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The federal sentencing guidelines are rules that federal judges are required to consider when sentencing someone who has been convicted of a crime.

In a separate web posting I detailed the ruling and background pertaining to Riley v. California, a 2014 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision which said that police cannot search the contents of a smart phone (or flip-top phone) without a warrant. The ruling generally was viewed by legal pundits and others as a victory for individual privacy rights, but other Fourth Amendment issues related to high-tech devices remained up in the air.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court debated whether a 2012 decision (Miller v. Alabama) – which struck down state laws imposing a mandatory and automatic life sentence without parole on juvenile convicted of homicide – should apply retroactively. At the time, the decision was meant to apply prospectively, and many states changed their laws accordingly.