The Fourth Giveth, The Fourth Taketh Away

In some sort of cosmic joke, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals today handed down decisions in two cases that I argued a while back. One was a winner, the other really is a winner, but I didn't convince the judges of that.

The first case, US v. Johnson, involved whether a couple prior convictions should count when figuring Mr. Johnson's criminal history score. This is the one we won, as I convinced the court that a West Virginia fleeing conviction was "similar" to hindering an officer, an excluded offense under the US Sentencing Guidelines. It helped that the WV Supreme Court had already defined fleeing as being hindering under state law.

The other case, the one I lost, is US v. Perkins. The issue in that case is whether police could pull over Mr. Perkins based on a phone call from an unknown source that didn't really allege any wrongdoing. Unfortunately, I only convinced one judge to see things that way.

Given that it took them six months to get to Perkins, I wish they could have held out one more day so I could enjoy the victory in Johnson a little bit.