White Collar Roundup - April 2016

It Matters if It's Tainted

A fractured majority of the U.S. Supreme Court held in Luis v. United States that the government cannot restrain untainted assets before conviction to prevent a criminal defendant from hiring counsel of choice. We previously covered earlier opinions in the case here. The issue is whether before trial the government could restrain untainted assets – assets unrelated to the crime – or whether doing so would violate the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The Court had previously held in United States v. Monsanto, 491 U.S. 600 (1989), that the government could restrain tainted assets – assets derived directly from criminal conduct – even if the defendant wished to use such assets to hire defense counsel. In the Luis plurality opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer balanced the interest of the government in restraining assets it believed it would ultimately obtain through forfeiture after a conviction against the defendant's Sixth Amendment right to