There are too many stories that surround the concept of acquitted conduct to cover them all, but I wanted to provide some links to some of these stories as recently covered in my main blog for anyone interested in continuing to think about these issues of what offense conduct can/should be considered at sentencing. Here are just a sample of some coverage:
- Practitioner’s Note: Acquitted Conduct in the News (Again)
- Judge Bright urges SCOTUS attention to acquitted conduct enhancement
- New academic paper on acquitted conduct after Booker
And, providing an example of the different settings in which this issue can arise is an interesting new Second Circuit ruling in Vega v. Lantz, No. 08-4748 (2d Cir. Mar. 2, 2010) (available here). In Vega, the panel reverses a district court's ruling granting relief to a Connecticut inmate who complained about his designation as a sex offender based on the fact that he had been acquitted of sexual assault (though convicted of first-degree assault and kidnapping) after horribly abusing a "sixteen-year-old girl, with whom he had a sexual relationship, when he was twenty-nine-years old."