News and Announcements

In late October and early November, courts in New York, New Jersey and other Eastern Seaboard states were shut down by Super Storm Sandy. This account, by Chief Judge Loretta A. Preska, describes the challenges faced by the Southern District of New York in putting its courts back in order.

Pronouncing himself “humbled,” Judge Thomas F. Hogan, Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, has received the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award, but he cautioned in remarks that America's federal judges are “nearing a crossroads.”

Celebrating Bill of Rights Day, students in a newly released two-minute video talk candidly about the rights and freedoms they value most and are guaranteed in this seminal document.

U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Denny Chin, a Chinese immigrant who grew up in a Hell's Kitchen tenement, is the subject of a newly released Pathways to the Bench video profile, the eighth in a video series in which federal judges talk about challenges that helped prepare them to serve justice.

Every four years, U.S. courts play a little-known role to help ensure that the Electoral College votes are received in Washington and properly counted.

According to data released this month by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, immigration cases were the fastest growing segment of cases in the federal system for which an offender was sentenced in fiscal year 2011. Until fiscal year 2009, the most common federal crime had been drug-related.

"Bring your body bags," was the message left by an offender on a probation officer’s cell phone. "I’ll kill you and your family," another offender wrote an officer from prison after his probation was revoked.

A Bankruptcy Appellate Panel, or BAP, is authorized by 28 U.S.C. § 158 (b) to hear, with consent of all the parties, appeals from bankruptcy courts that otherwise would be heard by district courts, but only in those districts in which the district judges authorize appeals to BAPs.

All 80 federal defender organizations in districts across the country have begun using a new web-based system, defenderData, to manage their case information; schedule events, generate, edit, index and search case-related documents, and produce reports.

A public education program housed in the Thomas F. Eagleton Courthouse has received the St. Louis Bar Foundation’s Spirit of Justice Award, for its excellence in teaching young audiences about the workings of the courts.