United States Court of Appeals

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On August 24, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, reinstated defendant Ronnie Long’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, challenging his rape conviction more than four decades earlier.  Proskauer filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Mr. Long on behalf of some forty leading scholars who specialize in forensic science, emphasizing the grave impact of the prosecution’s repeated failures to disclose all the forensic evidence in the case.  The Fourth Circuit agreed, and now Mr. Long is expected to be released imminently.

Over forty years ago, Mr. Long was accused of committing a rape and burglary that he has consistently maintained he did not commit.  Relying heavily on the victim’s identification testimony, and the asserted “honesty” of law enforcement who investigated the crime, a jury found Mr. Long guilty of first-degree rape and first-degree burglary.  He was sentenced to life in prison, and his conviction was upheld on appeal.  As the result of continued litigation over the span of many decades, however, a steady stream of suppressed evidence concerning the crime, neither disclosed to the defense nor presented to the jury, came to light. It included lab-test results demonstrating that Mr. Long was not linked to the crime scene; medical evidence taken from the victim that unaccountably went missing; and, most recently, 43 latent fingerprints lifted from the scene, none of which matched Mr. Long.  It also became plain that the detectives who investigated the crime lied at trial about the evidence suppression.

Earlier this month, Proskauer filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in support of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ ban on assault weapons, such as the AK-47 or the AR-15, and large-capacity magazines.  We filed the brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Worman v. Healey, a case challenging the ban on Second Amendment grounds.  Partner Kimberly Mottley and I led the team, with Lindsey Olson Collins and Steven A. Sutro co-authoring the brief.

Since 1998, Massachusetts has banned the sale and possession within the state of military-style assault weapons and large capacity magazines.  These same weapons were used in some of America’s deadliest mass shootings:  Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut;  the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida;  the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada;  Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; and most recently,  the Temple of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The popularity of such assault weapons among perpetrators led the New York Times to dub them the “rifles of choice for mass shootings.”