft requires us to determine how to account in Baptiste’s criminal-history calculation for Baptiste’s ostensible sentence from a prior state case. More specifically, a state court purported to sentence Baptiste for a marijuana-possession conviction to “198 days time served,” referring to time he spent in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. Based on this disposition, the district court scored Baptiste two criminal-history points and therefore concluded his criminal-history category was II.
The parties debate whether time in Immigration custody can ever qualify as “imprisonment” for purposes of determining criminal history under the Guidelines. While the parties raise interesting arguments, we instead resolve this case by concluding that where, as here, a defendant has pled guilty to a prior crime and adjudication has been withheld, that disposition must be counted for a single criminal-history point under § 4A1.1(c) of the Guidelines, regardless of whether the sentencing court purported to impose—or even actually imposed—198 days or no days of imprisonment. For this reason, we vacate the sentence imposed by the district court and remand for resentencing, using a criminal-history category of I.